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).

Back in the 80s when I was a kid we were hardly eating haute cuisine and yet so few kids were fat. We had chips cooked in lard(!) fish fingers beef burgers the works, buying crisps and chocolate at the tuck shop, yet.. not obese. So I reckon it's to do with activity and not food.

busybarbara
So I reckon it's to do with activity and not food.
Nope.
As back in the 80's

• there was almost no snacking
• portions were much smaller
• restaurants, pubs and cafes were not open all day
• eating in the street was socially unacceptable
• kids did not snack on the way to and from school
• the amount of borrowing was much lower so people at what they could afford
• food was MUCH more expensive

I still have my account books from then ... relative to earnings, food has halved in price in the last 20 years

So basically eating however you like is fine as long as you only restrict it to mealtimes with no snacking. To be fair that makes sense. I certainly never remembering snacking on the way to/from school because we didn't have anything that would be viable.

busybarbara - I said similar earlier in the thread. We didn't necessarily eat a better diet, but we just ate a lot less and less often.

Yes in the 80's the idea of picking up kids from school with a snack for them, would have been very unusual. But some parents now see this as a necessity.
Basically kids used to normally have 3 meals a day and a snack at one of the play times.And it was normal for a packed lunch to be a sandwich and bag of crisps. Many parents on MN now seem to see that as too little food.

Online there are lots of complaints about the small size of Pizza Express pizzas. They have not changed the size, but most places have increased their portion sizes.

busybarbara
If you look at the wine glasses that we used to get with Green Shield Stamps at the petrol station, they were TINY
you got ten glasses out of a bottle of wine
now a standard pub portion is 250 ml = 1/3 bottle [wow]

ditto plates - the standard plate was 11 inches across and you never served food on the sloping part (that was greedy bad manners)

now they are 15 inches across and people pile them high

Agree with that, I ate a lot of crap when I was a kid but it really was breakfast, dinner and tea with a biscuit for supper. We had a pudding after tea most nights too but it was something small and eaten right after the meal. I was out all day everyday though and no snacking in between those meals. Things like a trip to KFC or a meal out weren't the norm, they were for birthdays or something around 3 times a year.

With exercise I think it helps too that if a child is busy actually doing stuff they've less inclination to snack. I know when I'm kept busy all day I eat a lot less

Related to 'going outside to play'; I wonder whether the rise of effective central heating in houses ha s contributed to people's perceptions of cold weather and the likelihood they would still send kids out to play/want to take them to the park etc. Especially when entertainment available within people's homes is so diverse and easy to access.

As a teenager I had my nose permanently in a book.
I was an expert at avoiding PE
I never enjoyed running around
BUT
WE ATE LESS FOOD BACK THEN
how hard is that to grasp ?

I think that for the vast majority of human history food has been scarce, the gene that says "eat now as the food might not be there tomorrow" is strong. Now obviously for many of us in the western world food is plentiful, and takes us less calories to get it to the plate than ever before.

)))))) Slimming Clubs ((((((((
They want you to keep failing and keep coming and buying their products.
If they actually worked they would have gone bust years ago

We had a Weight watchers at work but it didn’t last because most people just wanted to weigh and go rather than listen to any spiel.

I think there is a huge class divide here.

For a time in my life, I worked a few days a week in a supermarket.

The retail work was fine.

But overall, amongst the workers there was a mindset that obesity and low aspirations in other areas of life was the norm?

It was “crab mentality” - I was just keeping my head down and working there to save money, but I was socially picked on for being “different” becayse I’m slimmish and tend to stay that way.

apparently not being obese (and getting pregnant early on with three kids from a minimum wager husband) is striving too high in life and should be mocked

Early pregnancy with guys who didn’t stuck around or pull their financial weight tended to be the social norm there.

If I said I spent my weekend running/studying/doing anything that wasn’t watching TV or “out with the girls” or with family it was weird/showing off/proved I was lonely/slutty/eccentric and didn’t have any friends.

I can see how for any girl/young woman growing up in that environment associating with those kind of people, obesity is pretty much the only option as otherwise she’d be socially ostracised.

