UPF, poverty, obesity.... children’s healthy eating - an impossible challenge?

I found this mind boggling - when my Dad was in hospital long term I was so surprised to see the canteen did not have ANY fruit. There was some sad veg. It was mostly beige food.
The shops are the same - all sweets etc.
It just feels really counter intuitive.

I worked in the NHS for many years ~ early in my career all the food was cooked on site and was generally ok in terms of nutrition, pricing etc

In the last years of my career the food was provided by external caterers and we constantly complained about the food and pricing system. Chip based meals were the cheapest and salad based meals were the most expensive. A piece of fruit was the same price as a large mars bar.

I used to feel very sorry for the dietitians . . . they tried so hard to get the right messages across but the staff canteen (which was also accessible to out-patients and visitors) didn't reflect any of the 'healthy eating' ethos the Dietetics Department were trying so hard to promote

@OneAzureBiscuit I couldn't agree more- the two supermarkets convenient to my flat are lidl and Waitrose, I read labels and waitrose stuff has tonnes of crap in it as does lidl products. I would place them as equal for UPFs.

Interestingly, I spent a bit of time in Italy recently, and the Conads and Carrefours (so about the sainsburys equivalents) had much better quality food in terms of ingredients and products I tried than the lidl.

Why do you need to eat organic all the time? ai don't think it is a generalisation. There is really no such thing as children's meals in most of the world. Your DC are the exception( as are mine, but we don't eat a British diet mostly)

I dont really understand this organic thing. We eat mostly veggie and mostly wonky old veg.

The opposite side of this...

How to avoid middle-aged spread: go to private school

www.thetimes.com/article/21ec4609-0590-447c-8695-d51a2599f7a4?shareToken=c1602b5dd667a47103bdad5312d3eb0b

I have to say the kindergarten does very good lunches.
two courses, there’s no choice though. It’s either soup and main, or main and desert each day. It depends on what’s been made. So they roughly get dessert 2 days a week.

Today it’s vegetable broth with pancake strips. Then local white fish (forelle), mash potatoes, green beans and a sauce.
Yesterday was chicken schnitzel, potato salad, and green salad. Then apricot dumplings and custard.

They work with local farmers who also drop off fruits/ veg taht can be eaten raw for adding to morning snack. although we have to all send own box of morning stuff also, this is just supplemental so children try things they might not have at home

Takeaways are non existent tbh. So it forces us to cook

I would agree with this but the 2hrs for your typical British casserole is a pain when DC are young as mine were impatient but now I have teenagers we often eat about 7 or 8 so if I’ve WFH it is something we have quite a bit.

Here’s the thing. There is of course a correlation between poverty and a high UPF diet due to the low cost and availability of these frankenfoods, however what gets overlooked in these conversations is the fact that the middle classes are also overindulging in unhealthy food but are often completely unaware of the fact that supposedly healthy food items are far from that. A list of posh junk:

ready made hummus (far fattier than homemade and usually made with sunflower oil instead of EVO)

coffee shop coffee ( we used to be a nation of tea drinkers and now coffee shops are everywhere. Lots of these drinks are full of calories and younger and younger kids are being allowed to drink Starbucks coffee etc which is madness. Too much coffee can increase cortisol, disrupt sleep etc, all impacting weight gain and other health factors.

Pret A Manger - overpriced UPF sandwiches probably not much better than McDonalds

Sourdough - if it’s bought from a bakery fine but a Quick Look at the ingredients from the supermarket stuff will reveal it’s actually UPF with a bit of the “mother” thrown in.

Cured meats (think prosciutto, chorizo etc)- terrible for you (nitrates, high saturated fat, sodium etc

Out of season fruit and vegetables- most people, including poshos, have forgotten how to eat locally and seasonally and expect to eat grapes all year round when there are health benefits to eating according to light and weather patterns.

This is just a short list but it would be very long if I had the time!

This is the best thing you could have done for your daughter, you quietly fill her diet with good whole healthy foods, but don't make treats a huge taboo, so she won't crave them and binge on them as she is older! It's exactly what we do.

