To be shocked at the level of obesity of British children?

[MEM00]

Having recently come back from holiday I found myself really shocked by the size of so many other British kids at the resort we were at. It was mostly a mix of British, French and German families and I found it impossible to not notice the difference in the British kids compared to others. DD is 8 and I would say average sized, by no means skinny. She made friends with another girl the same age by the pool, and i'm not joking when i say the other girl must have been twice the size when they were next to each other.

Am i overthinking this? Because it really makes me worry for the future.

This isn't intended by be 'fat shaming' in any way btw.

This is very interesting and I'm sure there's a lot of truth to it. I wonder what the explanation is for USA though. They're history is obviously very different to ours. They're a mix of many different cultures (some of whom have the most wonderful, healthy foods) yet they embrace junk food, fast food and UPFs even more than us! When I see what some of my US friends eat, there's very little that I'd describe as real food.
Junk food and UPFs exist everywhere but some countries seem to have taken to them more than others.

Itsprobablynotcominhome · 23/06/2024 12:45
Why do you care? Look after your own kid, stop judging everyone else's

Everyone should care. There are hundreds of thousands of people being treated for completely preventable diseases.

That aside, living as an obese child is a pretty miserable existence.

That's interesting @TheKeatingFive. On the MN S. Asian forum, parents are feeding their 7 -month -olds chicken curry, daal, and mooli (radish) parathas.

I think its peer based, we have 5 daughters differing ages up to 12 and in 3 schools. There are zero overweight children, all are sporty and fed healthy food. The reason in our case is it would be frowned on and the schools are competitive... no one would want to be the large child or large parent.

In the UK obesity bas er normalised to such a large degree. Shops like m and s who previously carried very few clothes beyond size 16 now have all ranges in all sizes. If you like say Reiss clothes then you have to stay slimmer for example.
If larger clothes were hard to come by um sure there would be less large people. Same for kids.

Wall -E coming true.

I read a theory that the UK took so quickly to eating processed sugar because the climate doesn't have lots of sweet foods, unlike Mediterranean countries with figs and dates and so on. The US followed suit because of English people settling there. Who knows if it's true but it's interesting. Both countries were definitely heavily involved in the slave/sugar trade but so was France.

In the US now, it's pretty easy to explain- unchecked capitalism and very little regulation. Corporations are seen as more important than people. Advertising has worked on people and they now think UPFs are the default food. Plus there's the whole don't tread on me/no nanny state attitude.

Farming subsidies is another huge one. Basically there was a surplus of corn because industrial farming techniques gave a higher yield and they had to sell it somehow, hence high fructose corn syrup. Now the farming lobby is too powerful to change this.

twistyizzy, it helps though! Less in and more out, no excuses!!!

What on earth are you banging on about? Two sound bites and a free mind reading session. What am I supposed to take from that?

That's very interesting, thanks.

Idk if I agree with the rationing point tbh.
I remember reading a book about Ukraine in the 1930s someone telling their grandmas story how they were starving and had to eat leather and grass and stuff. So they had worse than our rationing but you rarely saw a big Ukrainian in the 2010s (before Russia invaded as the example because obviously there isn't enough food there now).

What I think really does it for the UK and the us is the obsession with chocolate and sweets I was born in 01 so I'm not ancient but my parents were strict and a treat was a treat like at Christmas or Easter with the eggs. I pretty much only had sweets at birthday parties. Now looking at other parents of primary age kids I'm seeing people who constantly give their kids bags of sweets and chocolate bars like multiple times a day. These people aren't poor and unable to buy anything else btw(as people on these threads often claim) hell I grew up actually poor and that's another reason my parents never wasted money on chocolate and cake.
I also agree with the point someone made on this thread about Disney dad's/mums and grandparents undermining the parent who tries to feed their kids healthy with a million "treats"

Cars, screens, UPF

Very interesting on rationing & food ‘history’. Many women were in domestic service pre war & it was possible to learn to cook really well. After leaving service many were ‘good plain cooks’ & many women could rustle up the delicious from meagre ingredients & speedily. Interestingly, in the memoirs I have read many ex cooks attributed their long healthy lives to the high quality food they ate whilst in service & habits formed.

Another thing about classically British food is that it fell foul of a lot of health trends from the 60s/70s onwards.