It's entirely possible to do very little physical activity and still be slim. People eat an enormous amount, these days - eat out more, eat bigger portions, buy drinks out more, snack more. When my dss have friends round, the fat ones are constantly telling me how hungry they are and asking if I have anything to eat. It's really noticeable as a family that doesn't snack much how other families can't seem to go anywhere or do anything without bringing snacks along with them. I also clearly remember the first time I ever visited the US how overwhelmed I was by the ridiculously oversized meals served in restaurants and how impossible it was to eat everything provided. I don't notice this any more - the UK just upsized all its restaurant meals to catch up. With that, plus alcohol in adult diets, it's not surprising there are so many obese people around. Lack of exercise is just making all this so much more unhealthy, with the damage being done also going on internally, but the evidence on the outside is in large part from eating too much, particularly too much food dense in calories. Snacks these days are also comparatively huge - fun sized chocolate bars, for example, are OK, but everything else is pretty obscene. And if you are sitting around more, you're thinking about food more - if you're actually busy doing something away from foods and food adverts, you don't tend to have the thought of food popping into your mind quite so often (unless you're one of those people who takes food bloody everywhere with them, just in case...).

now a standard pub portion is 250 ml = 1/3 bottle [wow]

That’s a large glass, standard is 175ml and small is 125ml.

We don't have a car... we walk or cycle. My DS is skin and bone, but I'm not!

That's really depressing CupofReskh

I took my kids to a trampoline park this afternoon and after reading this thread I wasn't surprised to see loads of kids slurping down lurid 'slushees', having bounced for a bit. DS2 then wanted one. He got water

The kids are fat because the parents are fat! I’ve bad food habits so my kids have learned what they live.... we’re not obese but all could lose a stone or 2! Those parents who are obese often have obese kids. It’s a combination of lack of respect for good food and shit weather!

seren
The fact that the 250 ml glass is shown on all menus
example here www.carluccios.com/menus/main-menu#drinks
when even the 125 ml is half again as big as a "green shield" glass
says it all

Well I didn't eat sweets or chocolate til I was over a year old...the reason being my parents moved back to London and as they worked I was largely cared for by my Italian grandmother when little. Who was traumatised by the lack of food she experienced in WW2 in northern Italy. She constantly fed us, as she had done with my older cousins. They all had issues with food. It was until I was about 21 that I realised you didn't have to eat the mounds of food given to you lol. I went to parenting classes when my son was a baby because I had no idea what a sensible portion for a child was 😆
I would say the same of friends whose families are Turkish/ Mediterranean. Kids are constantly fed. It's not just Britain. Although it doesn't help that our food is industrially produced with things like palm oil added to everything to keep costs down.

You only need to read some of the "hungry teenager" type threads to see how skewed some people's concept of eating is.

There was one a few weeks ago. The amount of money that posters were spending on snacks for teenage boys was astronomical. Some idiot wittered on about how her sons would have a WHOLE 99p pizza as a snack. You know. Those plain cheap ones you get from Iceland or whatever. As a regular snack. Ffs. And there were plenty who agreed with her. Posters who complain that their teenager has just eaten half a fresh loaf and the dinner ingredients are "cruel" "controlling". Starving their children. There's very much a mindset that teenagers need to eat like absolute hogs, and that children in general should never be made to wait for food lest they feel hungry

Of course teens want to eat like a horse. Of course they are unfillable. I most certainly was anyway - I was very active and always staring. But I didn't hog all the food in the house or eat entire pizzas as a light snack, because that's fucking mad, and anyway my stomach just would have expanded to want more pizza. And what happens when the teen years are over and you're left with adults with slower metabolisms who feel that it's OK to eat half the fridge?

It’s the parents. They feed their kids rubbish and buy everything in a packet. It starts from sheer laziness when some wean their kids on the entire Ella’s range. And too many trends. Dont give your kids cows milk / gluten free and the list goes on. Parents fret too much over the quantity of food instead of the quality. If little Johnny isn’t eating his whatever, they loose their sh*t and write endless threads. It’s really not that difficult to feed your kid a proper meal. Total rant this is...but been standing at Euston for the last 1.5 hours! But it comes down to the parents not educating themselves on what to feed their kids and taking responsibility, they allow companies to dictate what to feed their kids.

It is normal to feel hungry before you eat a meal. I mean properly hungry

I blame the huge selection of cheap processed food, filled with hidden fats, sugar and salt, the cost of eating "healthy" (see the other thread where OP spent £260 per week on super foods) and also ignorance of how to cook proper food from scratch.

We are the biggest consumers of cereal per capita in the world. this alone could account for it as cereal and childrens cereal in particular is horrendous processed crap. start the day with that and you are starting with a massive sugar load and begin cravings from the get go. snacking follows as a result of the insulin crash which will then cause another spike in blood sugar followed by another crash.

You may as well give your children ice cream!! The nutrition is startlingly similar and icecream at least has good dairy fat and calcium!!

Post war, we were persuaded by the food manufacturers that we couldn't cook and we were sold processed, less nutritious and more harmful food instead. Hence many families don't know how to cook and we have an obesity crisis. Fast food has made a bad situation worse. And yes, fizzy drinks and confectionery just feeds our sugar and carb addiction.