Sweeping generalisation, my DC absolutely do and it costs me a bloody fortune as nearly all of it is organic! That said, I’m not saying they like my concoctions as I do improvise loads if I don’t have an ingredient, we had sweet and sour Tuna the other week for example! My eldest definitely eats junk though but he is 17 and very thin and can eat anything. What I worry about is not weight though with him it is the junk that he has out and about. That said, this is I think one of the healthiest cities in the country, lots of green space and many teenagers go around on foot. You don’t see loads of overweight children where I live. My DD is really fussy about skin outbreaks etc. so won’t touch school canteen food due to UPFs.

Agree!!

And it's not just the marketing that's an issue either, a few years ago, myself and my husband decided to lose weight, eat fewer calories and better foods (our diet was shocking) we lost a large amount of weight, and we assumed that we would save money not eating takeaways and such.....wrong!! Fruits, veggies, lean proteins etc. are so so expensive, anyone on a low income would really struggle to eat well I think!

The next government, whoever that may be, really needs to make this a priority.

Yeah I wonder if it's to do with the lack of time we have and how long it takes to create a traditional meal. British cooking is actually a huge faff as it often involves many pans then an oven too. Or a stew which needs a good couple of hrs to cook. Maybe this is why people resorted to chips with something?
British people need to get inventive to get quick home made meals on the table that everyone eats as frozen food as a daily choice is harming everyone.

Everywhere in the world children eat what their parents eat except in the UK, US and perhaps Australia.

I was an obese child, and morbidly obese for most of my adult life. When my daughter was 2 my previously fit and healthy DH died suddenly and I decided I had to make sure that I'm around for my daughter as long as possible so I totally overhauled my diet. To be honest, even when I was obese it wasn't terrible – I certainly wasn't eating chips and chocolate and takeaway every night – but I did eat UPFs including jarred sauces, white bread, cereal etc. I moved to a high protein, high good fats, low carb, low sugar diet which meant I was forced to cook from scratch every night, and as a result I pretty much cut out UPFs entirely, mostly by accident rather than by design. The transformation has been unbelievable. I've lost 6.5 stone, my skin is better, my hair and nails are stronger and shinier, my energy levels are transformed... And I'm not religious about it, I'll still eat out and get the odd takeaway but in general I eat whole foods.

This of course has also changed my daughter's diet – I'm even less strict with her and she does sometimes have chicken nuggets or McDonalds or a pasta ready meal, and she has school dinners which are no doubt full of UPFs! – but mostly she eats what I eat, so whole foods cooked from scratch. Preiously she was on the 90th centile for weight and between the 75th and 98th centile for height. She's now 6 and is 75th for height, 50th for weight, and is tall and slim. I am far from a perfect mother – she goes to gymnastics and swimming and we do a lot of dog walks but I wouldn't say she's an unusually active child, and as I said, she has school dinners! – but I genuinely think her not having UPFs and therefore not getting addicted to them has made all the difference. We don't have them in the house (because my willpower is rubbish!), so for her a snack is fruit, Greek yoghurt or wholemeal toast – she's never really had easy access to crisps, cake and biscuits and doesn't seem to think anything of that. She enjoys them at parties etc and I don't police what she eats outside of the house, but her self-regulation is just so much better than mine was as a child – she'll have half a slice of cake and leave the rest, whereas I would have been trying to figure out how to wangle a second bit!

Anyway this is a long and anecdotal way of saying that I truly believe UPFs are the problem and without government intervention, it will only continue to get worse. Another side effect of my diet rehaul is that my grocery bill has increased DRAMATICALLY – it's easily doubled, even taking into account inflation (which means it's actually more like tripled). My food bill is more than my mortgage. I'm very lucky that I can afford that, but I'm very aware that a lot of people can't. Imo we need better access to locally grown whole foods, with subsidies for producers of those paid for by a tax on UPFs.

