British kids and eating habits - IABU ?

[lovemycoffee2]

I have two young kids and we live in the UK but we are not originally from here.

At home we cook everyday from scratch our food and we take that food at a lunch box at our workplace. We have a light dinner again made from scratch.

The issue is our kids which are of course going to school/nursery and they love to copy their friends!

In the UK it's healthy if a kid eats sausages (god knows what the meat has inside), or for example Heinz baked beans which have 10% sugar and 20% salt (leaving 70% being actual beans) or if they eat fish fingers which are pre-fried (even if you bake them they were already fried before got frozen) or chicken nuggets (again pre-fried which god knows what was the oil quality).

It's also acceptable to drink juices which have no sugar but plenty sweeteners.

Also, it's perfectly fine to have a ham sandwich for lunch which has ready made processed bread full of emulsifiers and ham which (like sausage) god knows what ingredients has.

It's ok that primary schools offer desserts, even if they are small portions and low sugar on a daily basis - not on a weekly or as special occasion! I don't have a dessert everyday, why my kid is offered one?

Honestly, are all these things ok? Am I paranoid?

I am very worried that the kids will either end up obsessed. with diabetes or with other health issues given all the processed food and the fact that we are what we eat.

YABU - are you crazy?

YANBU - unfortunately this is a "balanced healthy diet" in the UK!

I agree with your points about carrots and meat but white bread needs to contain flour, water, yeast, oil and salt. Shop bought bread (whether wholemeal or white) contains amount awful lot more than this.

Italy and Spain have a very similar child obesity rate to the U.K. Looking at male children, ours is only very slightly higher. So whatever problems we have, they clearly have the same. As does OP’s country, Malta, which has a higher obesity rate than U.K.!
https://data.worldobesity.org/rankings/?age=c&sex=m

I do wish school lunches were a bit healthier. I choose the best option for my dc which is normally vegetable curry, chicken and rice etc, but the pizza and burgers are still there which they’ll have occasionally (which I don’t think is a bad thing, everything in moderation is important). And they have fruit or yogurt for pudding at their school. Nursery lunches are amazing and so healthy though.
I do think eating habits are improving away from the 90’s style of processed food, where I am anyway. I have a toddler now and most parents are very conscious of what they feed them. I cook almost everything from scratch as do most people I know.

Couldn't agree more but you'll get a lot of defensive push back on here as people simply have no understanding of what's in the junk food they buy. And to be fair, some (not all) healthy food is expensive eg fresh bread with no additives vs upf sliced loaves, organic chicken breast vs frozen chicken nuggets. So it can also be hard to make healthy choices. Once you learn how to make soups, stews, salads and use lots of legumes, beans etc it gets easier to make healthy food cheaply but that's a journey, not an overnight change.

Growing up in France, I’m laughing at some of these ‘on the Continent’ stories. They obviously don’t mean France so would be interesting to hear which country this food nirvana exists. We were literally weaned on chocolate, they sell special bars to put in baguettes! In Germany they have special ones for brown bread (German’s so much healthier than us!). We have aisles dedicated to packaged processed sweet treats. Our national dishes include chocolate wrapped in buttery pastry eaten for breakfast!

Burger and chips is on every children’s menu I have ever seen. Chips come out with everything - we love chips (second only to the Belgians)!

I’ve not noticed any major differences between there and here (apart from the love of a roast dinner), supermarkets sell pretty much the same things (France has a much bigger selection of julienned vegetables in mayonnaise, but have only really seen coleslaw here).

I guarantee that a bakery white loaf still spikes sugar more than a packaged whole grain one.

It probably does. But I think that this is where confusion over what is healthy comes from.

Supermarket wholemeal bread might have elements of it that are less bad than other breads. But that doesn't make it inherently healthy.

I think people mistake this can be a healthier option for this is healthy and you can eat as much as you like.

Fwiw, we don't eat bread very often at all. Sometimes I'll make loaf myself to go with soup but I can't remember the last time I had a sandwich.

Quite frankly, this thread is nuts. Protect your children's teeth, everything else comes out in the wash. You can turn around health as an adult, eating patterns don't have be set in childhood, or you are doomed. But perhaps that why some posters are so focused, because of their health anxiety. As always said there must be two 'abroad', France, Spain and Italy, because they no longer look that different to us. On a recent holiday we could tell who the German and Spanish were because they were the only ones arguing that they should be able to smoke everywhere. If what's said about french children is true I wonder when the low level sexual aggression and entitlement clicks in for French men. I've had very different experiences of french boys. I agree that the food industry has done a number on people and the NHS has got it wrong, but it is worldwide. If you have relatives (as I do) across Africa and Thailand then you know that health isn't a given if you live on freshly prepared food. Their teeth tend to be better though. Vegetables, pulses, beans, legumes, seeds, nuts and black/red/green tea most days will see you ok. Things like meditation and breath work and weight baring activity as we age, it isn't as simple as no processed food.

Oppps , wrong thread .

We had a French exchange student to stay.
He smiling refused to eat any vegetables or fruit at all while he was here.
Our younger DD thought it was a good idea to copy him.

His mother had given him and DS baguettes filled with chocolate when DS stayed there. DS couldn't eat his. Nor could DS eat the very rare bloody meat served at school lunches in France.

Smilingly ....

Whereas my Italian friend (male, middle-aged) came to the UK and lost weight.

You can’t generalise. My experience of growing up and living in the UK is of everyone cooking from scratch, fighting over allotments, and most people at least flirting with vegetarianism for a while. I never went to restaurants with children’s menus, although I have to say that baked beans on toast is the food of the gods. Not all the time though: it loses its appeal when eaten regularly.

