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 Greek children are the fattest in Europe, because until relatively recently, the country was really poor. Therefore a chubby bouncing baby was seen as a good thing - as in, its parents could afford to feed it properly.
I have heard of Greek grannies (who often do the childcare) chasing the children around to force more food down them...

Walk around a town centre and count the number of take always ......

'Marilyn Monroe was a size 16...'

Yes, but that's a US size 16 (roughly a UK 12) and sizes were smaller back then anyway

Beyond, I believe you as this is what I also notice in my immediate circle. However, you must be living under a log if you have not read the statistics about childhood obesity or seen the telly programmes on it. Childhood obesity is directly lined to poverty and your stating that you have never seen it is just saying that you live in a privileged bubble. I understand, I live in one and my children an all of their friends are slim an active. They have the advantage of a parents who are educated to advanced degree level and who cook from scratch most meals. They get the swim camps abroad and weekend 2+ hour sport sessions, as well as schools which place an emphasis on sporting achievement.

This is not the experience of many children.

My kids went to secondary school in Holland and the difference between food culture there and the schools they'd left in the UK was quite remarkable. The Dutch (imo) see food as fuel, except for special occasions, so lunch is straightforward milk/sandwiches, breakfast pretty much the same, and dinner (at 18.30) meat or fish/potatoes/veg. No snacks, no sweets/choc in the checkout zone and everyone cycling to work. VERY rare to see an overweight teenage Dutch girl in central Amsterdam - unlike the South of England city I now live in where the crop top belly has been in full bloom this weekend!

Mominatrix Thanks for trying with all the info, I'm not sure why this topic is always so focussed on anecdote (not just in this thread, but everywhere) rather than evidence.

It's Sugar! - we eat much less sugar.
It's Coffees! - it's most prevalent where there are fewest coffee shops and incomes are smallest.

Of course the evidence of what is actually causing it is difficult (the obesity increase and bedroom temperature correlates a lot better than sugar consumption in the temperate UK and Northern Europe for example, but who knows if that's just because of money to heat caused the changes at the same time and it's something else entirely)

Agree Mom

There are no overweight children in my area. But this isn't representative of the whole country.

Also agree that it has become normalised in certain areas. I was recently in a northern town, in Asda, and I couldn’t help noticing that I was the thinnest person in there by about ten stone, and I wouldn’t say I am Meghan Markle level of svelteness!

My whole family is short, so I don’t notice that we’re short. Likewise if your family is all packing an extra pound or twenty, then it doesn’t strike you as abnormal.

Yeah that's a good point IrmaFayLear, everything in the fridge was for something. We probably snacked mostly on bread and butter, with fresh stuff like potato scones and scones at the weekend from the local baker. We did have quite a lot of biscuits in the house though and we did consume a lot of sugar - we even put it on our cereal!

Because of the housing crisis, lots of families live in cramped, small flats rather than houses with gardens (which have been hogged by one or two old people rattling around with 5 empty rooms). Then the Government wonder why children are hooked on video games, rather than playing outside and why there is an obesity epidemic in UK children.

Im in a scandinavian country and I think it starts very young. I thought the comments at the start of the thread were very telling about 'the weather being rubbish so kids can't play outside' appropriately dressed kids don't care if its raining or cold.

The poster who keeps saying that exercise hasnt been proven to reduce obesity, maybe not directly but can there be an argument for the fact that when my kids are outside playing then they are not snacking and they are nurturing a love for the outdoors and a love for exercise that will hopefully carry on into adulthood and encourage an all round healthier lifestyle?

I think portion control is a big one, at the kids barnehauge they all serve themselves at breakfast and lunch so can self regulate the amount they want to eat. I also agree with the poster who stated working ours and the presenteeism of the UK. I finish work at 16:00 sometimes earlier if I go flexi. This means we can be done eating by 5:30 all play outside as a family for an hour/hour and a half and still be in bed by 7. Not possible if your work culture labels you as a slacker for finishing at a reasonable time.

Then there is the food itself and what is culturally the norm to eat, processed foods are hard to find and very expensive here and tbh my colleagues would ridicule me if I turned up with it for lunch and my kids nursery teacher would pull me to one side and tell me it was not acceptable.

I'm not saying where I live is perfect, there are obese kids here too and it is on the rise same as the rest of europe but it is defintely easier to be healthier here and to raise healthier kids then it is in the UK.

Children eat too much, and exercise too little, and I don't think it is necessarily to do with poverty.

When I was a kid, hardly anyone was overweight. From memory, I think at primary school there was one overweight kid in my class, all the rest of us were like string beans. All the families I knew then were on a strict budget and a limited amount of food was available. Hardly any snacks. You had your 3 meals a day and that was that. If you were lucky you'd get a rich tea biscuit and some weak squash for elevenses and maybe an apple after school.
Unless the weather was appalling we played outside all the time, and everyone walked to and from school.

Agree that European countries are hot on our tail. In Italy children and young people are getting porkier: lack of movement and increased snacking.

