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).

it's a bloody minefield minifingerz.

I am convinced that physical exercise helps though, He has left school now (being 19) and put on loads of weight again when he was living in London and existing on a diet of kebabs and coca cola.

Came back home, worked on a farm for a while, and off it came...

Different reasons for different children and adults.
I think sugar is the main culprit, I cant even stand sweetened yoghurts I think they are too sour. A child is not going to eat a plain unsweetened yoghurt when they can have a pudding or a mars bar.
If they are having decent healthy meals at home, then they will still buy junk when they are out with their mates.Teenagers go to places like Mcdonalds or Burger King etc. They dont all want to have a big salad.

Because a lot of british adults are fat and in denial about it

You see it all the time on here

‘Oh marilyn monroe was a size 16’

‘Bmi is nonsense, if you went on bmi olympic athletes would be classed as obese’

Etc

I don't think it's actually the meals they eat a lot of the time, it's the endless snacking. I grew up in the 70's on a "Bejam" diet of beefburgers and chips etc. so really not that much different and most of my friends were the same. However, what is different now is it seems to be the norm to have biscuits, cakes and sweets on demand for many. DDs friends are given money to buy brownies / doughnuts etc from the canteen as well as full lunches. A lot of kids seem to eat almost constantly, even toddlers in pushchairs. And also portions of cakes etc. are huge.

I actually only know of one heavily overweight child in DS year 9 year group ( state school) .They are few and far between round here. If anything the kids look a bit thin and lanky.
I do think it comes on a bit later say 15/16 as bad eating habits away from home set in. I would it's because my town doesn't have the same number of junk food places for the teens. We have a Mc Donald's but that's it and it's pretty far out of town.

Snacking seems to be an epidemic I had toddlers in the 90s and I can't remember carrying little pots of snacks. I helped out at a toddler group last year we provided a small snack parents seemed to be constantly in their bags feeding their Dc it was a 90 minute group

I live and teach in a 'naice' area. Children (including my own) are generally a healthy weight. I let my kids have treats etc (especially my DD who would eat nothing but crap if given the choice) but we walk quite a lot, go outside a bit, they have a couple of fairly active hobbies each.

Last year we went on holiday to your big standard British holiday park. Pretty much as soon as I got there I was shocked at the number of overweight kids there, ranging from just slightly noticeably overweight to out and out obese.

As the week went on it became clear why. These kids were eating not stop shite. As well as the chips, nuggets stuff, they were walking around constantly sucking on these frigging foot long slush puppy things, giant lollipops, giant marshmallow rope things, cans of coke. Just... All the time. I am not normally judgy about what kids eat, and my kids eat their fair share of crap, but this was just such another level I was pretty horrified.

I think the fundamental issue is that they eat too much.

I grew up in the 70s/80s and me and my peers generally had a crappy diet e.g. yogurts with a spoonful of sugar on the top, Findus crispy pancakes, penguin bars in our lunchboxes. But the difference was, the overall amount we ate (of anything) was really small. 3 quite small meals a day, that was it. We didn't eat out, we didn't go and buy stuff from the shop (other than a few pence worth of sweets). Food just didn't play a big part in the our lives at all.

Bog standard not big standard

Just asking. I know that there is shocking childhood obesity but is that just in the UK or is it in the rest of Europe?
Not just the UK, but certain countries have bucked the trend (eg, France).

Marketing junk food to kids so they can use pester power to decide what the family eats.
This is the worst excuse which is give. Parents control the purse and the grocery list - you’d have to be quite the wet fish to allow a young child to dictate your shopping. My children have strong views yet they have never pestered me to purchase any particular food item as I do most of my shopping on-line or when they are not around.

The Tories sold off all the school playing fields and swimming pools.
Would the presence of school playing fields and swimming pools really have made a dramatic impact of obesity levels? Going back to the example of France - they don’t have the childhood obesity problem we do here and they are not known for the numerous swimming pools and playing fields their schools have.

Lots of poor areas don't have shops that sell fresh food and even if they do then lots of people in poverty have inadequate cooking facilities and/or weren't raised to cook and eat fresh food.
Poverty is indeed an issue, but what percentage of people have inadequate cooking facilities and how does it match up to obesity rates in children - I think that the number of children who are obese and have inadequate cooking facilities is higher than the total number of obese children. Additionally, I am always bemused by reading about the lack of shops which sell fresh fruit and veg. An interesting programme was the Hugh F-W one where in the first programme he set up a fruit and veg shop in a poor neighbourhood thinking that the lack of such produce was the problem, only to be angrily confronted by a shop owner who reported that he did sell fresh fruit and veg, but had to decrease the amount he sold due to the lack of demand.

People don't understand health and nutrition. I saw someone on here say that orange juice was just as bad as coke because of sugar. That sounds ludicrous but some people genuinely have no clue
Orange juice is really just as bad of full sugar coke in terms of sugar load.

So basically - why do french supernarkets control what the people eat and british supermarkets give them free rein?
Childhood obesity in France is not an issue because it is tightly controlled. Mothers-to-be are chastised if they gain more than the prescribed weight allowed, and children are routinely weighed - in this country, it would be labelled as “fat-shaming” and people would protest. As it is, plenty of parents protest against the routine weighing of their children and come on this forum to protest that their child was wrongly labelled as overweight.

