What is really stopping us from feeding our children healthy food?

[LilMissRe]

I saw an article today about obesity levels in little children and how it is increasing to dangerous levels. I'm intrigued as this is for a project I'm doing to graduate from university- hopefully this year!

The concern here is that, well, little ones (0-5 yrs) have the least say in what they can eat and drink, and as many don't start school officially till 4-5- schools can't really intervene and so a lot of experts place the blame entirely on us parents- especially mothers.

In my opinion I think time and marketing of unhealthy food is a big player here and is to blame, but I can't just use my opinion and would be very grateful for your opinions and experiences on this.

What is really stopping us from feeding our children healthy food?

Thank you!

I think a lot of the points have been made very clearly up thread already.

Things I see all the time are:

If you have it everyday, it's not a treat

People have no idea what a portion looks like for a small child - lots of angsting over what their child is eating when actually they are healthy and growing

Everything in moderation - except often the person saying it has no idea what moderation is.

Not every child can be on the 95th percentile - it's supposed to be a tiny minority. Most children are supposed to look like rakes.

I wonder how much this links to raising populations of autistic children aswell where they really will only eat certain things.... both my children are onthe spectrum, one will only have baked beans as a vegetable the other will have anything but in terms of veg as now they have an ingrained idea that i dont make them like at school , oh and he wont eat pepper, and both meals have to have separate veg if its 'wet food' i. e beans, etc one will only have cheese the other only ham, so yeah meals, packed lunches.... it. is. fucking. relentless. and. soul. destroying i wonder how many families face similar issues.

roundaboutsroundabouts
I would add to your list 'snacking'

People cant seem to go any where without eating it buying drinks and when they do they want it super sizing. Look at how popular coffees with flavoured syrup are, the size of the buckets of popcorn in the cinemas, how packed McDonald's gets, how popular subway is. , the list goes on. It's like some people dont gave a rest from eating!

My ds is on the 25th centile and people are always saying how tiny he is and how small his appetite is. It isn't. He eats when he's hungry and stops when full. That's normal. That's how we should all eat.

I agree snacking is also to blame. I eat three meals a day and it's viewed as very odd that I don't snack.

Children are a bit different though in that they have very small tummies so often need to eat little and often.

OP's claim that marketing was to blame annoys the Fig out of me. I have agency. I made my own choices, thanks.

I had to wait until kid#4 to get a very fussy won't touch veg or fruit kid. I could basically force him to, or I could wait him out for years & reward any veg consumption with cholate. Anyway, that's what stopped him from eating a balanced diet. I was too soft to force him to eat veg or nothing.

Sugary Reward foods have worked well enough, by the time he was 9yo or so, though he still doesn't eat any fruit.

We're all more affluent, treats are cheap, sugar is in everything (and sugar is the biggest cause of obesity) My mum's generation were on rations as tiny kids, then everything became much more interesting and affordable and they didn't make my generation eat the vile stuff they'd had to, but they didn't really start cooking new and interesting food from scratch because society changed, TV advertising gave the impression that all modern affluent households ate these amazing new ready meals. These days, in many big urban areas it's actually impossible to get fresh produce from your local shop, it's all food with long shelf lives, so what do you do if you don't drive? It annoys me when poverty and lack of education get used as the reason for obesity - it is so much more complex than that

I spent HOURS cooking food from scratch. The kid wouldn't eat any of it. Having a fussy eater is sometimes where I starts I think. If you make it a battle it becomes a rut. I trusted she wouldn't be fussy forever and just gave her what she wanted slowly she's asked to try new foods and her food choices are slowly expanding at 3.

If we'd battled it she may still be only eating yellow food and may have gone on to be obese.

I’ve noticed around my way that overweight parents seem to have overweight kids. So I’m guessing they are feeding the children the same food they are eating.

I also think that since I was little in the 80s places like McDonald's or KFC have changed from somewhere we might go for a meal (I.e.lunch or tea) to somewhere that people go to for a snack. The drive through near where we live has a queue right the way around from early morning until late at night. Not all of those people can be shift workers or similar having their meal at an unusual time. Many of them are getting a snack between meals. Burgers and fries are not snacks, they are whole meals.

