UPF, poverty, obesity.... children’s healthy eating - an impossible challenge?

[PaminaMozart]

This is truly frightening: Food Foundation says height of five-year-olds falling, child obesity up by a third and type 2 diabetes by a fifth

The average height of five-year-olds is falling, obesity levels have increased by almost a third and the number of young people being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes has risen by more than a fifth, the report by the Food Foundation said.

Aggressive marketing of cheap ultra-processed food, diets lacking essential nutrition and high levels of poverty and deprivation are driving the “significant decline” in children’s health, researchers found.

Obesity levels among 10 and 11-year-olds in England have increased by 30% since 2006, with one in five children already officially obese by the time they leave primary school, researchers found.
Cases of type 2 diabetes, which is linked to obesity, have risen by 22% among those aged under 25 in England and Wales in the last five years, the study added.

Babies born in the UK today will also enjoy a year less good health than babies born a decade ago, according to the report.
Baroness Anne Jenkin, a Conservative peer, said children’s health had “never been worse” but warned that almost no one was talking about it. “This is a timebomb waiting to explode if action isn’t taken.”
Gordon Brown, the former Labour prime minister, said: “When the height of five-year-olds has been falling since 2013, and we’re learning babies born today will enjoy a year less good health than babies born a decade ago, every mother and father in the land will be concerned and shocked at what is happening to children through lack of nutrition, living through the hungry 2020s in food bank Britain.”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/19/uk-children-shorter-fatter-and-sicker-amid-poor-diet-and-poverty-report-finds

Were they twinkies ? They're amazing

Didn't Jack Munroe live in a relatively affluent area of London where she had access to fresh and fruit veg stalls enabling her to buy only what she needed and nothing more?

The average single mum working full-time in a low-paid job won't have time to scour different markets/shops to source ingredients for one meal the way Jack did, and the average unemployed mum living in a deprived town won't have access to fruit and veg stalls/food markets where they can buy single tomatoes and a handful of sugar snap peas.

Is this a joke?

She also bought a £800k house whilst pleading proverty.

Twinkies were a huge let down when I tried them in the US. It tasted like really stale sponge cake.

Even Cadbury's Mini Rolls are better.

I didn't know that. I do remember reading some of her recipes which were costed by individual ingredients eg. 6 sugar snap pea pods, half a chicken breast etc. as opposed to the packets of things most people would have to buy to follow her recipes.

Yep, I never understood that.

Here's the story.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-11403551/Row-anti-poverty-campaigner-Jack-Monroe-detractors-flares-up.html

Exactly this. Why does everyone have to be told what to do and eat by the govt? Surely if you can't be a good parent and feed your child proper food you shouldn't be having children? My parents made sure we ate healthy food, treats were just that, treats and not frequent, we didn't drink soda, we didn't eat candy and as adults those habits are ingrained. I can count on one hand how many times I've had soda as an adult, I don't eat fast food and cook healthy meals, all of which were ingrained in me as a child. People seem to want to blame everyone but themselves despite most of this coming down to just bad parenting.

I don't think it's as simple as that. I grew up in home with a SAHM who cooked from scratch every night, with veggies, meat, chicken, lentils and rice. No chips, pasta or fish fingers even or any beige food. Everybody ate what was cooked, no exception, mum never did separate meals for anyone.

However, I still became addicted to junk food, because sugar is addictive.

It's only now in my 40s that I'm reversing all those years of sugar addiction with better food choices. I now also cook from scratch most nights and I'm able to resist sugar for the most part but I do fall off the wagon from time to time and the addiction starts again, albeit only for a week or so.

😂😂😂

Genuinely curious, not including sandwiches, what can you rustle up in 10 minutes?
I don’t want to go back to cooking like my mum (I am 66) where every meal was cooked from scratch. Labour intensive and time consuming. People in the 70s leapt on instant food like Angel Delight and Smash to ave themselves time and effort.

In the early days she did write some good columns for the Guardian and there are some useful recipes on her blog/cookbooks (I’ve used them myself).

Sadly - whether the fame went to her head or being poor became her “identity” and she couldn’t cope when she wasn’t anymore - the wheels seemed to come off. She seems a rather complicated person.

And I agree that the recipes are costed on the actual cost of a teaspoon of herbs or half a lettuce, when you can’t actually buy that amount. They often also seem rather small portions. I still rate her nut roast, cauliflower passanda, raspberry cake and salad leaf pesto.

what can you rustle up in 10 minutes?

Off the top of my head, boil some water, put a pan on to heat with a bit of oil in it and put pasta on to cook - 10 minutes. In the meantime, thinly slice some onion a fry. Slice some mushrooms and add. Slice some cooked chicken and stir in. Stir through some pesto then mix with the pasta.

Variations: onions, tinned tomatoes, sliced/crushed olives, garlic, herbs. Or garlic, onions, chicken and cream cheese and herbs.

I tend to allow 30 mins for a quick dinner, sometimes it can take less.

