To not be surprised our kids are so fat

[Babycham1979]

When they're fed utter crap like this;

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-2957301/What-school-lunches-look-like-world.html

No wonder obesity rates are so high,mand no wonder so many British children are incredibly picky when they're fed processed shite as is evident in these pictures. Imagine some of the pickiest UK children being handed a bowl of miso soup, or prawns, or plantain?!

Is the issue budgetary, or culture? Either way, we're failing our children.

I was a child in the 70's but our diet at home was mostly based on post-war recipes, steak and kidney pudding, boiled bacon pease pudding, braising steak, never rice and never pasta, and none of us have ever been overweight. We often had a cake if we were in town shopping and sweet puddings were pretty standard too. I think the secret was that all of these dishes were cooked from scratch, no cheap fillers to make the manufacturers more profit, and no concealed sugar. We did play out a lot, and walk to school, but I think the secret was good quality cheap basics. I think that obesity is also caused by lots of children comfort eating and boredom eating. Life is full of pressures now we didn't face, for children and parents, not forgetting the huge marketing budgets junk food has, and how 'cool' it is to eat it. My dd has quite a puritanical diet, meat and 4 veg, pudding at weekends, water to drink, and I am happy with that.

I also think that children are pandered to too much, and given exactly what they want to eat when they want it. There are loads of threads on here about fussy children that need to be tempted to eat which I find infuriating. These are your three meals a day, which we all eat together, and there is nothing else.

You can be thin and have an excess of visceral fat, the fat around your organs. Michael Moseley is a famous example - if he had not been tested for a tv programme, by all accounts he would be dead or seriously ill by now -

because he thought he was slim and fit -

not diabetic with his diabetes being so uncontrolled he was at serious risk of death.

Sorcha so what is it then that you believe has caused the huge rise in diabetes, if not obesity?

Sorcha seems to be trying to single handily rewrite medical history!

Yes, medical experts the world over in agreement that fat causes diabetes vs someone on the Internet with apparently no evidence saying 'nah I reckon it's the other way around innit'.

Our school meals are very healthy and actually quite sophisticated for first school children. My DS is now eating much better at home because of this. Saying that, my children are a million miles away from being obese anyway. They both have very healthy appetites and my oldest DS eats like a horse - including junk food- but is only on the 5th centile for weight. He is very active though and does a lot of sport.

Sugar not fat contributes to Type II diabetes. Of course it is sugar that makes you fat a lot of the time but it is sugar which is at the heart of it also because it is hard not to eat too much of it.

For the person who mentioned that her daughter has joint problems and therefore struggles to walk fast/run for exercise. Could she not cycle/swim instead? Less impact on joints.

sarf, my diet as a child was similar to yours, plus I had school dinners which included a sweet pudding daily and we had dessert after every meal at home too. We were skinny as children and still a healthy weight as adults. The difference seems to me that we didn't snack between meals, we didn't eat processed food, and meals were relatively low in carbs (despite the sponge pudding ) and not massive portions. We also didn't drink fizzy pop, sweets were limited to once a week, crisps were a rare treat, we weren't allowed to help ourselves to food from the cupboard, and 'snack time' hadn't been invented yet. Pizza and pasta and rice dishes hadn't entered my mums world yet either.

I don't know much about diabetes but isn't it more common among African and Asian communities? Why is that, Asians are usually slim?

It is facinating to see on this thread what people consider as "healthy" or not. Fruit is universally seen as a "good" yet little consideration is given to the type or variety.

There was an interesting study a few years back that measured the amount of sugar in new fruit varieties - grapes, strawberries, apples all had almost doubled their sugar content since the 50s.

There are nearly as many calories in 100g of banana (95 cal) as there is in a 2 finger kit kat (106). A quick weigh of the banana in our fruit bowl is 220g. Grapes are 60 cal per 100g yet blackberries are 1cal per 100g. A satsuma has less than the calorific value of an orange.

I don't know much about diabetes but isn't it more common among African and Asian communities? Why is that, Asians are usually slim?

Yes, African and Asian people are at higher risk. That doesn't change the fact that being obese also puts you at much higher risk of developing diabetes. I don't know why people won't accept this?!

Yes fruit does contain sugar, but the fact is if you enjoy a diet which mostly consists of a variety unprocessed whole foods then you are less likely to become overweight.

In addition to all of the points made above, I think that nowadays, we see hunger as something to be avoided at all costs - a condition to be "medicated" with snacks as soon as it shows any sign of appearing.

When I was a child, if you didn't eat at mealtimes, you had to wait until the next. On the whole, we've lost sight of normal eating patterns. Snacks such as crisps and chocolate used to be a treat, eaten in moderate portions, rather than a staple food, available in increasingly huge packs.

Having said that, I find very irritating the nutritional advice and policing which clearly assumes that everyone is overweight. When pregnant (and very slim), I was given the Emma's Diary type nutrition advice pack which suggested that a cottage cheese salad was a sensible lunch for a pregnant woman; an overweight one, maybe!

I also resented the packed lunch police at my DS's primary school. He was 3rd centile for BMI and yet if he took anything containing fat or sugar (eg biscuits), words were had. Nothing was said to the parents of overweight children, who turned up at the school gates with sugary fatty snacks.

The 'lunch box police' would piss me off as well, but I think it's unavoidable at this stage. Something has to be done.
In any case, childhood obesity rates seem to be levelling off at the moment, which is the first step.

Having seen the state of some lunch boxes I can understand why they sometimes have to police lunch boxes. I agree in general it should be down to parents but when a dinner of jam butties, chocolate bar, chocolate biscuits and crisps is being sent in daily then I can see why something needs to be said.