I just find cooking really, really boring. I cook 5 days out of 7. I only do it because I finish work early every day so I don't have an excuse not to and I'd feel guilty if I didn't. We have a takeaway on Saturdays and DH cooks on Sundays, my favourite days of the week!

Oh absolutely, the worst thing you can do with fussy eaters is turn it into a battle. I cook everything from scratch and my three year old is a pita but what can you do? Just keep offering and not making a fuss.

For me, I'd say it's in the parents control. We enjoy treats, ie always have biscuit/cake mid morning. DD had a proper breakfast, cereal and toast. If she wanted anything else fruit. Lunch sandwich, salad, ploughmans style lunch. She was fussy about protein in sauce so mealtimes a bit restrictive, but always had a massive pile of veggies on the side of whatever. If she wanted a snack mid afternoon, she had fruit or veggie sticks first before anything like biscuits/chocolate. She rarely had sweets, wasn't used to have them so didn't ask for them. Even now at 17, if she's been somewhere and not had the healthiest tea, she'll come home and cook carrots, broccoli and peas or have a banana. It's what she's used to. Also, regular exercise, walking, swimming, cycling. Money was very tight for us around when she was 3-5 and I'd often go hungry so she could have the last piece of fruit, but we still managed to give her a reasonable diet, exercise.

it use to be that "british" style family restaurants use to offer dc size meals - so roast dinners, shepherd pies etc with veg & old fashioned pudding with fruit content - now its always the chips & beans with fatty meat/fish

Never understand why people use the excuse that they were never taught to cook.

Food Tech didn't exist when I was at school but nowadays there's this great thing called google - don't know how to make something? Ask google for free step-by-step directions on exactly how to make anything.

In summary:

Drinking calories - fruit juice, fizzy drink, squash
Snacking - constant eating, bodies never getting time to actually digest food properly
Portion sizes - have grown massively since in the last 40 years

The amount of fat and sugar in processed food is highly addictive and bad for our gut flora.

Lastly I woudl say thinking McDonalds and the like is a treat. It really isn't it's crap, full of fat and sugar and highly addictive.

@roundaboutsroundabouts

Same here! It's growing increasingly difficult to find clothes to fit DS, everything seems to be cut for bigger children.

@Bex1775

That's a really good point about how fresh produce isn't accessible. I live on a military base, and the shop here is the only one accessible without driving, or waiting a few hours for a bus. It sells energy drinks, takeaway coffee, jarred sauces, fizzy drinks, biscuits, chocolate, milk and a handful of toiletries with a large freezer full of processed crap and ice cream. No fresh produce, not even frozen fruit or veg. A huge amount of people here don't drive, so without a food delivery, this is all they can access easily, which is pretty crap. My hometown corner shop is the same.

The reasons I think people are obese nowadays are:

• More stress (so comfort eat)
• Don't know how to cook
• Time constraints (not everyone wants to spend their only free hour of the day cooking or they need to be elsewhere)
• Lack of a healthy street food culture
• Too many unhealthy fast food places
• Not enough affordable healthy fast food (not everyone wants to spend £7 for a tiny salad)
• Few non sugary/unsweetened drink options when out
• Portion sizes
• Fresh food goes off so quickly
• Fresh food is often expensive and already bruised in the shops
• Poor food regulations (food shouldn't have loads of crap added it it so they can use less of the real ingredients)
• Lack of exercise and time to exercise
• Lack of cheap good quality food compulsory school meals

My husband & DS (13) are obese. Me & my DD (10) are not. We have cooking skills, knowledge, and not constrained financially We all eat the same at home but the men seem to be obsessed with eating & seem to shovel away the calories when out and about. DS knows fizzy drinks are evil, but he buys them every other day on way to school. He knows he can get 4 choc bars for £1 rather than 1 for 75p. I am going to have to send him with pack lunches to try & control it. DS was 98th centile baby, even when EBF. I just don’t know what else to do. I’ve shown him pictures of extreme cases of diabetes to try & scare him off. I cook fresh from scratch every day. It’s a constant battle.😥

Food Tech didn't exist when I was at school but nowadays there's this great thing called google

Google won't be able to give you the confidence in cooking if you are starting from scratch. It will use measurements and language that you don't understand. It won't be able to tell you if you have mixed something enough or too little or if you are about to accidentally give people food poisoning because you have just used the knife that was used to cut raw chicken when cutting bread.

