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

We need to get Joe Wickes on the telly and cancel Bake off. It's obscene. All that fetishizing about bloody butter cream.

How mean of your sister to bitch about customers ordering 2 slices of toast.

Those are mainly occasional treats made with natural or slightly processed ingredients so are allowed. Thank goodness

At least butter cream is just butter and sugar, rather feed the 4yo that than the weird shit you get in a tub off the baking shelf!

Seriously, how difficult is it to make two rounds of toast?

Morrisons 800g white loaf 75pence; just like butter450g £1, electricity to toast bread 0.8pence. Break that down to 2 slices of toast : bread (8.3) + butter (0.06) + electric 1.6 = 3.2 pence.
price charged to customer is £1.80.

I’ll leave you to do the maths.

My family own a takeaway in a deprived area. Nearly all our sales are from Just Eat nowadays, all in the local area.

Some people are regularly eating four times a week from our takeaway. It costs so much more to order via Just East but nobody seems to care.

Presumably the person is ordering buttered toast not some upf spread made of carcinogenic petrochemicals.

Anyway what's your point? Your maths doesn't add up as you missed the fixed costs. How do.you know the person has a toaster? They may not have bread and butter in the house. They may not be able to go and buy some for a perfectly good reason. Obviously any sane person who was at home with the equipment and ingredients to make toast would just do it themselves, so the fact that they didn't suggests there's a good reason why not.

Really?

Crack on.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b013q28r?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

These podcasts from 2011 are interesting listening (3x 30 mins) They're about how pregnancy, the first 1000 days of life and generational health affect the template for lifelong health and mortality. It's not only factor, but under/ over nutrition in early life and recent genrations sets up underlying susceptibility to ill health in the body. A change of circumstance for the better can mitigate those tendencies, and it also helps explain why some people are more resistant against poor lifestyle.

I find intergenerational health interesting as I'm only 1" taller than my Edwardian Great Grandma. My Grandma was born before WW2, but experienced rationing for most her childhood and teen years. Neither my mother nor grandma had great nutrition through the mid-20th century- partly budget and motivation to cook and my mother didn't have great access to a varied nutritious diet until after my birth. As generations have got taller, I'm now considered quite short whereas older generations were average.
It's too early to tell on my DCs but they were solid 8lb+ babies compared to my 6lb7, they've grown consistently and tend to follow an average or slightly below on height- however DH had a late growth spurt in the uni years so we're some years away from the final outcomes on height. It is plausible that my height potential was affected by family adversity in the mid-20th century.

UHPFs became more widespread in diets from the 1990s and it's possible that their long term effect on parental health is now affecting children as well as what children consume themselves. In the 70s/ 80s they were more of an occasional treat on top of a more basic core diet. We know that maternal health and health in pregnancies has declined. Some of that is due to advances enabling women with complex health to conceive and carry pregnancies to birth, but a larger element is lifestyle.

The problem is UPF have infiltrated everywhere at all levels, so going low UPF ( I don't believe no UPF is possible with children) has become a conscious lifestyle choice that goes against general society.

My DCs preschool would only accept supermarket cakes, so UPF, for birthdays, no home baking due to hygiene and allergy concerns.

The point about family members, especially grandparents treating children to sugary snacks is something I've had to battle. I told my mum that treating grandchildren now would be making them a homemade dinner not taking them out for ice-cream.

As for breastfeeding, mothers need a lot of support to be able to do it. I only managed to breastfeed my second for so long as my mil helped so much with looking after my older child, who was a toddler.
Spending hours sitting, breastfeeding your baby is not a luxury a lot of mothers have.

@BogRollBOGOF I thought as you are interested in intergenerational health you might find this research on the gut microbiome of interest. It shows how over multiple generations our gut bacteria are declining in diversity which has huge implications for the health of future generations.

This is linked to upf consumption as the lack of fibre and the emulsifiers and preservatives in these foods kill off the beneficial microbes as well as to declines in breastfeeding, antibiotic use and c sections.
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2016/01/low-fiber-diet-may-cause-irreversible-depletion-of-gut-bacteria.html

So much of it is fashion and peer pressure.

My kids eat healthily, for the most part. One is a late teen, one still in primary school.

Both have been teased by their peers for what's inside their lunch boxes. Salad is a no-no; both love it (actively ask for it) but their peers think it's weird. Homemade coronation chicken on bread? Eww, gross. Vegetable sushi? One child had theirs thrown away by staff in primary (because they didn't realise that sushi rice is designed to be eaten cold) and has refused to have it ever since. One child once brought an avocado salad into school and got ripped to pieces by their peers telling them it's disgusting. They're a huge fan of spinach, too, and keep getting told they're weird.