More to the point of the poster, snacking is not really accepted in France, and crisps definitely are not a thing there.

Sugar
This is the laziest of all excuses. Total sugar as a part of Western diets has been on the downward trend and obesity is still increasing. It is easy to pick sugar as the single demon, but it would be innaccurate.

Bejam diet

According to a report on European nutrition and activity by the World Health Organisation our kids nor our adults are the fattest in Europe although we don't fare that well either especially in Wales
http://www.euro.who.int/data/assets/pdff_file/0004/243337/Summary-document-53-MS-country-profile.pdf?ua=1
In the data it shows we do have poor levels of activity as a nation which clearly doesn't help

It's a global problem for the globally rich. I think I've noticed that Britain in particular has a lack of children playing outside. Also sports are usually once a week, in Brazil where we live my kids do Jui-Jitsu, swimming and football. All the classes are twice a week so the only day they do nothing is Sunday. In the UK I noticed activities are only once a week. That's not enough imo. In addition to their structured classes and PE at school they are outside far more than they were in the UK. But that's not to say Brazil doesn't have an obisity problem, it does.

my ds2 piled it on last few months and he is now on a diet and getting back into his fitness.

He was always fine at school, fairly active, but always been a picky eater and not burning it off at uni has resulted in him being bigger and eating too much junk rather than cooking - I am overhauling what i buy at the moment in order to help him and me, but its not easy as i still crave the bad stuff myself. we can but try and he wants to shed the pounds, but its hard to get off and so easy to put it on.

I wasnt able to monitor what he was eating and cooking of course, but a lot of this is his own fault too and he knows this.

we can educate and try to make people chose the right choices but we cant stop them eating the wrong foods.

We weren't given cakes and sweets unless it was a birthday, celebration, etc.

I remember my mum and my friends mums giving us kids bowls of chopped up apples etc to snack on while we played.

Could expecting 4 and 5 year olds to "sit nicely" in school be part of it?

In other countries 4 & 5 yos are still preschool so more time being physically active, maybe?

People would be more likely to trust 6 year olds to walk to school but have got into the habit of walking / driving them as we send them to school so young.

I also guess few parents do the school run then go home again many are going straight to work.

Out of town centralizing, shopping, industrial, living encourage car use.

Cheap low quality food.

According to WHO almost all European countries have a higher percentage of obese and overweight kids than England and Scotland (this includes France). So where are the ‘facts’ coming from? People need to learn how to research.

I've got an overweight dc with autism and a skinny dc without autism. Same parenting. I'm not overweight. DH is.
It's not about cooking skills, availability good ingredients, money, takeaways or sugary drinks in our case (except for DH who has a terrible chocolate habit that he hides).

" People would be more likely to trust 6 year olds to walk to school but have got into the habit of walking / driving them as we send them to school so young. "

if I as a parent, sent my 6 year old to walk to school with a friend, I would have social workers banging on my door.
And it has been like that for years.

It isn't just British kids. 17% of French kids aged 5-11 are obese, projected to rise. Italy has one of the highest rates of childhood obesity in the world. 18% of Spanish kids are overweight and 8% obese. In Europe, the US and Canada it's a serious issue and it's getting worse.

Easily accessible and cheap processed food, aggressive junk food marketing, hidden sugar etc etc. 50 years ago food saturated in addictive salt and sugar just wasn't as widely available or as cheap or marketed to children.

Add to that the fact that kids are much less active now due to lack of safe spaces to play, working parents who don't have time to do active things with them, more time spent in classrooms etc and it's just a recipe for disaster.

I grew up in the 70's, parents managed weren't rich.
Mum used to cook proper meals from scratch, there weren't shelves of multi packs, huge chocolate bars and big bags of sweets.
You had sweets as a treat, usually Saturday, they had to last Sunday too.
we played out from dawn till dusk, rode bikes a lot, and generally got lots of exercise.
we walked to school, no school run in cars.

I don't see many obese DC where I live either, only adults. In fact both of my DC are/ were chubby around age 7-10. I don't have a problem with this and in fact I think it is a good thing. I can't remember the last time either of my DC were sick with a cold or off school.

My youngest gets a bit of flack for being fat, but he's not. The others around him are skin and bone. My eldest was ribbed for being fat at this age and now at 12 years old he is tall, slim and very strong. He swims 4 miles a week and eats really healthily.

I think it is OK to be chubby as a child but not let this turn into obesity via junk consumption.

When I was a kid there were no huge supermarkets selling vast amounts of baked goods, made desserts (they came out packets unless you made them yourself), multipacks of confectionery and crisps.There were bakers, which would sell out of bread and cakes if you didn’t get there quickly enough.

...in fact when mine were 11 (year 6) I decided to let them take the little bus to school (no road crossing, 5-10 mins on the bus) and other children told them that this was 'illegal' and that their mother was 'not good'. Obviously this was the parents talking...

My parents bought most of their groceries from the local fruit and veg market and the butchers as our food was cooked from scratch at home.

Most of my shopping comes from the supermarket and consists of a fair amount of convenient processed food that my parents either couldn't afford or didn't need.