Snacks and confectionery are available everywhere. Food is a massive, globalised industry, with many of the same sweets and snacks available in every country — at least in Europe and (with different recipes) the US. They may be normalised as you say but no one is forced to eat them. If people are coming to the UK and putting on weight they should stop eating so much! Just buy ingredients and cook as they so virtuously do at home! Absolutely all ingredients are available here even when, for the sake of the environment, they really shouldn’t be.

No, most people are not so stupid that they don’t understand that eating the wrong things is one type of unhealthy, whereas overeating is a different unhealthy habit.

However, wholegrain bread makes you feel fuller and so the urge to eat more is diminished. It’s digested more slowly so no crash that makes you reach for more food. Don’t reduces overeating even in those who don’t understand portion control.

Great post.

This doesn’t mean the beans are 20% salt. This means the beans contain 21% of your recommended daily allowance of salt.

Processed square toast for breakfast?

When I was in France I lived with a family. Breakfast (for them) was croissants dipped in bowls of sweet hot chocolate drink.
🤔

Thank you.

No, you can’t really generalise, a lot of my friends here are big foodies and very food aware. Whereas my family ‘back home’ aren’t as aware, they just practice their old habits/ eat in the mainstream way in that country. A lot of my European friends haven’t changed their eating habits in the UK either as you say, it’s a choice.

Just coming back to the OP’s point, UHP and junk food is normalised at school whereas it shouldn’t be as it creates habits for life.

OP, you are focusing on the wrong things. Instead of getting angry about what other people choose to feed their children you need to reflect on why you find it so difficult to say "no" to yours.

Your child does not have to have school lunches, you can make the decision as an adult to opt out, as plenty of other UK parents do. Your child does not have to eat sausages and baked beans. Not every child in the UK does. Those are choices and no one is forcing you to feed your children a certain way.

Your children are very young, you have many years of "but Jacks parents let him, it's not faaaaaiiiir!!" ahead of you. Much better to nip that in the bud early on. My children have learned from experience that it's pointless complaining to me that some of their friends already have mobile phones, are allowed to stay up til 10pm on a school night, have Haribo and chocolate in their lunchboxes every day etc etc. They know it won't change my mind.

By the way, 'tantrums' are developmentally normal in young children. No humans are born with the ability to regulate their emotions, regardless of where they're from, so your claim that children in your home country don't have tantrums is unscientific nonsense. Parenting young children is challenging, blaming every challenge you face on other parents and their children is not going to make it less so.

My children have learned from experience that it's pointless complaining to me that some of their friends already have mobile phones, are allowed to stay up til 10pm on a school night, have Haribo and chocolate in their lunchboxes every day etc etc. They know it won't change my mind.

It's actually "Everyone Else" 😃
Until you chat to the parents.

Packed lunches at primary school are fine. That could be more difficult to negotiate at secondary school because Everyone Else has school lunches and those taking packed lunches have to sit somewhere else.

Most of us who are a bit older ate sausages when growing up, and - gasp, horror - ham!!! - and many of us still do .We weren't poor, it was simply the food people used to eat. My GPs lived until their mid-80s and my DPs until their late 80s, and all were fairly healthy.

When I was young we had pudding every day, none of us were fat.

You are quite right, people have no idea of others' struggles. There are some very privileged posters on MN, who seem to think it is their mission in life to educate the masses while preening themselves for being so superior.

So much judging on this and indeed any posts about food from sanctimonious know-it-alls - it's so, so, boring.

Yes. But my point is that large scale companies have squeezed out independent traders and, as well as ingredients, they sell an awful lot of processed convenient foods.

Agree, having had experience of school dinners. I often found the vegetarian option was the best, but usually had a packed lunch. School dinners used to be both nutritious and interesting, but have declined since the 90s - mainly because of contracting out rather than being cooked locally.

As a diabetic, I would not take that bet so quickly. It depends on the type of white bread. In theory wholemeal is supposed to cause a slower rise because of the fibre, but the different processes used in bread making appear to have an effect. Sourdough is better for my blood glucose than quickly made loaves. Commercial bread generally uses something called the Chorleywood process for fast rising. In addition not all wholemeal bread is 100% whole grain, and some contains sugar.

You made a very good point in your last two paragraphs. I think the OP touched the nerve with this thread. So many people want to be healthier and lose weight, they are self aware and know their diets could improve. They are willing to hear it from a Slimming World representative but not from a random stranger on the internet.
I’ve experienced similar in real life too when work colleagues kept asking me how “you stay so slim” and “what do you eat to be this slim” repeatedly for years, yet anytime I actually provided a truthful response I got ridiculed. Competitive underwater, rabbit food , this is not a real meal -are you getting an actual meal with this side ?” I’ve learned now to answer that I have good metabolism, people seem to like that answer.
Someone up the thread asked how they could make their kids school lunch healthier, I thought I would answer based on the small changes we made as a family (we still eat crap occasionally, we are not saints and my husband’s diet is awful). One of the things we did was baking our own bread.
I found it cheap and easy and thought it would be a good thing to share just in case it helps anyone. Look at the ridicule it has caused.
I now genuinely think posters want answers like “you are doing the best you can, keep going , the food you provide is not actually bad, there is nothing wrong with what you eat, healthy food is too expensive and no one has time for all this prepare- from -scratch nonsense anyway. “ They don’t want advice, they want validation.
There is no point. Every diet related thread goes like this.