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

@ThisNaiceLemonSloth

Yes you are sour in your name so no surprise

The people suffering are the children - they don't have responsibility they are too young, they need to be taught

Obviously if you suport private only health care and are super rich you won't mind the impact on the future NHS, other people suffering doesn't affect you somehow ( I see that as as sad lack of humanity )

You see the lack of understanding of what a UPF is on this thread though. Yes, it includes takeaways, McDonald's etc but also
Breakfast cereal
Lurpak / butter spreads
Bread (unless it's the sort that is stale the day after you buy it)
Marmite
Squash
Pretty much all shop bought yogurt
Shop bought pasta sauce
All the vegan plant based meat substitutes
Any ready meal (even posh Charlie Brigham's)

And so on. All stuff that must people would happily include as part of a healthy diet

So you'd just abandon these children to a short life of obesity and illness. Would you then take away their healthcare as when they turn 18 as it becomes their own fault even though they never had the right diet, education or health background?

Social, education, health and medical services are part of the government's remit, how many of these services are you happy to remove?

I disagree. 4.3 million children (30% of all UK children) were in poverty” in 2022/23, “up from 3.6 million in 2010/11”.

The definition of poverty used here is absolutely poverty, meaning they don’t have enough money to feed, cloth, house and keep children warm.

That’s 30% of children in the UK living in households who don’t have enough money to feed those children a health diet. It doesn’t matter how much education around food and healthy meals, if they haven’t got the money to buy nutrious food they can’t make it.

Exactly. Children should not have to suffer because their parents are making bad choices for them. We should hold parents responsible but we can't do that if we ignore the problem.

I think the first step in tackling this would be to make donations to political parties above a very low level, like £50 a month, and only by individuals, illegal. Brake the influence of big businesses on politics and make politicians actually work in the best interests of the people. Also, ban politicians for second high paid jobs on boards of these companies even after serving as MPs.

It's prohibitively expensive to cook from scratch with fully healthy ingredients. We try to do that for the obvious reasons mentioned in the title and the price of raw ingredients, especially organic meat and produce, add up to eating out in a restaurant. We're only 3 people and an average meal at home costs £30-£50 in raw ingredients. Before the meal planning brigade jumps in, this is literally the stuff that gets used up in one meal. Organic steak £15-20, two organic chicken breasts £15, a single cantaloupe melon £5, 1 box of strawberries from a local farm £6 etc. Add in a few packs of herbs, dairy products and juice and that's the budget for a single day.

UPFs are not only cheaper, they are shelf stable. You can buy an entire week's worth of meals in cans, jars and vacuum sealed packets for a fraction of what it costs fresh. It makes perfect sense why so many families rely on that out of convenience and cost.

It is very hard to find pure foods these days, even when you intentionally want to reduce the amount eaten. Pretty much anything that isn’t in its purest form involves UPF. Artificial sweeteners, preservatives, palm oils before you get to things like gums and stabilisers and broken down molecules. They are in things you might not even expect and they mess up the way our body experiences foods.

Time poor adults take a lot of food at face value without looking at ingredients.

The only way to fix it is by education, not needing to having a two working household so someone has time and to pay enough that people can spend time putting together proper meal plans and shop well.

@ThisNaiceLemonSloth absolutely! 3 year olds don't do the weekly food shop, they don't take themselves to Macdonalds etc Start then off right, cook from scratch, give them fresh food and veg and they won't care too much for upf crap.
My daughter would much rather have my 5 veg pasta sauce on her pasta than a jar of Dolmio - this was after she challenged me with the why can't we just have a jar of pasta sauce like everyone else??? (I'm acutely aware that cookinĝ from scratch is not like "what everyone else's parents" do, according to DD).

We live in an area where 32% of kids are overweight by year 6.
I made lots of friends when my three were babies and I could have guessed which kids would be fat by the age of 1.
The largest kids (now all teens) parents are not poor (teachers, nurses, social workers in the main).
As babies and toddlers when went out for picnics etc already the food was different. I was very conscious of food as have a multitude of health problems and wanted to give the kids as good as start as possible.

