If you're poor and you have boys, read this.

[user1477282676]

www.theguardian.com/society/2016/oct/11/obesity-soar-boys-girls-poorer-homes-deprived-backgrounds-overweight-2020

I am sorry if that sounds offensive. But I am so, so angry about the state of things right now in terms of inequality in the UK (and the world!) and I have started another thread along the same lines...but this one is slightly different.

According to this article in the Guardian, obesity among boys from the most financially strapped families is going to be rising whilst obesity in wealthy children will fall.

How is this even a thing? We know what schools do in their attempts to "educate". They weigh, they police lunch boxes...but that doesn't fix anything it would seem!

I am so cross that children...and it would seem boys especially, are going to be suffering.

There definitely is a cultural influence and probably also a significant difference between poor boys of UK heritage and those whose parents or grandparents were born overseas. There certainly is with educational attainment.

DistanceCall. I suspect many of the poor UK boys the report refers to that are getting fat at the chicken shop would turn their noses up at most of that menu.

I bought a slow cooker for £7 from Asda. There are ways to eat well on very little money but you have to want to do it. And if you don't there is a huge choice of cheap and crappy food available on your doorstep.

How utterly fucking patronising.

I lived on benefits with my two dc for 7 years due to my disability. At one point I had £46 a week to feed us, clothe us and pay for bus fares for hospital appointments. With one child in nappies at that point it was extremely difficult to manage.

But I did and I didn't resort to feeding them crap. My children have always had healthy meals. I may have gone without but my children never did. I have always cooked from scratch and can make a cheap healthy meal as easily as I could buy chips for the same price.

This isn't about poverty. It's about education (or lack of), a perpetual cycle of families who cannot cook decent food and no one appears to be breaking it and to blame schools for it is unfair.

There needs to be more education in expectant mothers. Break the cycle early. Get mums who have older children to take them under their wing, teach them some cheap basic meals which are healthy and filling. Some people have no clue about cooking and wouldn't know where to start.

Apart from chatting on Mumsnet though, how do we ACTUALLY change this?

Like let's say I feel so passionately that every single school should provide 1 hour of physical activity every single day that I want to try to make it happen.

I don't mean vaguely encouraging young people to be more sporty like here, I mean making it a compulsory part of the national curriculum.

What do I do?

Obesity does not lead to Alzheimers. Perhaps early death is good now because it saves the councils having to find the funds.

There are many lovely homes up and down the country, independently run and costly, that house ill wealthy people.

I suspect many of the poor UK boys the report refers to that are getting fat at the chicken shop would turn their noses up at most of that menu.

Yep, that's the problem. Because it has very little to do with what they eat at home. Yet in Spain that is similar to what most children eat in their homes too.

We are poor and have two boys of school age, It can be hard as they want certain things their friends have. But there are ways around it. Just not having it in can help, it;s a change in attitude and making the best of what healthy foods you can get. Just having in bags of carrots (39p) and broccoli (49p) or frozen peas to add to sausages for example, for tea to fill them up without lots of carbs (even if they are cheap). Shopping habits can make all the difference. Mine love baked beans, potatoes and milk, so I get big things of these (try and get the low sugar beans). Eggs, too. It doesn't have to cost a lot. It does need preparation and organisation though.

I don;'t agree takeaways are a cheap option, they aren;t around here anyway. Fish and chips are lots round here, much cheaper to make your own.

One hour of physical activity a day sounds fascist imho and isn't inclusive. Shall we play God Save The Queen whilst they exercise?

Sports equipment is expensive.

It's not about education but about culture. Our culture educates us. I am 4th generation poor. I was never taken to a dentist as a child, even though it's free. My mother never went, her mother didn't take her and my grandmother received no healthcare either (pre dates NHS).

I managed to move away, to mix with different people, live in the same street as people who had jobs. My group of friends are similar to me, and I am to them, if that makes sense?

When town planners created sink estates they created ghettos of poverty in every sense imaginable. If there is no way physically of getting out then there's no way out of it. And if one family moves out, another moves in.

My brother did not escape, did not move away. By 18 he had a criminal record and drug dependency. His son is obese. My son is not. DB has had state sponsored healthy eating campaigns thrown at him without success. It's not education, its the culture of poverty.

Barbara

List was: flour, eggs, sugar, yeast, butter, raisins, cinnamon, salt, milk

so: plain white flour: 89p, raisins: £1.75, dried yeast: 89p, Swartz cinnamon: 1.75, table salt, 35p, fresh milk, 49p, caster sugar: 1.09, eggs: 99p, clover (cheaper than butter!) on offer: 99p

Total: £9.20

cinnamon was £1.75, raisins were £1.75

Why boys?

In some households boys will have priority over being fed first, so girls will be hungry.

Girls are expected to be thin, boys are expected to be big and strong.

Boys are more likely to be sat around gaming and less active.

Girls are more likely to smoke (I'm always reminded of John Reid's comments about smoking being a working class pleasure on threads like this)

Schools can not cure all of society's problems.

It seems that the problem is that when people try to change things or provide education it is either ignored or people are being accused of being patronising do gooders wanting to punish the poor by taking away their chips.

Look at the uproar when an MP said that she didn't she didn't understand why any family couldn't afford to give their child breakfast when porridge cost pennies to make.