I accept it Christy. (hmm)
Just wondering what other factors are there. And what other factors affect the statistics over the decades.
Because it is not 'as simple as that', if it was then we wouldn't have to discuss it again and again.

Fruit sugars, if eaten as part of the fruit, are slow release due to fibres. Fruit also contains a lot of vitamins - a Kitkat doesn't. Fructose, if refined, is worse for you than sucrose, absolutely, which is one reason fruit juice isn't actually that healthy. But a piece of fruit is healthy, sugar or not, and you'd really struggle to eat enough of it to pile on weight.

The healthiest foods of all are a range of salad leaves. But if you ate nothing else, you'd die. Eating natural, mostly unprocessed food, and a wide range, in sensible quantities, is good for you. It's not rocket science.

This is a really interesting debate. I think part of the trouble is that, as usual, the Government advice about healthy eating is being taken way too seriously by some, and not seriously enough by others. So the more conscientious parents who offer a healthy diet (in the main) become hysterical, whilst the ones who should be are taking no notice. The advice is confusing, and ordinary, everyday essentials such as fruit and milk get labelled "bad" due to naturally-occurring sugars. And carbs get labelled "bad" too, because they have sugar too. I'm still trying to figure out the sugar content of Soreen, because, according to Google, it has no sugar but loads of carbs.

It's just ridiculous. We can't see the woods for the trees any more. What happened to words such as "sensible", "moderation" and "proportion"? Why can't you have a portion of chips from the chippy which actually feeds just one person, not three?

The problem isn't really advertising, or availability, of "junk" imo; the problem is that we have lost sight of what a healthy lifestyle looks like and we constantly look for justification of our habits. We are in denial. We know the answers, but can't bear the consequences of putting them into action, because that may involve some discipline and discomfort.

Someone said up thread about fat...I agree
I was furious with a healthy living thing they did at the school...my DCs - perfect weights - have blue milk as part of a diet that mostly avoids processed crap...(DP & I have green milk)
DD2 (just 8) just stopped drinking blue milk - didn't talk to me about it - when I realised she said they'd told her she wasn't allowed to drink blue milk because she was older than 2. Didn't encourage her to discuss it with me... Apart from anything else I am a great believer in everything in moderation - we don't have processed low fat spreads - we have real butter. We have full fat yoghurt and cheese. I believe in don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognise. And that hidden sugar/excessive sugar consumption is the main contributor to the 'obesity crisis'. In fact some research done by Harvard showed that people who regularly ate reduced fat/0% fat yoghurts were more over weight than those that didn't...
And it was 'blanket advice' If she had a problem it would be one thing - I might rethink- but she really doesn't (in fact they told another child who is being treated for being severely underweight the same - FFS)
I phoned them to complain -had a long conversation with the organiser who kept saying they were following government guidelines etc...but she could see my point of view - at the end of the conversation she said well she can have blue milk if it was my choice as long it is part of a balanced diet - such as fresh fruit and vegetables ...and low fat yoghurt....
unescorted Sugar in fruit - I agree with to an extent (also apparently carrots are sweeter now than they used to be!) -but I would still encourage mine to eat a banana over a kitkat...
Calories in food are calculated by burning foods in a lab -it doesn't take into consideration the amount of energy your body takes to digest them or that you will not get every last bit of energy out of everything you eat (Think of sweetcorn and peas you see undigested in your poo -that happening at a cellular level too). Also fruit does contain fibre - which you really can't digest. I would suggest that the kitkat is easily digested and will release all its calories with very little (if anything) will come out the other end...
It is also the reason I hate 'healthy fruit smoothies' with a passion - not only do you get more fruit in a glass than you would comfortably eat but most of the digestion work has been done for you (and that's assuming they haven't strained most of the fibre out) - same with fruit juice... which was (fittingly I suspect) described as 'obesity in a bottle' by a leading research scientist...

There are nearly as many calories in 100g of banana (95 cal) as there is in a 2 finger kit kat (106)

Yes, but a banana has nutritional benefits that a kit kat doesn't.

Also, you are unlikely to eat 6 bananas at a sitting, but it wouldn't be difficult to eat 600 calories worth of biscuits and chocolate over the course of a morning.

It is quite difficult to exceed your calorie "allowance" if you are eating a healthy diet with sensible portion sizes, perhaps including a couple of pieces of fruit, and not eating biscuits, cakes, etc.

unlucky, it will take the NHS 20 years to get up to speed with current science that good fats are good for you and keep you slim! My son was shown the sugar or fat film and his teacher agreed with him that fat was better (although I think even that film was showing unhealthy fats too rather than distinguishing good natural fats from the awful processed kinds).

It is actually all very very simple. If you eat normal unprocessed foods you're fine - whether that is 100% veg diet or 100% meat/fat (innuit) or what most of us have a mixture. If you eat loads of processed foods you aren't.

If man made it don't eat it. End of story. Not surprising really. Always look at what we ate for hundreds of thousands of years which was lots of fish, eggs, meat, veg and in season and not that often fruit. Drink water.

Maybe some of us question conventional medical wisdom, and thank god we do. Us low-carbers (or failed low carbers like me) have known for decades that sugar (not fat) is the real culprit. The medical establishment has finally caught on to what we have been saying for years. So that's why some of us, including me, would question the diabetes link, I suspect it has more to do with vitamin D levels, which is why it is more prevalent in Asians/Africans when they migrate to cooler climates

jilly no ,you won't be fine if you eat 100% meat (well, sea mammals) like the innuits do. Their GI systems have evolved to cope with this diet. Their livers are larger, as an example.
British people have adapted to eating a mixed diet. Actually most British people will do fine on the traditional 'meat and 2 veg diet', as long as we don't
eat too much of it.