22% of 4-5 year olds are overweight? How?!

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Can someone explain to me how we are living in a society of overweight 4 year olds? I'm not trying to be goady or holier than thou, I'm genuinely interested.

What is the cause of these fat 4-5 year olds??
Where is it all going wrong for these children who are now likely to be overweight or obese well in to adulthood.

FWIW I have a 4 year old. We have McDonald's takeaway regularly, sweet treats (danish, cinnamon bun, chocolate, biscuits, cake) daily. Lots of cheese and yogurt, healthy fats, jacket potatoes etc. And she's still on the 25th percentile and a string bean.

All the gadgets you mention,you dont need.you dont need a freezer,you dont need an oven,unless you eat expensive crap like chips and fatty stuff.I am not saying there are no financial issues.overweight children eat a poor diet and poor diet is expensive!

It’s not just cash poverty.

Give me some examples of very cheap l, healthy meals that can be done with no oven, use no frozen vegetables, don’t take long to do and don’t use much cooking knowledge.

salad - grow your own, use the clearance section of supermarket or buy loose at greengrocer's
porridge - rolled oats and boiling water
beans on toast
carrots and hummus

scrambled eggs or poached egg with wilted leaves
boiled egg and soldiers

I think the reasons are often quite complicated. Our diets have changed significantly in the last 50 years as have our exercise habits. Exercise is now a special activity you go and do whereas before it was walking to the shops and carrying everything home again. We also did pe every day.
Genetics have a big part to play. I can eat anything and not gain weight. Dp eats a very high calorie diet but not processed food but has a heavy job. DS is like me and is nice and slim at 4. DD who’s just over a year is highly likely to be overweight in the future if we don’t control food and exercise.

•salad - grow your own

BINGO!!!!!!!!!

@WhoppingBigBackside

Are you just listing healthy small meals and snacks? Why

Carrot and hummus is not a meal
Porridge is not dinner

Like someone struggling for time is going to be nipping in to the green grocers for cheap salad. You must not have heard of the concept of “good deserts” in deprived areas.

Poached egg with wilted leaves is not a cheap option.

@HappyAsASandboy

It might be a controversial view, but sometimes it's the measure that's wrong. For some kids, "overweight" according to the definition doesn't mean they're eating more/worse than they should be - they're just big kids!

My DD has always eaten as if there's no food due tomorrow. She will eat anything anytime and then ask what's for the next meal. She was born small, sat on the 50% line until about 2.5 years and then became "overweight" pretty fast. She was padded all over and even though she was tall she ticked all the "overweight" boxes.

She's now 11 and getting taller and taller. She still eats whatever food she can get her hands on but is absolutely using it to get taller and slimmer. I have no doubt she'll be a very strong and solid shape when she's 16, but I doubt she'll be overweight by then.

The problem is this is what every parent who has a kid who does have a problem says.

There are a lot less outliers than people would like to believe.

amp.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/12/more-than-a-million-uk-residents-live-in-food-deserts-says-study

This is an old article but the situation is the same

I'm surprised it's not more than 22%

Kids have the same genes as their parents so the same predisposition to weight gain (nature) then they also eat the same diet as their parents (nurture) so if over 2/3rds of the adult population are overweight or obese, why wouldn't their kids be too?

@WheelieBinPrincess, it was in reply to PurpleDaisies, and those are mostly meals not snacks.

[quote WhoppingBigBackside]@WheelieBinPrincess, it was in reply to PurpleDaisies, and those are mostly meals not snacks.[/quote]
You are seriously suggesting that parents struggling for time and money are going to grow their own salad?

You are living in a dream world.

Not at all. I have a container with leaves growing in it, it took minutes to do the sowing, maintenance is nil.
Similarly you could grow kale or herbs. Herbs will grow on a windowsill

Poor people, grow kale! What an excellent suggestion.

Totally clueless.

@WhoppingBigBackside don’t be ridiculous.

I’m not poor, but we do live in London in a flat and could probably just about grow some cress with the available space.

What would that solve if I was poor and needed to get some nutrition into my hungry children?

I've been poor @PurpleDaisies, but I grew food. I've been that person putting a 23p clearance item back on the shelf in the supermarket because it was money I didn't have.

Kale is about as easy as it gets to grow and grows through the winter.

Not totally clueless at all. I just don't make excuses.

If you are poor, there will always be someone who will let you have a cutting or spare seeds

If you are poor, there will always be someone who will let you have a cutting or spare seeds

That is categorically not true.

