Why are British kids fat?

[VogueVVague]

So time, two parents working, low budget/cost - all these things can result in ready meals being served up etc. but that still doesnt explain why, compared to the rest of Europe, our kids are the fattest.

So whats the reason?

Is it political?
Cultural?

Something must have changed for us and mot the rest of Europe in the past 50 years (doubt kids before 1960 were chunky).

I think we eat too much wheat too. Bread is pretty crap and people can spend their whole day eating wheat. Pasta, pizza, biscuits, sandwiches, wraps, cakes, fish and chicken with bread crumb coating.
It’s nutritionally poor and leads to weight gain.

"For the parents of secondary age children the answer is to stop giving them cash and make them take in sandwiches/ packed lunch. They obviously can’t be trusted to make sensible choices so as a parent you have to step in."

So overweight teens aren't allowed any independent spending power at all?

What about skinny teens? I've got a skinny 14 year old (who buys shite with his pocket money when he's out with friends but doesn't get fat).

At what age do you stop trying to control your teenagers eating and spending?

I'm not a total bore with food but I wouldn't say I'm a foodie either , I very rarely snack and dc snack is fruit and the odd biscuit but mainly just stick to mealtimes to eat . Of course an ice cream on a day out or if we go for a meal then I'm not going to say no to a pizza etc because it's not something we do all the time but I don't understand this constant need to be eating !

Cinema gets me , 10.30 early showing of kids films - families piled high with expensive cinema food . The film is like 1.5 hours long ?!? And between two meals !

What I don't understand aswell is why school meals seem to be such rubbish food and always followed by a pudding ? Didn't this all get revamped a few years back due to Jamie Oliver ?

Well its not really rocket science in that parents are not cooking from scratch anymore and we are all eating more rubbish. I am certainly guilty of the odd oven chips and fish fingers tea but I do try.

Do you give your child sugary cereal or a better alternative such as porridge or weetabix
When your child is hungry what do you offer them - a banana, apple, berries, carrot sticks, homemade brown bread or a sugary yoghurt, white bread, biscuit, processed cheese?

Do you cook from scratch 5 nights a week. Are at least 3 of these 'old fashioned dinners' - protein, lots of veg and potatoes/good carb.

Is your child allowed go to the sweet shop more than once a week - if so thats just too much.

It is about making choices - some of them hard - and realising that responsible parenting is hard work so beside working you also need to get a good meal on the table. Monday to Thursday I tend to serve up batch cooked meals - pasta with veg and chicken sauce, bean chilli, meatballs and mash, beef or chicken stew etc
I am not saying its easy but its prioritised in our home

Shops and supermarkets have a big part to play in this. Every shop you walk into in the UK is wall to wall junk food with lots on special offer. As soon as you enter the store you are hit with it and it is piled up at the end of every aisle and also at the till to further tempt you.

IMO special offers and discounting of processed foods, sweets and fizzy drinks should be banned including the excessive instore displays. Crap food is too cheap, too tempting and too available.

I also think that they should ban the sale of junk food and snacks at all secondary schools.

Feckitall yes, I think we do need to make obesity prohibitive in some way. I do know though that berating someone about being fat is not the way to do it though, instead we need to tackle food companies and make them stop selling rubbish.

The body positive campaigns are doing untold damage in my opinion. Remember the uproar when Cancer Research had a campaign saying obesity is the second biggest cause of cancer?

So when I was a kid- primary and secondary school- exercise was a daily part of our curriculum. I grew up in California, finishing high school in 1990. Every single day we had PE and the majority of us (in high school) took part in an extra-curricular/after school sport as well (track and field, swimming, football, or tennis). I can't remember how many times a week it was. My school had huge grounds- still does- which accommodated all sorts of sports. But you don't need huge grounds to offer exercise to kids on a daily basis and that is what they need.
Daily exercise- this meant PE for 1 hour- was just part of the routine and in a great climate (this is huge. A good climate really helps you want to look and feel great. It's a great incentive!).

PE should happen EVERY day in school for every child in primary and secondary school.

Although rising, the UK has one of the lowest rates of diabetes in Europe

www.diabetes.co.uk/blog/2015/08/which-country-highest-diabetes-europe/

Culture of snacking rather than ever feeling hungry. Popping into a shop rather than waiting to get home.

Culture of treats always being sugary food (rather than something else like stickers).

Culture of sweets/choc being given everywhere - party bags, end of term at school, end of term at activities, "reward" for doing well, tombola prize...

Culture of pudding after meals - why oh why do schools do this.

Culture of worshipping cake and baking (see Bake Off, bake sales, Instagram, Pinterest etc) rather than other forms of cooking.

