Lifestyle, Body Composition, and Physical Fitness Changes in Hungarian School Boys (1975-2005).

General socioeconomic conditions as well as the physical environment have undergone remarkable changes in Hungary during the past 30 years. Unfortunately, these positive processes have resulted in a reduction of habitual physical activity along with unfavorable changes in dietary habits. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to compare some selected morphological and functional parameters of 7–14-year-old Hungarian schoolboys living in the middle of the 1970s and at the beginning of the new millennium. It was hypothesized that there would be significant differences in morphological and functional characteristics of the Hungarian schoolboy populations, because they were assessed 30 years apart. Means of height, body mass, body mass index (BMI), the sum of five skinfold tests, percentage of body fat, and two running performance times (400 m and 1,200 m) of the boys (N = 3,672) studied in 1975 were compared to those of the boys (N = 3,758) in 2005. Data were analyzed using two-tailed independent sa...