It's always said that cooking classes etc at Sure Start centres totally miss their target audience and are either woefully undersubscribed or full of middle class parents who can already cook looking for new ideas.

Why is cooking with lentils and vegetables seen in the UK as a niche middle class hobby rather than the optimum way of feeding your family well on very little money?

One hour of physical activity a day sounds fascist imho and isn't inclusive. Shall we play God Save The Queen whilst they exercise?

Sports equipment is expensive.

Children should easily be getting 1h of exercise a day. 30 mins run around at lunch. 30 mins in the park on the way home from school.

Sorry, haven't read the full thread, but most of the evidence I have seen suggests that the reason poor people are fatter is because they are more likely to eat energy rich but nutrient poor foods.

You see, the problem with poor people is that they are, well, poor. They have less money than non-poor people to spend on food. Energy rich/nutrient poor is generally cheaper to buy, quicker to prepare (remember, most poor people work), easier to store and cheaper to cook.

Some poor people are bloody fantastic parents, and they manage to tease out their time and budget to produce lovely, cheap and nutritious meals for their DC. Other poor parents are a bit shit, and quite possibly feed their kids Tesco Value biscuits for supper. However, most poor parents sit somewhere in the middle.

Rich parents can also be fantastic, a bit shit, or somewhere in the middle. However, when rich parents are a bit shit, their kids are more likely to end up with half decent food.

It seems to me that a lot of time and money is poured into trying to make every poor parent a fantastic poor parent, since shit rich parents are less of a problem.

The real problem, of course, is that poor people are poor. But it's very important that no one actually says that...

Interesting American study

One hour of physical activity a day sounds fascist imho and isn't inclusive. Shall we play God Save The Queen whilst they exercise?

Are you quite serious? It's a completely established fact that children and adults alike need 1 hour of aerobic activity every day.

NHS - How Much Exercise Should My Child Do?

NHS Guidelines for physical activity in children

US guidelines on physical activity in children

World Health Organisation guidelines on physical activity for children

Are these all fascist organisations?

Children are at school all day, and for a large chunk of the year they are at school during all daylight hours. Extracurricular sports are expensive and can be impossible to arrange for working parents. It makes sense that it should happen at school.

It's not about inclusivity, it's about helping children (and adults) stay healthy. Or do you really think that schools should NOT offer physical activity because a small number might not be able to partake and could be offended?

icanteven Do you think that idea would really work, though? There have been several threads here with literally hundreds of posters saying that they hated school PE and it put them off exercise even after leaving school. Making it compulsory every day might make teenagers more active in the short-term (because they have to do it) but would it lead to healthier adults?

The problem of obesity isn't one that schools can solve. That's why the lunchbox policing and other tokenistic gestures haven't made much difference. If I were making a change to the curriculum, I'd include more nutrition as part of science lessons, but in a fact-based way. Not 'these foods are good/healthy and these are bad/unhealthy' but an explanation of protein, carbs, fat, sugars, etc. and how they affect the body. Neutrally presented, no moralising. People need the knowledge to make informed decisions about their own life and health, not to be told what to eat and when to exercise.

I agree it is possibly the gaming that makes a difference, boys are therefore more sedentary.

You aren't allowed to say it but I think laziness comes into it. Also lack of time, as mentioned above.
My DNephew seems to feed his dcs lots of processed food. But that is not what he was brought up on his DM was a v good cook.

Also we are bombarded with cookery programmes on tv, pretending you don't know what a healthy diet is can't really be an excuse these days.

"Or do you really think that schools should NOT offer physical activity because a small number might not be able to partake and could be offended?"

Very big difference between offering and mandating.

I don't know if anyone else has mentioned this but it's worth saying, if I send dc into school with a packed lunch it is policed and unhealthy things like chocolate bars and cakes would be removed and sent back home. We're told to pack healthy things for the kids. But having school dinners dc are given chips, pizza and cake for pudding. We were also told not to dish out sweeties on birthdays etc but so far I've had dc come out with loads of those little haribo bags and even a Krispy Kreme doughnut! No explanation given other than someone gave it to the school/class to hand out. I don't mind as it's rare but it also means dc think of these things as treats for good things. They started off the year as being the only children who would eat the free fruit but now dc won't even look at it because nobody else eats it so it's now seen as "weird" to be eating it and they don't want to be picked on!

Most cookery programmes sell a lifestyle choice. Recent one I saw was overweight Rick Stein travelling around Europe on long weekends. All very lovely, but hardly going to solve the obesity crisis.

Soooba you read my mind.

I kind of don't get this, aside from the school dinners thing - yes they are shit. But I think a lot of people are using poverty as a scapegoat for laziness and lack of education or motivation.

I am pretty poor, as in no money in the bank at the end of each month. We eat baked potatoes and tuna. Roasted vegetables with hot sauce dips as snacks. Slow cooked cheap cuts of meat with veggies. I batch cook big quantities of veggie bolognese and put them in the freezer. You can cook a huge casserole for 1/4 of the cost of a shitty take away. We cycle everywhere which costs nothing.

I disagree that being poor means you have to eat frozen crap from iceland. I think a lot of people like something to blame other than themselves.