Some of it is stupidity and ignorance or lazy parenting, not just poverty. Two of my step children and some of their friends at school are obese, but their parents absolutely refuse to acknowledge this. My DP tears his hair out over it as we have them 50% of the time, have a very healthy (made from scratch) diet with lots of fruit and vegetables and reasonable treats (2 biscuits after dinner only unless it’s a birthday or something). We also do as much exercise as we can with the kids (swimming, going to the park etc.) and we are not rich and our food shop for the entire family of 7 each month is circa £500 each month.

We’re by no means perfect but my children are a very healthy weight so it’s obviously not the diet and lifestyle in our household causing the step-children to be obese.

in the other 50% of my step-children’s time, however there is a constant stream of junk food. His ex spends far more money on food than we do (obvious from all the branded stuff they name, meals out and take always they mention or what we see in their lunch boxes) but she refuses to accept that there is anything wrong with this or that her children are obese despite the fact that their BMI has said otherwise for 5 years, that they are visibly overweight and need plus size school clothes.

You just can’t tell some people that they’re not giving their kids the best start in life when all they want to be is a lazy Disney parent.

I have seen a small (pre-school) child eat a large pack of haribos which were given to the child to keep them quiet during a christening service which lasted about 25 minutes . . . . (the service, not the haribos ~ the sweets only lasted about 15 minutes 😂)

@LakeTiticaca the haribos will be a bribe for getting them dressed and out of the house on time lol

i think this is a very good point, overworked and time poor parents aren’t going to be able to focus as much as they’d like to on health. Factor in a lot of people even working long hours will also still struggle financially and things are just too difficult, something has to give somewhere and we hear it a lot don’t we from when our dc are tiny it starts off ‘fed is best’ which is true but then carries on to things like ‘ if everyone is alive and been fed at the end of the day you’ve done a good job!’ which yes reassures but then suddenly we have this explosion in overweight dc and health issues and concerns over UPF but parents have to make hard choices and they prioritise a roof over their heads .

But the government shapes the choices we have, and the environment in which we make those choices.

Absolutely agree. The only levers that will work here are money. Humans have evolved to seek out high calorie, high fat food for survival when famine was a frequent event. That's not the environment in the UK anymore and the government needs to start taxing food by calorie content and nutritional value, ban UPF advertising and special offers. Ringfence the tax to allow discounting of unprocessed food and healthy food retailers in deprived areas. All this is under government control and doable by changes in food VAT. They won't do it though as ironically it would be a vote killer. Plus obesity is shaving years off life expectancy which will save on pensions and social care.

Another aspect of this is that children used to eat what their parents ate . . . there was no choice other than 'eat it or leave it'

Nowadays we have the concept of 'childrens' food', packed with goodness-only knows what additives, marketed to be appealing to children and generally on special offer making it more attractive to cash-strapped parents

With a freezer full of these products, children are able to demand their favourites, so that one child has a burger, another has chicken nuggets and a third has pizza.

I know some children who have this set-up at home and their diet is extremely limited as each child only ever gets given the few products that they like. The children love it, the parents find it easy but it doesn't bode well for their future health . . .

Every time I go to ASDA I get the rage. There's one very close to DS1'S school though so we do end up going sometimes, and I end up stalking the aisles muttering "What are we even doing here, it's all shite?!" It's not even that cheap any more.

I much prefer LIDL- it has a far higher ratio of simple, unprocessed ingredients to food adjacent substances, which I ascribe to the German influence.

Sorry it should have said
The kids that AREN'T fat were brought chopped veg, salads, berries, oatcakes, wholemeal bread, hummus, flapjacks.

Hope that makes more sense.

I'm also not saying that poverty isn't a huge factor in this and being time poor (though actually think this is more marketing than anything as the quickest meals to make are things like stir fries and veg pasta. Whereas I find I always burn chicken nuggets etc!

I think something that isn't talked about is time. Both parents work outside of the home there just isn't time to cook from
Scratch every night for many. I batch cook but only because I do it on weekend evenings, I can see why people wouldn't.

This