Playing sports video games on the Nintendo Wii will not stop an epidemic of childhood obesity, British boffins have warned.

According to a study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, virtual sports such as tennis, boxing and bowling on Nintendo Wii burned more than 50 per cent more energy than playing ordinary games.

But children used much less energy playing virtual sports than they would the real thing. Real boxing used twice as much energy as Wii boxing. Real tennis was 70 per cent more demanding.  Even conventional bowling uses almost 15% more calories than the virtual kind.

The boffins added up all the numbers and divided by their shoe size and worked out that a child who played Wii sports would use about two per cent more energy than one playing sedentary computer games.

The difference was meaningless and the activity was not intense enough to be counted in the recommended daily amount of physical activity.