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.

Actually my children's primary school serves chicken burgers also hot dogs.

In fact hot dogs are a particular favourite. Other days it's a cheese sandwich and a small jelly. Sometimes they have the halal chicken curry.

The portion sizes are tinythough. There's no way school dinners at this school will make any child fat.

Compare it to packed lunches... Omg the children get huge boxes of pasta, muffins, slabs of cake, crisps, smoothies.

chrome plenty of people do exactly that (eat food they don't need, or partularly want). It doesn't have to be a lot of extra calories, it can just be about 100 calories a day extra, over time.
How many people weigh out pasta or cereal, eg? I think a lot of people would get a shock to realise just how little a recommended portion actually is. How many people snack without even realising it? How many people are actually hungry when they eat? Probably not that many.
It's a little bit more complex than just putting it down to willpower of course but many people are unable to naturally regulate their intake without having to think about it.

Who would give their child a whole baked potato? Isn't that an adult portion?

In the 50s and 60s, children were fed half portions until they were the same size as adults, whenever that happened. Children's plates were used, or a tea plate - which was much smaller than a dinner plate.

No snacks at all, except for school milk (no biscuits) and in our case, a cup of cocoa mid-morning as under-5s at home.

No-one used a mug. Cups only, so even drinks were smaller. Toast was a breakfast treat, with the boiled egg.

On Friday, we were given a bar of chocolate - the smallest size (ie tiny). And our Friday evening routine in summer was a walk, with the chocolate handed out half way around. The walk took two hours. We did a similar walk on Sundays and we played outdoors constantly unless there was torrential rain. This changed a bit as we approached our teens but we were used to exercise I suppose, and by then we would be cycling on our own, or playing tennis and so on. You didn't hang around indoors or an adult would "find you something to do", which meant extra chores!

There's no mystery to the so-called obesity epidemic. We eat more than we need, we serve children adult portions, and we eat the wrong stuff. All this "kids need carbs" would be fine, if the kids involved were also eating protein and running around constantly. If they're spending hours on the sofa, watching screens, they need very little.

I am amazed when adults say their children get plenty of exercise and then cite an hour's swimming, a gentle bike ride, an hour's gymnastics or whatever...once a week! That is nothing.

I disagree Fatlazymummy, you know how much you need to eat by how hungry you are. Once you've had enough you stop. That's how it works, right? Blaming obesity on there being too much food available doesn't make sense, we still eat the same amount as we need.

Baked potatoes come in different sizes. They make a good meal if they don't have any butter and not too many beans.

I also do baked butternut squash filled with Borlotti beans, onions and herbs as an alternative.

I am like chrome, but I think your eating and lifestyle is engrained in you so hard to change.

It is hard to understand the other position sometimes. I often think how can people be overweight with children as you never get to sit still, but I realise it is often more complicated than that.

I'm just going to add (seeing as several posters seem to think this meal is all carbs) that baked beans are a good source of protein.1 small can contains 11.2 gs of protein, over a 5th of an adult woman's requirement. I expect the hot dogs also contain protein as well, though proper sausages would probably be a better choice.
Actually beans on toast is a pretty good meal as far as protein goes, since bread is also a good source of protein. It would probably be better to replace the potato with a couple of slices of toast. Beans on toast is one of the meals I grew up on (very healthily, no obesity in our family when I was growing up), as I'm sure many other poorer families did.
So no, I wouldn't describe this meal as 'pure crap' as the OP did.

chrome current research indicates that many people don't. It's all to do with genetics.

The portion sizes are tinythough
YY at ds(5)'s school they offer extra bread with the dessert (a plum) as some of the kids were still hungry...
DS has hollow legs I think so not worried about his portion control (yes, you can see his ribs in his swimming trunks & he does eat a couple of bites from a chocolate bar & then hand me the rest as he doesn't want it all of course I wolf it down))

What I put in my son's school lunchbox isn't reflective of what he eats at home for lunch. At school he wants to eat his food quickly and go out to play so we put things in that we know he will eat which tend to be a bit more processed. I want to make sure he's eating something and I am careful with the potion sizes.

At home we have wraps/pitta, salami, cheese, veg sticks and hummus or soup.

We are programmed to eat rich foods and as much as possible when it is available. This is how we have evolved.

Food is EVERYWHERE and has become some sort of nationwide fetish. You have people gorging an chips, crisps and takeaways or cramming in huge bowls of pasta, glugging olive oil and wine, cooking huge joints of meat. And no exercise.

Mil grew up poor and skinny as a rake. She ate huge slices of buttered bread and chips, fried sausage. But never ate sweets because there was no sweet shop on their estate and no money anyway. Played all day in the streets. She was always a bit hungry. But that was normal.

