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

[changing221]

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.

I work in a preschool and I'm appalled at the lunches. I'd say about 25% have any fruit or veg, less than that have what I'd say is the right amount. A lot of kids have chocolate biscuit, crisps, other biscuits/ cake, Nutella/ jam sandwich, sweet yoghurt such as frube pepperami etc. Way more than I have for lunch.

I think a big part of it is that unfortunately the shape of a 'normal' diet has now changed considerably, so people will continue becoming overweight unless they make conscious changes to go outside the norm.

A lot of people - perhaps even more children than adults - are having things like having crisps and chocolate daily, not to mention so many snacks for young kids it's unreal.

As a whole a lot of society's weekly food intake includes crisps, chocolate, sugary drinks, takeaways, eating out etc etc and even heavy activity can struggle to keep all of that in check.

I think its indulgent grandparents. When i was young they might give you a pack of polos to share with your sibling but now its a massive family sized bar of chocolate each.

The Obesogenic enviroment is a real thing - a generation didn't suddenly just lose it's willpower.

I remember the great excitement in our town when our major supermarket was being refurbished in the 90s - when it reopened it was going to be double the size! What delights were they going to bring us in a supermarket twice the size?

When it opened we soon found out - the new aisles were all full of crisps and chocolate. 30 years later, they still are so clearly there was profit in it.

Later I got a job in a New Town. The town planners had helpfully designed the town of the future so you could not go anywhere without a car. No walk into the town centre, walk down to the local shop, walk to the park, nothing. Everything was polluting and a calorie saving trip in the car. No thought to the future health of the population at all.

@KrispyKale

It feels like a fight NOT to eat the ultra processed food. 🤷That's the power of marketing.

I agree with this. I'm a veggie but the sheer amount of UPF for veggies and vegans has grown significantly, and people think it is healthy.

You really do need to understand how to cook from raw ingrediants, and this is hard when the main food in supermarkets is UPFs. In addition to the skill you need money and time, and even space. We bulk cook and store in two freezers but the moment life grids us down and things are too busy we just reach for the quick easy shit.

Constant snacking on junk which only makes them crave more junk. Their parents eat the same way and their children learn from them. I’m surprised the percentage is as low as 22%. Most young children I see look overweight, even those who are sporty. I would say around 30% of DS’s swimming squad are carrying too much weight and they’re training 8h per week plus land training. It’s diet related and not the fault of the child. They are driven by the cravings created by what they’re eating.

Lack of exercise. Children not wanting to go out to play as technology now allows you to play with your friends without having to leave home.

School PE lessons are ridiculous. 35 mins of rounders, 20 mins of football. My 12 year old (yr7) asked if, rather than taking turns doing tag rugby for 20 mins a time, her and her friends could spend the 45 minutes lesson time running laps around the field and was told no.

My 11 year old (year 6) is currently doing cricket for PE. Madness.

Playgrounds are also health and safety gone mad with no running too fast or playground games involving running unless on grass.

@Elephantsparade

I think its indulgent grandparents. When i was young they might give you a pack of polos to share with your sibling but now its a massive family sized bar of chocolate each.

Erm. No.

Lots of kids do not even see their grandparents regularly.

It's not a new Lockdown thing .
My DC are adults (19 and 22) .
I used to work mornings and pick up from school in the afternoon.
20 minutes wal for me at adult pace .
On the way there I saw parents getting in their cars , and on the way home those cars would be unloading DC or parked .
So couldn't even do a

@ForTheLoveOfSleep

Lack of exercise. Children not wanting to go out to play as technology now allows you to play with your friends without having to leave home.

School PE lessons are ridiculous. 35 mins of rounders, 20 mins of football. My 12 year old (yr7) asked if, rather than taking turns doing tag rugby for 20 mins a time, her and her friends could spend the 45 minutes lesson time running laps around the field and was told no.

My 11 year old (year 6) is currently doing cricket for PE. Madness.

Playgrounds are also health and safety gone mad with no running too fast or playground games involving running unless on grass.