The kids who are now fat were given pre made Ellas Kitchen tubes for the babies( basically sugar).

The older kids had white bread sandwiches with ham or cheese followed by bananas, crisps, sausage rolls, and biscuits
The kids that are fat were brought chopped veg, salads, berries, oatcakes, wholemeal bread, hummus, flapjacks.

Pack lunches, parties and meals out are the same. We have been on lots of day trips, camping, holidays together and things like we let our kids have one fizzy drink a day and one ice cream theirs have lots.

Screen times similar thing, the ones that restrict it have have more active kids, the ones that said "oh they self regulate" many now unfit kids who are addicted to their phones/xboxes. They hardly move from their rooms. Some of them are driven everywhere, don't walk to school and never have. Family outings are rarely about physical activities like swimming, hiking or playing tennis or football but are sitting down: the cinema or theatre followed by meals out.

Even trying to avoid it was hard . Every week it would be some kids birthday and my kids would come out with a little bag of sweets and then they would go to the party (class parties where the thing st primary- 32 a year, plus we would often get invited to older or year kids parties as mine would be friends if the siblings, they would then eat a ton if sweets and shite at the party and be sent home with party bags full of sweets. I used to take the party bags and chuck out half the sweets when. They weren't looking.
Packed lunches where another one. DS1 bf had lunchables, crisps and chocolate bar every day.
Lots of them have a Friday night takeaway and/or Maccy Ds classically after swimming. We couldn't afford this as skinter than most of our friends

Now these people are my friends. I love them and never say anything but now the kids are uni age the difference is stark. Some of the children/near adults are in size 20 plus clothes. Lots are size 14. The boys are in XL clothes. A couple of them can't walk more than 5k and definitely not up hill. These are loved, cared for kids who are great people, their parents adore them and worry about them, are spending weekends driving them to open days, have saved up for uni for them etc
Something has gone very very wrong.

I think the whole concept of eating has totally changed in the past few decades

When I was a child all meals were home-cooked and eaten at the table. There was no choice if one child didn't like a particular meal. Our family rule (that most parents followed) was that if you didn't eat your dinner you wouldn't get pudding
We rarely ate out apart from a very occasional treat of fish & chips if DF had some overtime pay!

Nowadays meals and mealtimes are blurred . . . it seems that in some families food can be eaten at any time someone fancies it. As convenience foods need little or no preparation, are easily stored and accessible, meals and snacks can be eaten at any time and the concept of regular family meals seems to be rapidly disappearing

The same applies for meals and snacks outside the home . . . there is such a wide array of ready to eat food available in takeaways, fast food outlets, coffee shops etc

It must be so much harder to track what everyone is eating when children and parents are dipping into the fridge and cupboard at home, sausage rolls & crisps are being eaten as a snack whilst out, etc etc

The food companies, and the government who allow them to produce utter shite and market it to kids and parents are to blame. Why there isn’t more outrage towards them is beyond me. They’re poisoning people with chemicals and unnecessary ingredients on a massive scale.

I can afford either exclusively non upf or the energy to cook them. I think many on low incomes are the same. We eat as healthily and cheaply as I can but I find fresh meat and fish a real drain in terms of price and the cooking of it. Ditto, I'd love to make my own cereal bars.

To those saying things were better in the 80s, do you remember campaigns about how we should choose oven cooked or grilled food instead of fried foods? We were told that cooked breakfasts were bad. Yes, a big greasy fry up isn't healthy but a fried/poached egg sandwich is probably more filling than cereal. Cheaper too.

Also where there is support e.g. breakfast clubs and free school dinners, the budgets are poor affecting food quality. Breakfasts are beige (white toast, cereals) and school dinners increasingly have heavily processed foods. Many schools don't have fully functional on-site catering and just re-heat industrially catered food. Portions are also often poor which exacerbates snacking culture as it's not substantial enough to last until dinner time, and not adequate enough to be the main meal of the day for families that struggle with providing an evening meal.