Let's face it, overweight DC are not only from cash poor and time poor households.

I work in a school with a very mixed intake, and since it is a small community I know some of the families.

Approaching a third of our current Y5 cohort is brinking on overweight ('well padded'), actually overweight, or obese. These are not all DC from cash poor or time poor families, not by any means.

The issue is that they eat too much of the wrong things, as well as not getting enough exercise. The amount of processed crap they eat at break (when they're meant to have a healthy snack) and have in their lunch boxes (despite the fact that our school dinners are perfectly edible, reasonably nutritious and bloody good value) is mind blowing.

As PP have said, it used to be that if you didn't like what was served up at home, you went without or got bread, cheese and an apple. Now kids know that the cupboard is full of crisps and biscuits and the fridge of sweet yoghurts and high-calorie desserts, and that if they reject the sausage, mash and peas, that's what they get instead.

The solution is multi-pronged: come down hard on processed food manufacturers, educate parents, maybe even make (healthy) school dinners compulsory while banning any snack that isn't fruit or veg (food desert? School provides it.)

I eat well and cook from scratch.

Kale is still crap and a pain in the arse to make dishes from.

I know what you mean OP, we don’t really restrict our kids’ diets either. Nothing is forbidden though their diet is made up mainly of balanced meals. But then if there was a packet of wine gums in our house the children might have one or two after dinner and a bag would last a week or two. I’ve seen a child eat the same sized packet as their snack at the park after school on their own. So whilst I don’t forbid any particular types of food, I’ve definitely got more of a handle on portion control than some parents.

@Dixiechickonhols

commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn03336/ The difference is stark between affluent and deprived areas so it will be much more noticeable depending where you live. It shocks me when I go back to deprived former mill town. Things like toddlers with bottles of juice and sausage rolls in their pram you don’t see where I live now. This sort of thing.

Can't believe it's called a "snack deal" too, like a sausage roll, fruit juice, and cupcake isn't a meal, it's a snack. 🤮

@Dixiechickonhols

Graph showing big change 2020/2021

Oh dear

@HappyAsASandboy

It might be a controversial view, but sometimes it's the measure that's wrong. For some kids, "overweight" according to the definition doesn't mean they're eating more/worse than they should be - they're just big kids!

My DD has always eaten as if there's no food due tomorrow. She will eat anything anytime and then ask what's for the next meal. She was born small, sat on the 50% line until about 2.5 years and then became "overweight" pretty fast. She was padded all over and even though she was tall she ticked all the "overweight" boxes.

She's now 11 and getting taller and taller. She still eats whatever food she can get her hands on but is absolutely using it to get taller and slimmer. I have no doubt she'll be a very strong and solid shape when she's 16, but I doubt she'll be overweight by then.

I'm sorry but I agree with Bobsyer 'padded' is just another way of saying fat. 'Strong and solid', chunky, big made, they're all the same thing.
And the measures are not wrong for the majority of DC. As a PP said a few kids will come out as incorrectly overweight because they are very athletic and have a lot of muscle but for the majority of kids if they come up as overweight/obese on the charts then they're overweight or obese.

I remember my DS put on a bit of weight in year 6 (puppy fat, ha) and I was dreading the school weigh-in thing in case he got upset but he came out perfectly normal so god knows how some parents can't see that their kids are fat. I could see he was a bit chubbier than normal but as it turned out he was perfectly fine.

There have been studies about how poverty saps people's mental capacity to deal with tasks.

If you have to wait ages in the rain for a bus home from work/the shops, you're constantly preoccupied with making ends meet and cutting costs and you're always worried about an unexpected cost or bill, you have much less mental bandwidth to ensure your children eat healthily even if objectively you could manage your money better to achieve this.

Many factors

But a friend of mine who is obese herself and her dh. Feed their 4yo dc awful food.. 'because what's the point in cooking different healthier stuff for dc'

Breakfast 2 white toast Nutella , 1 choc chip brioche and a scotch pancake

Lunch 2 slice white bread sandwich. Choc fingers mini bag. Crisps. Penguin bar. Haribo and a pack of choc animals.

Dinner. Nuggets, chips. Pizza chips. Macdonalds. Fishcake chips. Hotdogs, kfc, kebab shop Daily!
Pudding. Cake and Ice cream. Choc bar

Snacks.
Kinder bars.
Crisps.
Breasticks.
Cakes

The poor dc is massively overweight. Wears age 12 clothes turned 4 in June
School nurse called to talk about it and the dm said well what do u expect were obese and there was a lockdown