Listening to R4 atm and they are talking about children learning to cook

[OrmIrian]

Which is fantastic I guess. Everyone should know how to cook because it's fun and home-cooked food is nice and I guess it might help them understand more about nutrition and where food comes from. But...is it really going to combat obesity? My mum (gawd love her) cooks like an angel often from home-grown organic veg and locally-reared meat, and she is huuuuge.

Surely not being obese is easily as much to do with not moving around enough as to do with eating the wrong stuff?

True enough. Its not all just about cooking. One would hope that at the same time as teaching to cook, they learn about everything under the umbrella of health & nutrition, including fitness.

mm, I agree it won't combat obesity, I have a friend who cooks everything from scratch and is morbidly obese. Having said that though, she is fit and healthy in many ways - she swims and walks a LOT and is always running around doing different things. At least if you homecook you avoid a lot of the crap that goes into pre packaged, and that has to be better for you, even if you do use too many fatty ingredients!

I think it's enormously important for people to be able to cook to combat obesity because otherwise you don't have full control of what you are eating - you are reliant on buying processed foods marketed as healthy which in many cases are not.

Being to cook by itself won't solve the problem though. Specially not if we all just make cakes.

< chops hides the lemon drizzle in the cupbaord>

On the program they were making smoothies and fruit kebabs

I think children need to learn to cook proper food, they aren't going to eat fruit kebabs when they are independant!

You can cook cheese burger and chips from scratch, but it isn't going to keep the pounds off, is it?

DD is just about to start her Food Tech term, she's gutted because she's a good little cook and the first thing they have to make is a salad! I shall watch with interest how this term pans out.

Well exactly. Fruit kebabs are very nice and all.... but they aren't going to appeal that much to fruit-averse children anyway, and those who do eat it don't need fruit kebabs! The reporter asked some of the DCs if they knew how to boil an egg - only one knew. Perhaps learning how to boil an egg might be a more useful start.

Mo I strongly suspect your DD will remain disappointed and disillusioned. They tend to have to cater to lowest common denominator and I suspect that DS (5) - not to mention your mindees - has already done more cooking than some of your DD's class will have done! Strangely DS chooses to cook savoury things with DH and cakes or biscuits with me - I wonder why that is

I have made this point many times OrmIrian and to be perfectly honest I don't really buy the 'eat home cooked stuff' as a way of doing this either. Of course home cooked stuff is more nutricious and better for your body all round. However you can be perfectly slim and eat nothing but junk, I know many people like this. They just don't eat much of anything but what they do eat is pretty poor quality.

Being overweight is about eating too much for you body - pure and simple. The quality of what you put in is pretty irrelevant in terms of weight gain or loss (though not of course in terms of longterm health). What counts is the amount of energy you take in against the amount you use.

A programme I watched once on those really morbidly obese people who can't move really made this point come home to me (by that I mean people weighing 40+ stone). They showed a number of these people who had been put on very low calorie diets in hospital. All of course lost a lot of weight.

However the specialist on the programme said that there was a very high rate of failure on this programme of weight loss and that 80-90% of his patients would regain all the weight in a few months after going home and would need probably hospitalisation a second or in some cases a third time to save their lives .

However one of the patients had maintained his loss and in fact continued to lose weight over the period of a year following his discharge from hospital. They showed what he was eating and it was crisps, take-aways etc and very little in the way of 'healthy food. As he said, he still ate the same things - just much less of it.

I'm not advocating this as ideal but for him it was more important to lose weight (even after 18 months of steady weight loss including several months on a hospital diet of 600cals a day, he still weighed 25 stone or so) than to radically change his diet. Ideally he should do both but that was too much for him to manage all in one go so he chose a half-way house.

Most of the others had tried to 'eat healthily' and had all increased in weight again. Some of them had always eaten a lot of healthy food but as the doctor said oranges are healthy but if you eat 25 of them as part of a day's eating you will probably put on weight even if you don't eat much else, and most of these people could eat that may oranges in a day and a lot else beside.

Don't be so sure. They chose her school to film Master Chef in last year, for its excellent facilities and dedication to food & nutrition!

Whatever happens though, she gets enough support and advice of food at home for me not to be bothered. And like you, she's not interested in baking, just cooking meals with DH!

oooh - I'm impressed and .

DS currently wants to be a chef - and a policeman - and something else which I can't remember. His only problem with being a chef is the concept of having to get up at 4am to make bread every day!!

OrmIrian , did they have Fiona Hamilton Fairley from the Kids Cookery School on ? she usually does - ds used to go to the school in the holidays where they did workshops and cookery sessions from the age of 4 yrs - was brilliant - he used to make proper things,not cakes or sweet stuff - but proper things to have for tea when he got home. And they always did a food/fruit and veg recognition quiz - ds was brilliant at this and I used to glow with pride !