To have come back from Lanzarote feeling geuinely shocked at how fat the British tourists were?

[Illgetmycoat]

I'm not talking slightly plump, I mean seriously, morbidly obese. A whole different race to the German, French and Spanish tourists.

What is going on? When did our country become like this? Whenever you heard a british accent, it would be accompanied by a 3ft wide backside. And whole families, too, all swollen to gargantuan size, with the poor kids unable to put their feet together because of the rolls of fat on their legs.

How has this happened? What the heck are the Brits feeding their children to get them so large? How can you feed an eight year old you love so much food that they become morbidly obese?

It can't just be blamed on poverty, because it's not cheap going to Lanzarote.

I was shocked.

is nobody else as astonished as me that Britain is only 26th on the list of obese countries

Not me, Bertha! But I think nearly everyone else on this thread would share your astonishment

and the advice for healthy eating for children is mixed. I have a recipe book written by a paed dieticien for children aged 0-6 and it says they need 2 snacks and recommends dessert, albeit home-made, twice a day.

The snacks are things like mini-muffins or celery with cream cheese and the desserts are the sort of schhol dinner desserts like fruit sponge and custard.

But that sounds like a lot of sugar.

I notice that children here are always snacking. It's almost as if they will combust and disappear if they are not eating something. The snacks are not healthy either.
Just yesterday, walking around the supermarket, just after lunch time, a mum was shopping with her toddler (I would say about 12months old) who was holding one of those packaged sugary fruit snacks. Why not give the child fruit instead?
I went to a soft play area with DS last week, a 5 year old child kept being given a coke when she was thirsty. Why not water?
It is very sad.

@blue who said children shouldn't have sugar? Children need a lot of carbs as that dietician as recommended.

People here do realise that the Victorian landowner really did look down on the working class, don't they? The lower classes were 6" shorter than the upper-middle and upper, due to inadequate diet. But they were nice and thin

Underfed children fail to reach their full physical and mental potentials. This effect can be seen with just-about underfeeding, similar to how 150 cals too many per day can cause weight gain.

I'm just trying to introduce a bit of balance to yet another fat-hysteria thread.

ethelb I don't know how much sugar is ok for children to have, that's my point.

I don't want my children to view sweet things as either forbidden or a treat - I'd rather they could just view them as another food.

But the fact is they do prefer sweet things and when we regularly have puddings, that's their focus and they don't want their main course.

So I don't really know what I should be giving them.

Just yesterday, walking around the supermarket, just after lunch time, a mum was shopping with her toddler (I would say about 12months old) who was holding one of those packaged sugary fruit snacks. Why not give the child fruit instead?

Maybe the child won't eat fruit . . . mine wouldn't until recently and he's much older. He was also on a dairy free diet for a while, it gets complicated when they have food issues and you need something convenient and have been caught short.

You shouldn't be so keen to judge.

Fish fingers, mash and some peas isn't a bad meal? Really?

Mash - bet most people chuck a few knobs of butter and/or full-fat milk in there. It's a WHITE CARB, just sitting in your stomach, not being used up. And what are you doing after dinner? Something pretty sedentary most likely.

Peas? Again, most people would add butter.

Fish fingers? Screw what the nutritional info says. LOOK AT THE INGREDIENTS LIST - how many things in the list can you pronounce or know what they are. I'll bet that fish fingers in the 70s didn't contain a lorry load of factory-constructed E numbers, gums, fillers and flavourings.

Also, it's ridiculous that manufacturers will say 'calories, omegas etc per serving' and then once you actually read what the packagaing says, a serving turns out to be something absolutely tiny in comparison to what most people would put on their plate.

It is so hard for the body to cope with unnatural things, which simply didn't use to exist.

Have been reading this with interest. The person that said you only need to overeat by 150 calories a day to put on a stone in a year is spot on. I am 5 2" and a small frame. Last June we returned from a holiday in spain and I felt fat. Nothing fitted me properly and I felt depressed and miserable about it. Dh had said on holiday that I was fine as I was still one of the slimest people on the beach but I just did not feel right and my size 12 clothes were too tight. I weighed myself when I got back and was about a stone heavier than the same time the previous year.

I took a long hard look at what I was eating and used my fitness pal to log everything that passed my lips. It all adds up. I was addicted to tesco finest coleslaw and was getting through a 500g tub a week (1000 calories per tub). All those healthy salads I thought I was eating were anything but. Cheese was another weakness. Again I was adding masses of cheese to jacket potatoes and salads. I was never a big snack person anyway so there was nothing to be done there it was purely that my portion sizes were big and I was adding even more calories with the extra cheese and coleslaw. I also decided to exercise more so bought a treadmill. I am now 8st 6 (have lost 24lbs) and a size 8/10 depending on the shop. I think that vanity sizing also has a lot to do with it. I don't for one minute believe I am a true size 8. I was around the same weight as I am now in my 20s (am 42 now) and I was a size 10 then so how can I be an 8 now. Vanity sizing led me to believe that because I was a size 12 I was fine but it was only when size 12s started to get too tight that I did something about it. In reality the size 12s I had been wearing would have been a size 14 20 years ago.