Firstly the idea of the Mediterranean diet, then the long term assault against fat - which has been totally reconsidered.

Things like liver and onions, suet puddings, sausages/mash/gravy, bubble and squeak - all positioned as terribly bad for you. But probably far better than a lot of what we eat today.

@TheKeatingFive I wonder if we could bring that back? 70s cooking likely ‘better’ too. Rosemary Conley, Hip & Thigh, demonised fat. Savoury suet puddings not necessarily ‘bad’ & use up veg making it more palatable if a bit elderly/watery.

Yeah absolutely

it's interesting, I remember checking (for some reason) and two regular sausages are only something like 250 cals. Not at all bad compared to many, many things that would be considered much 'healthier'

Of course that's about portion size too. We would never get more than two sausages as kids - which probably seems quite meagre now.

It’s all free as they’re school sports teams and to be honest, plenty of their parents are overweight.

So generally speaking, I’d say the only difference is the kids are very active.

If you think about it, it was prob quite hard to be obese in the 1920s. My grandmother told me about one girl who they all passed their lunchtime leftovers too who was ‘fat’. I imagine not obese. Is anyone becoming obese on too much home cooked ‘meat & two veg’ second helpings?

Well I guess if you ate enough of them, it's possible. But the vast majority of people simply wouldn't have had that to spare. By necessity they would be much tighter on budgeting and portioning.

I think one of the easiest things the UK (or any country dealing with this issue) could do to begin tackling this issue would be to begin introducing regulation around UPFs and requiring clear and obvious labeling of UP foods. My 8 year old had a nutrition unit in science class where they taught the kids about the food supply chain and how to look for healthy and ethically produced food (as well as what to avoid), and it was really effective! Now whenever I do the shopping, she always checks the eggs for the number stamp, she checks things like the bananas and the coffee for fairtrade labels, and she notices if the stoplight system on food packaging has a label that isn’t green. I actually had no idea that eggs were stamped with a number (0-4) according to their production conditions until she told me, and we’ve changed our purchasing habits accordingly. I bet there are parents out there who would quit picking up quite so many UPF foods if they were clearly labeled and education around UPFs was included in units like this.

I said above that it is different now. What my grandchildren do now is better than my daughter did in the 90s.

Theres a Primary school very near me....a " community " Primary school. Kids are picked up by car and their mouths jamed with sugar at 3. 30.

I once accused my mother of giving me a deprived childhood as I'd never had a Pot Noodle (I must have been about 13 at the time)

I was puzzling over this with my Mum the other day. She's horrified by the poor diet of my sibling and the grandkids, stereotypical Scottish stodge, veg a grudging duty, very picky etc. She's equally bemused that for me a meal is a plate of colourful vegetables, plus pulses, or maybe a little fish or meat if I can afford it, failing either, a small amount of rice/pasta/potato. How did her kids end up with opposite extreme food preferences when she fed us the same traditional diet of meat/fish+two veg growing up?

Except. We were both born abroad (to white Scots parents); I was 5 when I came to Scotland, my sibling only 2. They only had the baby/early weaning phase in the tropics, whereas I had all the formative food years, incl. age 2-5 being largely cared for by local women and eating local food. It's anecdata, but it seems to have hardwired into me that a feast is vegetables and fish and fruit, comfort food is rice, and heaven is a perfectly ripe mango fresh from the tree out back.

Rebelliously, though perhaps poor hosting, I'd be feeding your white British child visitors your preferred foods in hopes of expanding their horizons. Maybe it wouldn't work, because their formative preferences have already been set? Or maybe one of them is like me, confusingly out of kilter with my earlier childhood experiences. I'd have been overjoyed and felt inexplicably at home in myself to be fed Asian foods in Scotland in the 70's and 80's!

(There was a banana tree too. I am now desperately craving Saba bananas, fried or grilled with butter/honey/syrup. It's been decades. And hello the wee gecko who used to live in a crack in the wall above my bed. And those plants that curl up when you touch them.

There's such privilege in kids who straddle worlds; but perhaps also a perpetual displacement and yearning.)

@MrsPinkSky Great to hear of some school sports that are free. I've only come across school sports where the kids (parents) have to pay for their kit and travel to matches, and/or hire in an external coach. If more schools were able to and/or chose to fund school sports more fully, that'd break down some of the barriers to participation.