Every day seems to bring new doom and gloom about childhood obesity, and yet it seems the most obvious solutions are so seldom explored.

Consider this: children spend around 7 hours — roughly 60% of their day — at school during the school year. Add in travel time, extra-curricular activities, homework, household chores and time devoted to dinner as well as personal hygiene and what do you get? You get a kid with around 90% of his or her day spoken for.

With so little time to themselves, what’s the easiest way to help kids stay in shape? Give them back recess, and provide more P.E. time in school. But that’s precisely what schools aren’t doing.

Elementary schools have a district fitness program for students every third school day. Four areas are emphasized: upper body strength, flexibility, abdominal strength and cardiovascular endurance, which is promoted through a mile run.

“We stress various fitness activities,” Westridge Elementary School physical education teacher Michael Mitchell said. “We try to be creative. We have them playing team sports and low organizational games at the same time.”

Every third school day amounts to an average seven times per month. Unless they’re enrolled in intramural sports, live in an area where it’s safe for them to run outside unsupervised or have parents willing to take them to the gym, P.E. courses may be the only real exercise a kid gets in a month. But how much exercise are they really getting? Try seven hours of of P.E. in a month. Just seven hours.

No wonder our kids are battling the bulge!