Majority of children will be overweight or obese in nine areas of England by 2035, study shows

I think a lot of the initiatives mentioned in the article focus too much on certain types of food, and not enough on portion size. No one actually gets obese from eating burgers or drinking soft drinks, they get obese by consuming too much of them.

I understand it’s much easier to drink more calories of coke than it is to eat the same calories in apples, but you are not going to be able to make millions of children, and more importantly their parents, change their eating habits so significantly just by increasing tax a bit on certain products.

This is basically demographic change issue. Obesity rates for white kids has stalled/mild decrease but the demographic change means more black and south asian kids as a percentage, both of which have higher obesity rates than white brits.

Blame the parents and blame our education system for failing to teach people how weight gain/loss works.

It still shocks me how many people don’t understand or don’t believe that calories directly affect your weight.

They focus too much on eating the “right thing” instead of focusing on eating the right amount.

Add to that many people’s understanding of calories in stuff is way off. Making a healthy homemade chicken salad means fuck all when you drench it in oil and full fat mayo.

is this one of those studies that fails to account for the fact that the rate of obese/overweight children will not just increase in a steady lane, and as a result comes to a figure that sounds shocking but is incredibly unlikely to actually occur?

[Extrapolating data like that can be funny, but it’ll usually also be comically inaccurate.](https://xkcd.com/605/)

Not something I witness near me, my kids are only in a small primary, but there are two clearly obese kids out of 200ish kids.

I can see the number going up based on the life of abundance even those close to our worst off can get but I doubt it’ll ever become “majority”.

This will have Jamie Oliver seething.

In all seriousness though, this is really sad. I wonder if it’s partly due to how time poor people have become? People are working longer hours and retiring later. In the past one income families weren’t super unusual, so there’d be a parent at home cooking healthy balanced food, and if there wasn’t then grandparents were often available to lend a helping hand with childcare.

I’m not saying no one has time to cook a healthy dinner anymore, but it’s so much easier to get a drive thru on your way home or stick a frozen pizza in the oven. People just want to relax when they get home. Exhausted working parents are also less likely to want to work up a sweat with their kids.

Kids aren’t playing outside as much as they used to, or at least that’s how it seems. I think as a society we’re all a little more risk adverse, but also the housing crisis means that kids don’t often have easy access to outdoor space to play. What used to be greens on council estates are now often being built on to create more housing. I don’t know what PE is like in schools now, but I can’t imagine it’s anything particularly radical given DfE budgets.

I might be way off base with this, as it’s not based on anything tangible just my own observations. I feel like childhood obesity keeps cropping up though, and the solution offered is always to make healthy ingredients cheaper or highlight that it already is. I’m not sure it’s the price of food that’s the issue, I think parents are probably overworked and exhausted.

If you’re underpaid, overworked, everything is going up in price and all the news is terrible all the time I can see how it’s easy to stick a tray of nuggets and chips in the oven to make sure your kids are fed and you can rest.

Being healthy is both expensive and time consuming.

Cooking from scratch is the best way to avoid ultra processed foods but that takes time and effort. You have to devote more time to:
– meal planning
– price check more items
– do a quality check of the fresh items
– date check
– sort them into a meal order when you get home so there’s no wastage.

Then there’s actually cooking the meal, I have a slow cooker which does a great deal of heavy lifting but I prefer those meal types in the winter and they feel too heavy in my stomach in the summer.

Boiling often seems the easiest way to cook veg and if you are doing pasta and rice also it makes sense to boil the veg. But it’s not often the tastiest so then you have to do a sauce or fry/roast them. Even when doing homemade air fryer veg they often cook easier and taste better if boiled first.

Sure there are quick meals like stir fry and salads, but who wants to eat them every single day? Once a week is more than enough for stir fry, we used to cook it so often it became boring.

Then even after cooking there’s so much additional time to clean up, all the plates, chopping boards, pots and pans. Dealing with the leftovers, and finding a way to use them.

Also if you have young kids most of the time they don’t want to eat what you spent all that time and energy on. They will just eat the fish fingers and pasta and maybe a few slices of cucumber it is such an energy drain to see all that hard work left aside.

Even the act of calling the family to the dinner table and serving up is exhausting. You call multiple times, they take ages to come downstairs, they then complain about what you have cooked, it’s a battle to get them to eat it, they then leave the table and you have to spend time clearing the table, wiping the table chairs and floor in addition to cleaning the kitchen.