Both eat a very healthy diet at home, with the occasional exception. Meals cooked from scratch with tonnes of vegetables, seafood, a variety of meats, salads of many kinds, soups, stews, roasts, casseroles - we try new things; I insist on seafood at least once a week. We try new foods. I had one child enquire about lychees the other day (had to buy it online as not stocked in my town, it seems). But I know I can't put it into their lunch boxes without some kind of trouble and a subsequent refusal to eat it.

I'm fat, by the way - years of SSRIs to blame, despite my doctor's claims they wouldn't affect my weight (the weight gain stopped when I stopped the meds). I love soup and take some to work as often as I can. But eat anything outside of British norms in my town and be labelled a weirdo.

No wonder kids don't want to explore.

It's interesting. I'm a child of the early 80's. Looking back we were fed terribly, nuggets, waffles, angel delight, ham sandwich and crisps, breakfast cereal. A spag bol made on special Saturdays and a roast on Sunday but mostly limited fruit, veg and fresh food. Yet still I recall 1 overweight child in my year at school. This is rather awful but she was known as fatty Natty but it was because she was the only big girl she was an anomaly.

That was interesting.
There does seem to be a lot more emerging about the importance of gut bacteria.

Again family history involves digestive issues including IBS and gallbladder problems. DS1 had multiple food allergies/ intolerances as a young child and thankfully grew out of them (CS baby, also autistic so a few issues that often flag up on this theme). The positive of that phase is that I had to home-cook through the DCs early years and put effort into a balanced diet. I am a MN slattern and don't try to create a sterile home, and both children are pretty resistant to minor illnesses. While DS2 has asthma that can prolong coughs, he's not ill with increased frequency.

I noticed autumn 2020 that DS's seasonal triggers to asthma were worse than his average. We did a lot of distance walking so the DCs retained good stamina, but they had missed out on social/ competitive sport like junior parkruns. The asthma care nurse said that she'd had an uptick in asthma symptoms worsening as lockdowns had affected fitness.

In my youth groups, general fitness declined in 2020. Fortunately most children did get back to where they were when normal routines were restored, but some didn't and have struggled since. There's a neighbourhood/ affluence effect. One group is more localised in a more affluent suburb. The other overlaps and has a broader catchment and that's where more children didn't recover.

Maybe that's the issue, that women are expected to work now, when we already have had our hands full at home for forever

It was only yesterday someone was complaining about families in supermarkets and people were scoffing at shopping being a life skill children need to learn. So id say those are some contributory factors. It is of course complex.

I think there's a lot of confusion around upfs, so many things are marketed as healthy but they're really not, families are time poor as we're expected to have and do it all now so go for the quickest things they know how to cook. Not enough teaching of cooking, healthy eating, growing veg, meal planning etc (could do more in education which is too academic focussed imo and see also again time poor parents). Gas and electric being so expensive and lack of income will absolutely be a factor for some.

Yes,I definitely think it’s contributing. When things are so expensive that both parents have to work, then that leaves less time to shop properly and cook. It also means you’re more tired and more likely to be tempted by the easy option. With single parents, they’re exhausted enough before work and when they get home, do all their chores, cooking a healthy meal isn’t always appealing.

In addition, if you’re at work all day, you don’t have much chance to get to the shops, so tend to do a big supermarket shop with convenience foods that last rather than lots of fresh foods. Added to that the death of the high street and you’re going to pop out to the locally chippy not the non-existent greengrocers or butcher. These social changes have definitely affected the way we eat.

Also I'd add the jobs and commutes are longer. My DPs had professional type jobs but both were home well before 5 most days not that DF ever did any cooking it's more normal now for people to be out of the house for 10-11 hours which makes meal prep and cooking very difficult.

I also think people can be very defensive about what they feed their children. Public figures who speak out about children’s poor diets are derided, called out of touch and in favour of a nanny state. There are threads on here from parents complaining about the school ‘lunch box police’ because they’ve been advised their DC’s lunch is unhealthy. Some schools may be overly strict but I think in general teachers are unlikely to comment on the contents of a packed lunch unless it is seriously bad.

DD’s school bans certain items - nothing draconian but things like energy drinks and sweets - and some parents lost their minds over it. I volunteered to go on a school trip recently and saw a child with a packed lunch consisting of a sausage roll, packet of Monster Munch, an iced doughnut and salted peanuts. She was not overweight at all but yes, I judged the parents.