You could probably find step by step videos on Google for brain surgery, but no-one is going to let you do it without practical training by real people. Cooking for some people feels just as complex and difficult to do as brain surgery.

Food tech is utter tosh. Some of the worst generations of cooks enjoyed domestic science. It’s an hour week for school children. Who is going to remember the recipe for scones Mrs Beauchamp showed them in 1991? For goodness sake. How can that compare to going on the bbc goodness food website and getting a recipe?

Food technology lessons have always been crap. Don’t forget convenience food was readily embraced by baby boomers (microwaves, smash, crispy pancakes) all of whom had these lessons you’re looking back on rose tinted glasses with.

I mean honestly, in 2019, with AI and globalisation and climate change and policy is unrest you really think schools should be dedicating time to teaching children how to CHOP AN ONION?!

I don't even know the answer. I've been to sports day today and noticed loads of girls in dd1 (9) class are now over weight. There is one girl who always has been. Comes from quite chaotic background other factors there so leaving her aside....the girls I noticed today who gave got fat are kids from families I know quite well. Part time working mums, middle class, loads of time and money spent on sport activities, really focused child centred parents. Except what they are feeding the kids. I don't get it.

I have the very lean, twiggy, ravenous type of children with a major genetic advantage, so I'm not going to claim all the credit on providing them with a virtuous lifestyle.

Our diet could be better. An advantage of not living near relatives is that we don't get the weekly rourine"treat" from grandparents. We do get a lot of sweets home from school so I feel no need to keep a routine stock at home. I have no gripe with school desserts as portions are small and they're not the 700+ calorie slab you'd get at the pub. I managed a school life and teaching career with a school dinner and dessert for 25+ years with no issue. The only desserts we have regularly at home are when certain fruits are in season in our garden.

I've fallen into the routine of activities most nights across cooking time. Unfortunately DS1 is very sensory so a lot of one pot meals that are ideal to prepare in the day time are out. I do have the advantage of living near school and community facilities so we do walk daily to school in EVERY weather (in grim weather the cars come up to next door but one, but one's house so I have no motivation to drive) and to several activities. Swimming night we are out for 3 hours, for a 30 minute swimming lesson each. For the value of skill gained it's an investment long term, but it's a poor amount of activity time for that window. That's time not spent out in the garden being active.

I ask my DCs "Is your tummy happy? Is your tummy going to be happy until... (insert next meal) There is no pressure to finish the plate in a society of abundant food. I didn't fall down the pit of regular snacks as toddlers to need breaking. They are ravenous when they get in from school and they're better off having a "light tea" rather than grazing on snacks without being sated. I generally avoid certain aisles of the supermarket. We drink full sugar squashes rather than sweetners, but mainly water.

I'd like them to eat more vegetables. Unfortunately there are a lot of clashing tastes in the household and the DCs don't eat slimy lumps of veg in sauces, and DH is no fan of faffy "Sunday dinner veg" which uses up a lot of pots to keep them separate. It was a lot easier to feed them as toddlers even with multiple allergies to cater around!

Children's "healthy" products are often not that healthy and encourage a grazing culture.

In town, McDonalds is half the price of trying to find something more nutritious... and actually it probably isn't vastly better anyway! There's deserts parlours everywhere, portions are huge, bucket-like mugs of hot chocolate covered in cream and marshmallows. Massive portions are normal not a rarity which distorts perceptions.

It is a tough battle against society at times. Watching my DS's class growing up, the ones that were a bit chubby and toddler-like in yR are now definitely fat by junior school. In a few years there probably will be outcries when the school measuring is carried out. The gap between 5 and 11 is too great and there should be an extra stage at 8 before puberty kicks in for the majority.

Well yes they should.

If all they other countries can do proper cooking, then we should be able too.

There is no point training a nation to only do jobs if they cannot do basic household chores like cooking and cleaning.

School should be preparing you for life and not just some really narrow curriculum that has no bearing on everyday life.

Kpo58 other countries can’t do cooking. We’re by no means alone with obesity, neither are we the worst