"Why not give the child fruit instead? " - this is the whole problem! Because we are so in thrall to the capitalist monster, which dictates that we must consume consume consume, the advice is always to switch this for that. That comes over, heard by the wilful hearers (as we all are) as "EAT THIS" or "EAT THAT" which, simplified again, is still "EAT EAT EAT". Eventually it becomes an imperative of the body itself.

garlic - I am not astonished - I bet some of the gulf countries are much further near the top of the list than the UK and USA

I bet though if you go and find a list of smoking countries you will find the top of the list for obesity are low smoking countires

@thunder that odd attitude to food is why people just give up

Mashed potato has existed for a very long time! I add cream and black pepper to mine..yum!

ivykaty, right - smoking has got a lot to do with it in terms of the difference between this generation and the one before, I am sure. Smoking really does the job as an appetite supressant (physiological), and it fills a lot of awkward gaps that are nowadays being filled with food (social and psychological)

Also, a calorie is a calorie

No, no it's really not. Calories from a doughnut will be so much harder on your body than the same amount of calories from salad. The doughnut will spike your body's insulin and generally make it strain harder to process the sugars, E numbers, other unnatural crap. The salad will be far kinder - and you get to eat more, what with 300 cals of salad being a significantly larger portion than 300 calsories worth of doughnut.

garlicbollocks re: Underfed children... Underfeeding of nutrients can - and frequently does - happen in overfed children. ie they've had far too many calories but not enough vitamins and minerals to grow healthily. They're effectively starving - but fat.

But I disagree with any thought that children shouldn't have carbs or that their carbs should be limited (and I'm a BIWI Bootcamper!). They should get most of their carbs from wholegrains, fruit and vegetables, but they need a lot more carbs than adults to fuel their growth from the advice that I've had (paediatrician in the family) But sugar every day is bad for them - there aren't any of the vitamins and minerals they need in it, if they're hungry they need to eat something that will nourish them.

Britain would probably be even lower on the list if the statistics were collated in the same way. UK statistics are actual measurements, other countries use self reported statistics and people typically underestimate weight.

People seeing it as a British problem are probably just suffering from confirmation bias

ethelb - 'odd attitude'? considering butter as non-essential and preferring to eat fresh, largely as-untouched-as-possible food is odd? It's the easiest way to eat!

Steam everything and don't add crap/unncessary sauces. It a caveman didn't eat it, you don't!

@thunder why do you assume a caveman had the best possible diet for a human?

garlicbollcks, I don't like fat-bashing (which fat-hysteria often is, and hateful concern-trolling); and I know that there are still people who don't get enough to eat. But it is also true that on the whole there are more fat people. And I don't think it is always good for them (although some fat people are healthy and happy, many are not)
I think it is ok to ask why people are getting fatter and, in fact, if done sensibly, this actually gets away from fat bashing.

I don't ask "Oh my god why do people have no self-control any more?" because I just don't believe that human nature has fundamentally changed.
I do ask, "why do so many more people find it so hard to eat moderately?" and the answers to this are more interesting and useful.
The question "why do some people not have enough to eat in this rich country?" is a different, arguably far more important, question

Yes but if you look at that list, the first 7 or so are tiny pacific island countries with a very different body shape/size to us (if you have ever seen the fidjian or samoan rugby teams for example up close, they are six foot cubed awesome people) etc . And Andorra? Yeah that's statistically significant. Look again, and of sizeable countries its really the US Aus NZ and us - all westernised developed cultures with high car usage and lots of food choice (food imported from all over the world v what is available locally/seasonally etc)

Thunder.

In my fishfingers there is
Fish
Breadcrumb (containing wheat flour, water, salt, yeast, paprika, turmeric)
Vegetable oil.

Sounds pretty good to me! The salt is even pretty low, only 0.7 when the guidelines are 4.0 a day.

I don't put butter on peas, why would i its unnecessary, and only a tiny bit in mashed potato if at all.

People make assumptions on what's best to eat without really knowing and often get it wrong. Fish fingers are a processed food so not perfect but probably better than a lot of the other time saving foods that might be chosen instead. As long as you're not eating them for every meal its not a problem.

So often on food threads on here it became clear how much confusion there is about what to eat or feed our children. The ones that scare me are the posters that pop up declaring that children should eat no fat whatsoever and appear to have their children on a permanent diet whilst telling them they can't have xyz because it will make them fat! That's all just passing on issues.

It should be a balanced healthy diet, not about good food and bad foods, or where we make small children paranoid about their bodies . . . i have a friend who does this . . . You must not eat that because you're getting a big belly! You're going to get fat! Do you want a big bum like mummy? Etc etc To a 5 year old who has no control over the food that is put in front of her.

Caveman food

that's such bollocks

awful lot of smuggles on here