Nutritionist in yesterday's Observer suggests we should go back to the methods of the past to combat rising rates of obesity in children (17% of all 2-8 now obese)

[harpsichordcarrier]

Anita Bean says "A common mistake for parents is to give the child too much choice. The old-fashioned rule of just eating what was put in front of you seems to havewaned.The children chouldn't get into the habit of rejecting food, which gives them power and control. Don't let them demand food."

this seems to me to be really crappy advice and massively missing the point. I sort of see what she means, but surely giving choice is not the problem, it is whether the choices and the diet is healthy enough...
and surely giving children power and control over their intake is exactly the point, so they can make good choices when we no longer have power and control over what they eat.

but what do I know, I am not a registered nutritionist

Agree Soapbox - in our primary school of 210 children, I can only think of 2 that are overweight. At our pre-school of 50, none are overweight although we do have some amazingly tall 2 & 3yo's. Same goes for cousins, friends etc. So where are they hiding?

However, there is an issue with junk food and lack of exercise.

I do think it should be illegal for councils to sell school playing fields/local parks for housing. I spent all my summer lunchtimes being active on the school fields in addition to the games/PE lessons we had.

They are all teenagers. The 'Obese Children' tally is children under 18, or some such nonsense.

But the stat in the title says that 17% (so nearly 1 in 5) 2-8 yos are overweight. I know of two girls in that age group where the mother has been told to watch the daughter's weight, and in both cases they are tall, big boned girls who to my mind really don't look overweight.

yep, two to eight year olds.
I have no doubt it is a flawed statistic but I think there is clearly a problem

I wonder where those that don't see obese children regularly are living, compared to those that do....where I live it's a poor town, really, used to be a mining town....and there are far to many obese children in each year in primary school...
I mean there is puppufat and there is obesity...

From the way this thread is going it sounds as though the problem is concentrated in certain areas. I would say that there is not one overweight child in DS's Year 2 class of 30, nor in DD's day nursery.

I expect there is a strong economic/class correlation

exactly....
that was what I was thinking....

Perhaps unexpectedly, we are in Hackney, which usually scores highly in every deprivation index going.

But as I said below, I suspect that ethnic background may account for some of the difference in our case.

yes I expect so Dino.

On the geo-economic front, I'm in affluent Sussex - all but one of the local state primaries have playing fields and almost half have their own swimming pools, we have the Ashdown Forest and lots of parks (and places like Bedgebury and Bewl Water are only 20 minutes drive). It's what children need to encourage lifelong activity.

Yep, affluent area here too. Most kids arrive at school by car but equally most do ballet/cricket/horseriding/football/swimming, and virtually everyone has a large garden with some kind of climbing frame/swing thingy.

EscapeFrom - re your comment earlier (when I described seeing children walking home all eating something) that children come out of school ravenous:

Yes, you're absolutely right. And now I come to think about it I remember that after school we used to get a cake or an iced bun or something to fill in the gap before dinner.
However we did at least wait till we got home. And that's interesting - our mother used to provide the snack, so she had overall control of our diet. Now the expectation is that the kids will buy their own snack. So the parents are not in control.
At my secondary school there were certainly people who went to the sweet shop on the way home, but offically you were not allowed to eat in public in school uniform, so it was a bit naughty and certainly not the norm.

I think part of the problem is that people don't know how to cook and prepare food any more. I have patients see me for dietary advice that think to make a meal healthy they should add some tinned spaghetti hoops to their deep-fat-fried sausage and chips...

We are definitely more sedentary, and diets tend to be high cal/high fat/high sugar for a lot of families. But this is often due to a lack of education - I mean Tesco's and Asda were promoting lunchbox contents on their websites last week, and it was all special offers on Lunchables, cereal bars, crisps, Dairylea Dunkers etc!!

I see mums who don't know how to make a basic meal (eg cottage pie, or spag bol), and I even had one women that I had to tell how to make mashed potatoes. I find that quite worrying.

Agree, Sidge. I find it sad that some people think the height of home cuisine is to buy something from M&S. And to be suspicious of home-cooked food (like it is not cooked hygienically).

From my observation (and I admit it is a terrible stereotype), if you are paying at the supermarket cashier and the person in front of you is obese, more often than not, they are buying white bread products, confectionary, frozen meals, bottles and bottles of pop, crisps, tins.

There is also a significant difference in the general size of teh clientele at Asda and Sainsburys, even though in my area both are equally big and well-stocked on fresh foods.

Well I have a different problem. I wish my ds would eat. We have had advice from a nutritonist along the lines of put food in front of him say bugger all. If he hasn't eaten it in 30mins take it away with no fuss and give desert if we normally have desert.

Where are these obese kids?. Most around here are fine with the odd one overweight.

Carrying on from Sidges' post - knowledge of healthy diet is not being helped by Home Economics on the curriculum being replaced by Food Technology. As part of his course, my nephew designed an advert for a restaurant and looked at the economics of airplane food. I asked him what he'd actually cooked. He said "We don't have to cook Duchess, it's a real subject". and

When I did Home Econ, we cooked shepherds pie, jam tart, bolognese, veg soup and a sponge cake - amongst many other things. Absolutely essential life skills, not least because budgeting was also involved.

yes, maybe bringing back proper home economics would be a good thing, and make it one of those subject they have to take...
because, if the Kids don't see cooking, proper one, going oon in the home, then, well they won't really be able to learn it anywhere, unless at school...

Oh god yes Duchess, I totally agree!

Schools don't seem to teach Home Ec any more - and if they do there is very little cooking involved. My friend's daughter left school a few years ago and all they ever cooked in Home Ec (or whatever poncy name they call it nowadays) was cakes and flans.

Sure they will learn to cook at home if that's what the parents do, but how many kids never get a proper home cooked meal, made with basic fresh ingredients? Probably quite a few.

Haven't read anything except for OP and LittleBella but agree with LB. What about walking to school, walking to the shops (in fact walking everywhere), playing (energetic) sport in schools?

IME children who do plenty of exercise these days are fit and healthy whatever "choice" of food they have. Exercise is the key first, cutting down on high cal fast food second, everything else a distant third.

i agree with Anita Bean for dinner, but allow my children to choose, all be it from a limited range what they eat for lunch and breakfast,
seems to work

no brainer imo. Allow them to decide their own quantities but you control what they get. Don't offer alternatives if they don't finish their meal but don't force or bribe them to eat anything they don't want to. Give them some choice (i.e rice or pasta) but you set the boundaries.

They often don't want a choice in my experience and it's better just to serve it. Also if you don't have junk food in the house they can't have it and they have no choice to have it. That works pretty well too.

I was on a train yesterday and I felt I was on another planet, emerged in a different parallel universe or something in a carriage with people who were so very very large, all of them, the 2 couples next to me in their 40/50s, the family group back from holiday in the end of the carriage and the girl opposite about 14 and about 15 stone. It kind of emphasised the class division we seem to have on weight in the UK. Also I was drinking my litre of tap water and they were repeatedly walking up and down to the buffet buying the most amazing quantities of junk good. I was like being in a zoo watching a different species, as they might well have been watching me too of course.

Weellll I don't know. I don't think eating everything on your plate is a good idea ..stop when you are full as long as you aren't not eating in the hopes of something 'nicer'. But I agree to an extent don't see that choice is a good option for children. Most children I know would 'choose' chips because they are delicious. So generally my children don't have that choice too often. I think we have a bit of a problem in seeing food as a pleasure, and eating as a leisure activity, rather than predominantly as nutrition. I think that when you get secondary schools offering a healthy option alongside the standard fare, there is going to be a majority of children who don't take it.