Culture of spending a smaller % of our incomes on food (and probably a higher % on housing)

Minimal school sports. Lots of good (private, therefore eye wateringly expensive) schools concentrate on academics in the morning and team or individual sports most afternoons. State schools now offer decreasing levels of sport for children, having sold off their playing fields.
Lack of basic cookery skills. When I was at school, cookery classes were weekly and mandatory, where we learned to produce basic home cooked meals.
Today's culture of internet related activities, plus an awareness of the perceived dangers of letting children out to play on their own.
An abundance of take away meals and restaurants, where much of the food is laden with fat and salt.
A society where in most cases, both parents need to work to have a decent standard of living, and therefore little time to prepare home cooked meals.
Having said that, I believe there is much interest now in getting children to eat more healthily, and many schools are now adding healthier options for school meals and insisting on healthy snacks.

Because we have been fed the line that high fat makes us fat

We all went low fat

The food manufacturers filled that all with sugar / refined carbs because take the fat out of something and it tastes like shit

High fat foods don’t make us fat. They make us full.

High carbs don’t fill us and make us crave more and more

Our carb intake has risen rapidly since the 70s and hey presto so has obesity

www.dietdoctor.com/the-hidden-truth-behind-ancel-keys-famous-fat-graph

*Because parents are scared to let their children feel even a bit “hungry”

Exactly this. And if you don’t give them snacks every two hours they actually eat their real food.*

This a million times over. My children are not denied cake or crisps or biscuits but we don't eat them on a regular basis or snack between meals except for the occasional bit of fruit if a meal is going to be later than normal or something.

Lack of exercise. Some other countries kids still play out a lot. And the culture here of snacking. Children and adults should feel hungry before eating. But that is no longer the case for many people.

As a previous poster said my child also was listed as obese in reception and as obese in yr 6. She follows the 99.9 centile is 5ft 6 and size 8 feet. Both times we've taken her to the doctors to be told she's spot on height for weight.
Obviously there is an obesity crisis but not all children fit the measurement norms.

Hmmm, it seems to be a European, or developed country problem, not just the UK.

This EU summary shows that most European countries have had a rise in childhood obesity between 2001-2013, whereas the UK has risen much less, or even decreased.

content.worldobesity.org/site_media/filer_public/3c/c3/3cc3571c-0b70-4107-ae3f-a62d20c7db61/eu_summary_atlas_v2.pdf

The figures show how 13 and 15 year old boys and girls were, between 2001 and 2013, and in relation to the rest of Europe, and other countries.

I don't think the UK can be considered as having the fattest.

mooncup We were taught we should be eating more carbs for health. I am in my mid 50s and about 30 years ago remember trying to eat more carbs because we were taught that is healthier.

I’m in a diet now. I am 5’6” and 11 stone. People keep telling me that I am just right as I am and don’t need to lose weight.

This means nothing. What size are you? People always say others don't need to lose weight, it's politeness, you wouldn't say "thank God for that fatty, get dieting" would you?

Our carb intake has risen rapidly since the 70s and hey presto so has obesity

No, it hasn't, our carb intake of all sorts has declined since the 70s.

And even things like oven chips haven't increased in 20 years, they did increase before that, but at the expense of potatoes, not lettuce, lentils or lemons.

Maybe because of culture you need to have desert after meal?
We don't have desert everyday after dinner. Very very rarely with lunch.

Sorry but MN is full of people with food issues. I sometimes look on threads about weight loss and back out slowly..
I have a skinny active kid, I'm not remotely defensive about what I feed him (I'm a trained chef ) but honestly obsessing about portion sizes and squash feels really beside the point to me.
The fact is, there's a lot more to do indoors than there used to be (constant kids tv, Internet, gaming) and outdoors is a LOT more limited than it used to be.
It pisses me right off when people say things like parents are more neurotic about kids playing outside when 30 years ago we could play rounders in the middle of the road, but now there'll be a twat in a Range Rover pelting down the road at 40 miles an hour every 2 minutes.
In my town, where they have blocked off some of the streets to traffic/done proper traffic calming, the kids are all out playing again. On my estate there is little traffic-they are out there playing football right now.
We can't be all sneery about these "neurotic" parents and still bomb around everywhere in our cars. We need to mske some serious changes to the way we live, and to children's right to get about and play safely.

The Tories sold off all the school playing fields and swimming pools.

Much as I do love to slag off the Tories, this is not entirely true (they allowed some field sales, but "all" is untrue) and besides, kids need more daily exercise and not merely one double lesson of PE/games (half of which is spent listening to the teacher) per week, anyway.

It's junk food and snacks, high in sugar, carbs and fat, plus sugary drinks. A lot of kids have access to this sort of stuff all the time.

crunchymint

I know!
It’s dodgy dodgy reasoning why we’ve shifted to high carbs, based on crap research about cardiovascular disease

Our kids are addicted to carbs (sugar) and it’s not even their fault..their parents are too

Pizza. Pasta. Fries. Burgers. Sandwiches.

It is so hard to lose weight when you are doing it with a high carb diet. You will literally crave them like a drug. And your body produces insulin (hence the massive diabetes problem) to process the carb and with that fat cells do not get used for energy. And you get fat.

Have to break the habit like any other drug

It’s not the fat it’s the sugar

Do people really have puddings after every meal? I don't even have one when I go out for a meal, unless it's one of those tiny ones with coffee.