@ForTheLoveOfSleep It's not lack of exercise. It is poor lifestyle choices

If the teacher needed to supervise a class of children, the children would need to be taking part in the same activity

When you are doing something sedentary like watching tv or being driven to school you can eat while doing it

Over consumption. Adult portions, constant snacks.
Lots of eating out and takeaway and snacks and drinks out.
Being hungry or thirsty doesn’t seem to be acceptable.
When I was a child you wouldn’t be bought food or drink out and about - told you can have a drink when you get home or if you were hungry at 4.15 were told tea is at 5.
As a child if you did have a treat it was often shared between siblings. For money and portion reasons - it was seen as wasteful to give a toddler a whole bun etc. A chocolate bar would be cut up and shared.
Lack of movement. So no walking to school, no playing on park, no walking to shops. Being driven to a 30 minute activity class once a week in no way replicates.
Lost sight of healthy weight. 80% of my age are overweight or obese. Healthy children can be perceived as too thin now.
Vanity Clothing sizes. Parents think he’s fine he’s in age 5 joggers but they are cut big. Lack of formal wear. Polo shirts and elastic waisted trousers for uniform again lulls into false sense of sizing.

@RedToothBrush - maybe they are in the 88% that arent overweight.

I might not have been being deadly serious with my suggestion - but i have had a running battle with my MIL about the appropriate amount of sweets biscuits and crisps needed on a weekly visit.

My early 80s diet at that age had some crisps and biscuits but was mostly healthy homemade food. Nothing fancy or exciting, nothing you’d overeat. Some food eg a Mars bar was for adults only. Fizzy pop as a rare treat. No takeaway. No meals out. No coffee shops.
Add in several miles walking a day just to school and back.
People underestimate walking - I lost 5 stone in 8 months and my exercise was walking.
None of the mums in my street had daytime access to a car when we were children so children walked - to school, to nursery to pick siblings up, to shop, to brownies etc.

@AnnaMagnani

The Obesogenic enviroment is a real thing - a generation didn't suddenly just lose it's willpower.

I remember the great excitement in our town when our major supermarket was being refurbished in the 90s - when it reopened it was going to be double the size! What delights were they going to bring us in a supermarket twice the size?

When it opened we soon found out - the new aisles were all full of crisps and chocolate. 30 years later, they still are so clearly there was profit in it.

Later I got a job in a New Town. The town planners had helpfully designed the town of the future so you could not go anywhere without a car. No walk into the town centre, walk down to the local shop, walk to the park, nothing. Everything was polluting and a calorie saving trip in the car. No thought to the future health of the population at all.

This. It's obviously not just one thing. But it's a trend towards corporations making profit from lifestyles that are unhealthy. You don't make much money from people eating a bit less and walking more.

Junk is so cheap now. 50p 5 donuts. £1 for 4 bars of chocolate. You see all ages eating sharing bags of chocolate or family size bags of sweets.
Fizzy Sweets were 1p each when I was little and it was normal to be given 5p as a treat. So 5 sweets in a paper bag chosen at newsagents not a family bag of haribo.

@AnnaMagnani

Sugar and snacks.

So, so many examples.

When I was a child a Victoria sandwich would have jam only, now it has jam and butter cream.

I got out of school, having eaten barely anything of the school dinner as it was disgusting and walked home. Now children need a snack as they are hungry after school, and are driven home.

When I visit families at home, the automatic response to make kids behave is often to give them sugary snacks to keep them quiet. Not every home but many.

And as others have said, a complete reset of what a normal child should like. If you watch this 1970s rail safety video, apart from it being traumatizing and a completely bizarre thing to show to children (how things have changed!) what strikes you is that most of the children look really really thin. But they aren't thin, they are what children are actually supposed to look like, we have just completely forgotten.

A lot of parents today with a child that size would think they needed feeding up.

Not just the children, the adults are smaller too! But I agree with you, far too much processed food stuffed with unhealthy and unnecessary calories, palm oil, sugars ( including all the sugars given fancy names so unless you read carefully you don’t realise they are sugars ), plus all the flavouring ingredients that make food moreish so we want to eat more of them.

It’s no wonder that food manufacturing and production is one of the most profitable industries. Take a few cheap ingredients, add in even cheaper ingredients and chemicals and market it to parents and kids, extra kudos if you manage to persuade the parents that the food they are feeding is “healthy” like kids yogurts packed with sugars and artificial flavours. Bonus points if you manage to destroy a few natural habitats in third world countries along the way.

@FreeBritnee

In my child’s class of 5 year olds there are zero overweight kids. In my nine years old’s class I can think of maybe one or two who are overweight. Across both those kids year groups I can still only think of one or two who are plump. So I think you’re generalising when actually it may be more prevalent in some areas and less prevalent in others.