Last night we had terayaki salmon and egg fried rice.

10 mins in the oven for the salmon fillets, while that was cooking I fried spring onions and garlic. Added cooked rice (admittedly I cheated a bit as I cooked the rice in the morning) and frozen peas, then added two beaten eggs. 5 mins to stir fry some pak choi with garlic, soy sauce and chilli - dinner done.

I grew up in the 90/00s and an ultra processed diet was super normal. My Mum worked FT so was constantly knackered and as a result, our evening meals were usually things straight out of a packet or tin. We weren’t obese though because we still exercised a lot.

I think a primary issue is getting people to move around again. Kids don’t play outside enough, parents drive everywhere including to school even though it’s less than a mile away… We need to bring movement back into our culture.

As with most things in life, a bit of planning is useful.

I routinely fry onions + garlic in large quantities and freeze them, so that's a great time saver.

Stirfry:
In one pan, fry your protein - small pieces of chicken breast or salmon or prawns.
In another, large pan heat up the onion mix, then turn up the heat and add your veg.
Some, like carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, beans need par-boiling for 2-3 minutes.
Others, like peppers, asparagus, mange-tout, frozen peas (or other frozen veg) can be added as is.
Mix in the cooked protein.
Season with salt and pepper (+ some chillies if you like heat).
Or whisk up ginger, soy sauce, sesame oil, lemon juice to create a tasty sauce.
Or you could just add a can of tomatoes and some dried herbs (oregano, marjoram).
Add herbs (parsley fresh coriander, basil etc) to add extra yum factor.
Serve with rice noodles, Chinese egg noodles, other type of pasta, or rice.

Or alternatively a frittata, which is super quick and easy.

NB: Jamie Oliver has lots of 15 minute recipes.

UPF is unhealthy but the main reason people put on weight is because of calories in so it's portion size and frequency of eating.

Portion sizes - particularly of foods that are cheaper- have grown a lot. Plus carbonated drink sizes which have hundreds if not thousands of empty calories. I remember a trip to the theatre or cinema when young, if I was lucky I got a small portion of popcorn or a single ice cream. Now it's litres of fizzy drinks and bucket size portions of the popcorn or grab bags of sweets - no single portion sizes sold any more at most places.

Nb my salmon recipe can be made cheaper by using musbrooms instead of salmon or flaking through some smoked mackerel.

There are cheap meals you can make (excluding fuel costs), and there are quick meals but for the most part, they are one or the other.

Salmon and rice or chicken stirfry are not cheap and casserole or lentils are not quick to make (or low in fuel costs).

Not so I long ago I was panicking about money and food shopping (there's a thread somewhere if you care to AS) and I was shocked at how much my past "cheap and quick" staple meals had gone up by in cost. The price of minced beef in particular. I used to feed the dog mince if I ran out of dog food sometimes. Even the shitty, fatty frozen mince was relatively expensive last time I looked.

I'm a good cook with access to a fully stocked kitchen in terms of pans, soup makers, griddles, blenders, etc and I was struggling to find cheap meals we could all eat without resorting to frozen food.

The traditional northern staples my mum used to feed us were also prohibitively expensive. You'd need a mortgage to make bread and butter pudding or panacalty with the price of butter and corned beef the way they were.

As it turns out I wasn't as badly off as I thought so I've stopped paying attention to how much minced beef or a pack of butter is so maybe they've gone down in cost again? I do know I've struggled in the past financially but was still able to cook some meals but this time around I couldn't find much at all I would have been able to afford that was a frozen pizza or budget chicken nugget.

You can't mention Jack Monroe on MN! I think exercise might be a key factor in childhood obesity. Certainly we ate alot of ultra processed crap in the 90s and no one even worried about it or knew it was bad. It was still pretty rare to find overweight children although there were some. I know as an adult you can't outrun a bad diet blabla but I really think kids are made differently and just need loads of exercise. I'm am staggered at the levels of inactivity now. People drive to school from round the corner here. It's actually like America where they'll drive a few meters up the road. Then when the kids get home they spend their time gaming. I hardly ever hear kids playing outside in the gardens around us.

This attitude is why we have these problems.

They hold down wages (real terms wages are lower now than in 2008) imposes austerity, slash services for women and children.... encourage fast food outlets in every town and village, closes council run leisure centres... but its the parents fault.

How about the Tories start taking responsibility for their policies???

Reading Ultra Processed People at the moment and the current chapter suggests it’s the processing not the calories. Only on ch. 5 though.

Her recipes to use when broke are helpful, whatever else is true.

UPF is big big business, they employ highly skilled marketing teams who apply sophisticated techniques to literally manipulate us into buying their products. They're pitting the vast marketing and psychology resources of a global conglomerate against an individual citizen - I don't think its fair to say that individuals have a choice. UPF industry are experts in manipulating governments too. Thoroughly depressing.

I thought she had a bungalow in Southend?