The problem is, and you see it all the time on here- thousands of parents falling over themselves to defend why ‘the odd McDonald’s is fine’, the constant snacking is ‘fine’, ‘choc choc’ for their 1 year old is ‘fine’, regular biscuits, squash to drink… all of it. And it isn’t really. It isn’t even just about the visible issues like obesity, but what’s going on inside the body to come back to bite later, and the habits that are being formed.

The way children are fed in this country is dire.

Noone needs or benefitdupfs - adults too
So the government needs to restrict them. Also needs to free up time for parents to cook properly rather than working two jobs just to pay rent or mortgage

A good point has been mage by a few posters. These days you need two working parents to afford a mortgage.
Back in the day, with one parent working, the other had the time and energy to cook proper food.

@User8746422 Organic steak is expensive. Of course most people wouldn't be able to afford that every day.

Jacket potatoes, (4 for 75p) - 10 mins in the microwave - add a tin of tuna for 70p or less , or lentil soup (under £2 for a kilo - lasts ages!) with carrots at 50p and onions at 95p for a big bag. Cheap and done in no time on the hob.

We are a culture of excuses though. Not every one who is poor eats junk. And not everyone who eats junk is poor. Of course the government should do more - they don't care - but nor do most people. And the people choose the government. And if you do care you get told to shut up.

Actually, election time is a good time for a petition. 'Government to take strong action to reduce UPF for shelves' very vague but you get my meaning. Likewise we could do with a similar petition to ban smart phones for under 16s.

@MoonshineSon can you clarify this bit?
"The older kids had white bread sandwiches with ham or cheese followed by bananas, crisps, sausage rolls, and biscuits
The kids that are fat were brought chopped veg, salads, berries, oatcakes, wholemeal bread, hummus, flapjacks."

I'm not being arsey, I'm interested in the point you are making.

I went to DD’s sports day yesterday and was truly shocked at the number of obese children. I’m not joking when I say probably a third of them were noticeably overweight and a sixth actually obese. There were 10 year old girls bigger than me, a size 12 mum of two.

The school doesn’t help. School dinners always have the option of cake, birthday sweets dished out every other week, a weekly ice cream van parks on the school drive so you have to walk past it to leave and it has a massive queue 🤯

I’m going to say something a bit left field and I hope people understand this is not me justifying smacking (as I was accused of yesterday) but since parents stopped using ‘harsh’ discipline methods, they seem to be at a loss as to how to control their children and I think eating has become part of that picture. Food as bribes, food to keep them quiet, food to stave off a tantrum, food as a reward, food because everyone else now seems to be eating and it feels mean to say no. Endless snacks, they never seem to wait between meals. Mums take endless packets of biscuits and bread sticks with them everywhere.

Other people should not have to suffer because there are some out there who have zero self control and no personal responsibility.

We'll all suffer if there's a generation with massive amounts of obesity and the health problems that go along with it. We'll be paying for the NHS.

I actually agree with you that a significant amount of this comes down to parents. And if you've got an obese 6 year old (with no other health conditions), then you have massively fucked up. But just shrugging and saying "well it's the parents' responsibility" doesn't really help the child, or wider society, long term.

Good point.
I remember 'tuck' in primary school. Completely unnecessary for almost all kids, even reception age.

I agree, @BogRollBOGOF .

My children were weaned on whole foods and continued to eat this happily until they started nursery at age 3. They had the odd fish & chips and ice cream, but other than that it was mostly vegetables, fruit, a bit of chicken or fish.

Once they were at nursery they'd be given 'traditional ' British kids food. Pizza, pasta, fish fingers, chicken nuggets, stodgy puddings, etc.

They still ate healthily at home, but a switch had been switched. Interestingly, now grown up, one cooks healthy food, one eats mostly take-outs, and one is a perpetual grazer who'll eat anything that's in the fridge and requires zero preparation effort.

I think bringing back in school kitchens and qualified cooks, and funding healthy school lunches, is the way to go. Not sure how one might stem the flood of UPFs though...

There is hope. The much derided social media provides lots of influencer types with super healthy recipes which my teens make or ask me to. They both do a sport / dance and go to the gym or a jog off their own bats as they want to look good. Their friends are the same none are fat. So the smarter ones figure it out. But we eat pretty well and both exercise so modelled it.