Children are sedentary and do not recognise hunger. Parents from all classes seem to provide a constant stream of snacks, juice, elaborate meals etc

My kids eat chips, they eat home cooked bog- standard family meals -mince one of five ways or curry - have school lunches and an apple.

They are not fat.
It's Just Food. Everything else is marketing.

chrome100 you are 100% wrong.

How does your brain know to tell you to stop eating when you have consumed exactly the required number of calories to cover your calorie expenditure?

It doesn't. It is an imprecise mechanism based on the interaction of many complex signalling pathways.

For some people they stop feeling hungry before they have met their expenditure. These people will tend to the underweight as they naturally don't eat when not hungry. They struggle to maintain body weight.

For others they continue to be told they are hungry even when they have already met their expenditure. These people will tend to be overweight as they naturally continue to eat until they feel full. The struggle to maintain a reasonable body weight.

Your diet can effect this too (obviously) so people in the first category may find it useful to eat things where you can cram in the calories quickly before the brain cuts in.

Similarly people in the second category would do well to eat low density calories so they can fool their brains that way.

But fundamentally we are not all faced with the same challenge. And simply responding to your hunger cues will leave some people obese, and some people overly underweight.

In my local town the biggest queue is shakeaway with teenagers the biggest buyers. 700 calories of liquidised crap and not even a meal or a snack. I may of been fed some rubbish as a child but I very much doubt I went over 700 calories in a meal never-mind a snack.

YY lazy mummy. Googling the protein content of beans, potato, hot dog sausage & corn suggests there's around 30grams of protein in that meal - which is the whole daily amount required by a 10 year old child.

But of course it's all sugar....

People today are like cows, constantly chewing. Does anyone recognise hunger anymore and why are they so fearful of it. I think school lunches are the least of our worries; it's the constant need to eat that's the problem.

The other thing is knowing to stop eating when you're full. My DC will turn down dessert if they've had enough already, and I've never fretted about how much they eat. I make the food and they can choose to eat it or not, I don't nag or bribe but I won't provide something else later if they don't eat. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, but they're not going to waste away because they've skipped one meal. (Appreciate there are children with SN that have massive issues around food but most don't fall into that category).

IT is very important to only eat when hungry, and to let children develop their own ability to do this.

It isn't the end of the story though, I tried a month of strictly eating low calorie density food only when I definitely felt hungry and put on about 1lb a week.

Turns out my brain isn't good at recognising when I have consumed enough calories. There is some hormone currently implicated in this problem...can;t currently remember its name..griz something. AH! Grehlin

I agree with the pp who said that people's attitude towards you if you try to stick to healthy foods and snacks is almost like you're odd.
Whenever people find out that I never buy coco pops or sugary cereal, they talk to me like I'm over the top and there's nothing wrong with it.
The same when I say I hardly ever buy juice, biscuits and definitely don't buy cake (we bake at home).
I think those are the main culprits so I avoid them as much as possible.
I hate the thought if starting the day off overloaded with sugar.

I'm not saying we re super healthy because we re not. My kids love chips, crisps and sweets but I try not to buy them regularly.

With regards to some people believing their brains don't tell them when they're full...

How do they know this? Is it not more likely to be that they've stretched their stomachs over the years by snacking/large portion sizes, that now their stomachs are much harder to fill?

Unless I'm mistaken, I thought our stomachs were roughly the sizes of our fists. So it makes sense that if they stretch, they'll need more food to trigger the full up feeling.

worra because the research exists to prove it. Some people secrete more of the hormones that trigger hunger than others.

Why wouldn't that be the case? We aren't all biologically identical?

So they eat until they get sick and eat again? Or they're constantly hungry?

I don't understand how they can afford to live?

Or is there hormone balance treatment for it?

Have you really never known someone who finds it hard to maintain their body weight because they feel full too quickly and actually have to force food into themselves?

I knew someone like this in my last job. He drank a lot of sugary drinks because they didn't trigger nausea in the same way as eating when his brain was telling him he was full.

biology isn't perfect.

worra you only have to be out by 5% on your calorie intake and over a year you will be obese.

An extra biscuits worth per day accumulated over years will leave you spherical.

It doesn't have to be dramatically misaligned to cause obesity.

The research says that if you look at people who are the same size and eat the same diet/portions etc. then the ones who have a higher tendency to gain weight are the ones that feel more hungry more often and those people have higher levels of hunger hormones.

It isn't particularly surprising tbh.

worra you only have to be out by 5% on your calorie intake and over a year you will be obese

Not if they take enough exercise, surely?

I get that there will be some people with this hormone imbalance, but surely not enough of them to add significantly to the obesity statistics?

This imbalance must have existed in the past, before the obesity epidemic. Perhaps at a time when the majority of people ate less and 2 car families were the exception.