to ask what can or should be done about childhood obesity?

[Bakingtins]

Prompted by this article of which I think the worst bit is not the headline grabbing 24 stone 10 yr old, but the figure that 20% of children are now obese. It's something that I have increasingly noticed at my son's swimming lessons (and those are the kids whose parents do take them swimming) and at school.
Current weighing kids at school and 5-a-day, change-4-life campaigns don't seem to be working. What do you think the government, parenting organisations, the BBC etc. could or should be doing to reverse the trend?

Mominatrix, why is whizzing fruit in a smoothie bad for you?

I expect whizzing fruit into a smoothie is just fine. That is very different from blending fruit juice into a smoothie.

There is a reason why fruit juice tastes sweeter than juice from a fruit.

You could always put a bit of coconut oil in it to lower the GI anyway.

I asked a similar question. I always thought if you had an apple and an orange it was 2 of your 5 a day. But an apple and orange smoothies was just one which makes no sense. Apparently it's to do with removing the fibres in a drink and just drinking the juices.

I think it's also added sugar.

Although smoothies aren't ideal if a child really doesn't like fruit then they are a better way of getting the nutrients into them than just not having any fruit. Home made is much better though as then you know what is going into it.

I don't like the idea of any food being a treat, that makes it seem like it is better than all other foods. I certainly don't see the need to make fruit a treat, ideally it should be eaten at mealtimes because of the natural sugars but a balanced diet needs fruit and the pros far outweigh the cons.

Because it separates the juice (fructose) from its fiber - it partially predigests the fruit, basically. The fructose hit from a smoothie can really hammer your liver.

(Fructose, like alcohol, is metabolised mainly in your liver.)

How can chocolate sensibly not be considered a treat?

Why does it need to be considered anything but a food? Why do we feel the need to add the treat label to it? It is a food which when you have a little bit of it occasionally does no harm.

Yes, but not a lot, which is why it is best considered a treat:

"treat" being something that is nice, but best had in moderation.

It could be said that sweets and chocolates no longer being considered treats in a meaningful way is part of the problem.

Why, making something into a treat makes it desired and expected more. Having something just as part of the diet with no fuss made about it makes much more sense.

DS very rarely asks for chocolate because a fuss has never been made about it, so 9 times out of 10 when he asks for some he can have a small amount of it, just like if he asks for a banana he can.

Whereas I'd say that making something into a treat makes it desired as much and expected less.

We have always treated chocolate, biscuits etc as treats and my children (like children of all previous generations) don't expect to get them in any great quantities, nor do they pester me because they know what the answer is going to be.

Like yours, they are quite happy with a banana.

MrsMook 's point is interesting. My DS2 was also milk/soya intolerant which led to a lot of label reading. Between that and me doing SW to lose baby weight we ate pretty much no processed foods. We have slipped back a bit since he outgrew it as no longer have to be so careful, but the principle of cooking from scratch remains. On SW you can basically eat what you like as long as it's made from scratch, as most ingredients are 'free'.
Perhaps encouraging young people to cook is one way forward. My DS is only KS1 but all they ever cook at school seems to be biscuits...

It's got to be partly down to technology ie computers, iPods etc. All that time that children spend doing that, I would have been out and about playing in the garden/street/park as all the other kids were.

However who are these 20% of children who are overweight? I literally can't think of any obese children in my dc's school nor any of my friends' children nor any children at their activities.

It is such a worry & whilst the answers appear simple it clearly isn't.

My current gripe is with DS1' high school. He left our local primary last year, where actually we had always been very happy with the school dinners, he came home & I took over with a healthy tea. He started the high school & I was shocked that there are bacon rolls, buttery bagels, hot dogs all served at morning break. There are vending machines stuffed with crisps & sugary 'healthy' snack bars & drinks.

What DS was doing was using his dinner money for morning break on a bacon roll, then not needing lunch as he was still full. When he would get off the bus at home time (then starving) he would go to the shop & spend his remaining money on rubbish. Anyway we did quickly put a halt to it when we found out as it was definitely affecting his health (although he was still skinny) & the school is about to start a cashless system which will also help, but it did show me that despite having a very healthy first eleven years to his life he still made rubbish choices.

As a more general point, people tend to forget that drinks contain calories: so someone on a diet picks up a Boots meal deal with a hummus and watercress sandwich and a bag of "crisps" - current total 300kcal - and then chooses a "healthy" smoothie over a can of pop, adding nearly the same calorie load again.

I mean, there's obviously more nutrition in a smoothie than a can of Fanta, but in sheer weight management terms they are a notable pitfall.

Diet and activity.

Hours sat in front of a screen together with lots of processed food is the problem.

Once can give treats and not make a fuss over it. I did not mean to treat fruit as some rarified item to be treated as something special to have, but, as another poster states, something to have in small quantities.

Smoothies are OK only if you make them and serve them immediately. However, why the need to whizz up all of that fruit and give a huge sugar hit to the child's body when they could eat the fruit individually in its original form - slower input of sugar into the bloodstream for several reasons. Also the child would eat less of it as all that fibre would prevent them from finishing the lot.

Store bought smoothies are filled with fruit with very high GI fruit, diluted with more fruit juice, and the water soluble vitamins would have degraded from their original levels due to the storage time between making the drink and drinking it.

Teach people how to make healthy food on a budget.

I think giod is used in some cases to pacify kids who are badly behaved so I woukd say more support with parenting

Variety.of excercise at schools not just team games but excercise that can be carried out on your own like the gym

The calories in drinks really shocked me when I started loosing weight. Given that I could drink 2 or 3 big bottles of pop in a week that was a lot of empty calories. I have now cut that out and only really drink water with the odd glass of dilute squash which has helped with my weight loss a lot.

I also don't think the amount of carbohydrates people eat, especially 'white' carbs helps - it is seen as quite normal to have 2 or 3 slices of white toast for breakfast, sandwiches on white bread for dinner, pasta for tea etc etc. If these were swapped for wholemeal alternatives it would probably make a lot of difference and reduce the need to snack as much as people wouldn't get the same dip in blood sugar a few hours after eating. Wholemeal also provides much more goodness.

justgivemeareason I'm glad it's not just me who hasn't noticed lots of obese children.

I don't live in a particularly affluent area either, it is a pretty average rural village so there is a mix of people.

Of my 3 children, DS2 looks chubbier than DS1 and DD (just checked on the NHS BMI calculator and he is around the 50th centile, DS1 is around the 25th, DD around the 2nd). But I don't see many children looking a lot bigger than DS2.

I know people keep saying that you can't tell just by looking, but I find it hard to understand why not? DS2 looks a lot bigger than DD. An obese adult looks very different to a healthy weight adult. What makes obese children different?

Watch a programme called 'the men who made us fat' it shows the invention of 'snack' foods. It explains A LOT.

Food has changed a lot over the past 50 years. Fruit and veg doesn't have the same nutritional quality as it did back then. Bread production has turned into some frankenstein version of what it used to be. Added sugar TO EVERYTHING. Even those cooked chickens you buy from the supermarkets. Think they are just chicken? They are actually pumped full of dextrose to give it it that 'golden' cooked colour. Awful.

For those who are talking about taxing high sugar/fat foods to make them unaffordable, do you not think food is unaffordable enough already and it would perhaps be better to make cheap fruit/veg easier to come by and so relatively cheaper? In the small town where I live there is no supermarket, there is a fruit and veg shop but if you work out of town that is closed when you get home, so you are left with convenience store overpriced fruit and veg. Not everyone has internet access to shop online or the inclination to do so, or the ability to drive to Aldi.