This is something I find most disturbing as Italy has one of the lowest rates of adult obesity in Europe. I cannot help but think their is a link with austerity and its resultant impacts on family dynamics as having a role. Also look at the obesity rates in Greece and this pattern is echoed.

There's a bizarre culture of indulging and treating children at all times. As if it's abuse or neglect to not feed them sweets.

I'm from continental Europe and the food given to children there is deliberately super healthy, vegetable soup before every meal, no sweets, no deserts. Here is the opposite... children's food is the most unhealthy- pizza, chicken nuggets, chips
It's very strange.

I hear parents say "my fussy child will only eat pizza, chicken nuggets and fish fingers. There's nothing I can do unless I let them go hungry" How is that possible?? Surely you'd have to mostly feed them that in order for them not to eat anything else???

A friend of ds's was skinny and now is visibly overweight. He's 8 so the classic example of turning overweight during primary school. Dad is a scientist and mum is a consultant. She sometimes comes over for coffee and I usually don't have biscuits to offer because I don't want my dc eating them, she says she's the same, she never buys them. And yet her ds drinks apple juice with every meal, has packed lunch every day with crisps, 2 different sweet treats and not a vegetable in sight, goes to the sweet shop for treats ay least once a week. The other day he came over to play and brought a bag full of marshmallows.... It's mind boggling..
.I don't understand why you know better and still wouldn't stop feeding your child like that? Why is everyone so afraid of stopping the constant treating and indulgence culture?

No exercise. Its as simple as that. Twenty years ago the park, sports pitches and woodlands would be full of children running around. You go to the park these day, except for toddler and reception aged kids with their parents, you rarely see any children out and about anymore.

I do laugh at the Marilyn Monroe line- her measurements were 35-22-35. A 22-inch waist isn't even a UK size 4 in today's world. 35-inch hips would be a size 8 in most stores. Apparently, when one of her outfits was auctions a few years ago they have it on a UK size 6 mannequin and couldn't zip it up because the mannequin was too big.

I really don't think it's all down to food. It's the increase of technology and screens instead of actually going out. I always say how sad it is to see empty playing fields in the school holidays. 10-15 years ago they would be full at this time of year.

Previous generations used to eat lard and spam so you can't just blame modern food.

I think it's just a combination of things which together create an extremely obesogenic environment which an increasing number of people are unable to resist. I was born early 70's. Since I was born these things have changed

• shops open every day. Used to close Saturday lunchtime till Monday morning and nothing open round where I lived after 5pm so if you wanted some out of hours chocolate, tough.
• if you wanted a takeaway you had to go get it and there wasn't much choice.Chinese or Indian.
• Food just got nicer. Baguettes didn't appear in instore bakeries till I was about 8. Cheese was predominantly cheddar. OJ was frozen and you mixed it with water. Lots of meals based on meat, boiled potatoes and 2 veg. Don't think I even had pasta till I was 10
• Food got cheaper relative to wages so people eat out more and have more "treat" food. Growing up, we maybe ate out twice a year (and we weren't poor. I just wasn't a thing. My dc probably eat 3-4 meals a week in a restaurant/cafe.

So now you have a lot more highly palatable food that is very affordable and available 24/7 in a lot of places.

It was only a few years ago it was reported that young girls ( mostly) had eating disorders and anorexia was on the increase.
Seems to be going the other way.

I'm not sure Britain has ever had much of a cooking cultural. If you look back to Victorian times and the industrial revolution people were crammed in to allfull housing with a family in one room and no cooking facilities so they bought food from street sellers. Meanwhile my family who were rural poor were eating raw turnips for lunch as they harvested them I think we haven't so much lost cooking skills as the poor never having them.
I think that now many people look to TV and Internet for how to cook and a lot of that is expensive and over complicated.
It's actually cheaper to cook from scratch if you cook basics like potatoes and carrot, onions and a bit of mince but we are being fooled into thinking that fresh food needs to be expensive imported fruit and vegetables.

How can we bring around a culture change? Diabetes already takes up a third of the NHS budget, it's really scary to think that the next generation might be even more unhealthy.

Well, my experience is of (affluent) northern Italy. Kids don’t seem to walk a millimetre any more and parents work more so rather than having big home-cooked mama-made lunches they are stuffing in pizza slices and grazing Brit-style.

It's Coffees! - it's most prevalent where there are fewest coffee shops and incomes are smallest.

That wasn't what I said- it is the idea that having a coffee is a treat/luxury. We see food on the go as a reward rather than a necessity. Coffee shops typify our changes attitude to food.

Kids are getting fatter here in France too. When I moved here 16 years ago I rarely saw overweight children but now there are more and more chubby kids, from primary to lycée age. In the same way you never used to see many crisps or processed food, now there are shelves of crisps available like in the UK. The saving grace is that meal times are still respected - I'm always shocked when I go to the UK and see all the food shops which are open all day and people eating all the time. Also families still eat together, at least in the evening, no snacking in bedrooms.