As it happens, I don't know ANY overweight 4 year olds. There's none in my DC preschool. I have no friends with overweight children.

It's not a generalisation, it's a statistic. Just because we can't see them, doesn't mean they don't exist.

I think it’s just portion sizes.

As a child we are so much rubbish, barely a vegetable in sight. Sugary, processed crap all day. Yet I guess small ish portions of it. Never been overweight

Now as an adult I eat healthier. Never been overweight as an adult either, but I think my portion sizes never really changed.

Most portion sizes for 1 person in restaurants are way larger than dh or I would eat at home ( and dh is 6ft, and probably bmi 23/24 so he’s not super skinny or anything)

This is such an interesting discussion but I’m not sure there is a clear answer.
I grew up in the 80s. My mum was a housewife but refused to cook proper meals, despite my gran being an excellent cook and teaching her how. Every night Mon-Sat would be chips in the chip pan with sausages or burgers chucked in too. My mum said this was perfectly healthy because she used vegetable oil in the chip pan and not lard! 🙄Sunday we would normally have a Sunday roast but very few veg and the meat was always really fatty.
Snacks would be a 10p pick n mix every Saturday as a treat and nothing more. Portions were small and I often remember being hungry as a child.
Activity/ exercise for me was non existent. I wasn’t allowed to play in the garden, let alone out in the streets. I wasn’t allowed to make friends at all so I tended to escape into my own world by reading books or drawing, which are both obviously very sedentary activities. We didn’t have a car but my parents never took me anywhere, not even the park. School was at the end of our road so only a couple mins walk each way.
I was slim mostly as a child, except at the end of primary school when I became very fat. Luckily between that and middle school I had a big growth spurt which meant I shot up in height and looked slim again.
My younger siblings, by comparison: grew up eating same meals but with lots of extra snacks: usually 1-2 full size choc bars and multipack crisps every evening, plus a sandwich etc after school. They were never hungry. They were also allowed to play outside with their friends or play in our garden and were much more active. They both stayed slim throughout childhood and beyond and didn’t have the same issues with food as I have struggled with once I hit adulthood.

My old neighbours had children the same age as mine and both were very obese. The parents were also. I don't know if they had any medical conditions but I do know they had takeaway delivered to their house every single night, sometimes twice in an evening.

Their poor DD was only 3 at that time and she could hardly climb the front stairs her poor little legs were so big. The Mum was a SAHM and it was an affluent area so the poverty angle wasn't there with them. Some families just have no idea how to eat healthily.

I think a lot is people rewarding with food which can lead to its own problems in later life.

My DC are very slim. Everyone constantly tries to feed them. They are under the 2nd percent for weight and on the 75th for height.

Their grandparents try to “feed them up”. Friends often encourage them to take an extra biscuit or worry out loud that there’s nothing on them. HCPs raise an eyebrow and suck in their breath when they weigh them and suggest more butter. The people in the car seat shops have no idea what to do and one told me once that it wasn’t possible for my then 4year old to weigh 13kg and insisted on weighing them in the shop.

Once one of them did get quite ill and dropped some weight they couldn’t afford to lose, and then I did get to see what an actually underweight child looks like, and it took six months to get back to looking a healthy weight again.

But everywhere they go people tell them how skinny there are and try to feed them. I don’t know what that says about the world.

My 5 yo eats loads of crap, but I suspect it would be free access to snacks that would make her overweight. Sweet tooth! Especially things like chocolate. Limited to once a day.

I think it is majorly complex of loads of different issues. I think there are a lot of fussy eaters these days, don’t know any young kids really who will eat decent homemade food, whereas when I was younger that’s what I was raised on and if you didn’t eat it you’d starve, there was nothing else, there’s a lot of judgement towards parents, you see it on the MN boards all the time around children’s eating ‘just give them jam on toast if they don’t eat their dinner’, ‘make sure you have plenty of to hand snacks in your cupboards otherwise you’re neglecting your kids’, ‘just buy more snacks if the kids are eating them all’ etc etc. Couple that with lack of parent time and sedentary lifestyles of kids these days, kids don’t ‘play’ anymore, would rather sit on their tablets/game consoles or watch tv, and heaven forbid you don’t get them a game console when all their mates have one, you don’t see kids playing on bikes/having a kick about etc, it’s sad.

I haven't read the thread ( sorry) but I think snacks play a part

Snack snack snack

These stats have neen around for years. Lack of outdoor play, overuse of car tv/electronic play....