In comparison just sticking a frozen pasta ready meal into the microwave and then giving it to them in front of the TV is so much easier. You have a single plate and set of cutlery per person, less time cooking and you don’t have any pans to wash. If you feel a bit guilty of no colour you can chop up some cucumbers to stick on the side, or defrost some peas and sweet corn in the microwave, depending on how much time and energy you have.

Let’s not also forget that being healthy is easier with some exercise. Gym memberships can be expensive and most of the time they don’t allow kids. Exercising at home, you could do yoga and pilates but having enough space in the living room for a parent and two kids is very difficult. It’s too cold in the garden most of the year. What kid can you get to go jogging, and that also requires proper footwear. Cycling again costs a pretty penny and there are bigger safety issues there.

Walking to and from school can sometimes be a good way to be healthy but it depends on how far you are away from the school, a mile maybe fine for an adult to walk but for a 4 year old to do twice a day on top of a school day maybe too much. It also depends on how much time you have, if you work from home and start at 9am it’s probably not an issue, but if you have to commute to an office you may not have time for a 40 minute round trip to and from school.

So then you have to pay for wrap around childcare, which may give you the time to walk them to and from school and then make it to work on time. But that makes the child’s day even longer and 5 year olds can struggle with a 10+hour day 5 days a week. Even when they get older that can feel difficult.

Also then consider those who may be neurodivergent, and could be the parents or child or both. That compounds all the stress of it all.

If I was a stay at home mum or only worked part time I could probably manage it and keep my mind healthy. But currently I have a 2 and 4 year old, I work full time to afford part time childcare and my mental health is at the point I am just wanting to quit everything. I just want to bang a pizza in the oven for dinner, I want to quit my job and just have a drink or binge on chocolate or sleep.

The main reason I can’t resort to using ready meals all the time is dietary issues, I get constipated easily which leads to other painful issues and my husband is lactose intolerant, so no milk. I have to cook from scratch most of the time to avoid cross contamination for my husband and use high fibre ingredients for myself. All pasta ready meals are with white pasta, not whole grain and so neither of us can have them. Luckily I work from home so can prepare dinner at lunchtime, and start cooking at 5pm.

For clarity both me and my kids are healthy weights, my husband is slightly overweight but he is also a bricklayer so he might have more muscle mass than the average man. My daughter does 3 full days at preschool, moving to school in September and does ballet, tap and gymnastics classes. My son will start them also when he is old enough, I have a gym membership and make sure the kids are aware “mummy is going to the gym” so they know it’s normal, and I do dance classes once a week also. I just can’t handle all of this mentally and I can see why some parents take shortcuts.

Overweight kids is, as far as I’m concerned, a form of child abuse – it is neglect and should be treated as such. They are not getting appropriate nutrition or exercise. In a tiny number of cases, such as Pradi-Willi syndrome, there may be a good reason for it, but few parents are going to have that excuse.

Neglect is a on a society-wide level though, because there are a lot of environmental factors in modern society that didn’t exist in bygone decades.

My kids are dead slim and they eat sooooo much. I can’t imagine how much these parents are feeding their kids for them to be as fat as they are.

No worries we’ll just put Mounjaro in the water supply

I was at my kids Drama performance last night and there were toddlers literally eating all the way through

A three year year old in front of me had a pack of crisps, a pop up sweet thing with 3 mini lollypops, and a full sugar drink,

i was looking at child health recently, justs made me so fucking depressed.

There’s both too much and too little advice on what constitutes a “healthy” diet these days.

People are still looking at something like a pack or two of Belvitas and a pint of orange juice for breakfast and thinking it is “healthy” because it has visible oats in it and it comes from a fruit. Doesn’t matter that it is packed with sugar and calories.

Avoiding obesity really is* a case of not overeating calorie-wise, with a few extra add-ons for health like not packing yourself full of sugar if you are sedentary, and eating vegetables. But there’s so much marketing about “fat free” “whole grain” etc that it muddies the waters. Eating endless massive bowls of Cheerios will make you put weight on despite all the fluff on their box.

Like for example – I have a colleague who recently bought a bike. He had a bit of a nightmare trying to do a long ride the other month and knackered himself. He decided that this was because he had a chocolate bar the previous night and that was “unhealthy” which doesn’t match with a “healthy” activity like cycling so soon after.

I can’t really get what I want to say across properly but basically whilst the basic concept of health and not putting on weight is quite a simple one, actually accessing and understanding that information in a helpful way is not a simple task.

*metabolic conditions aside.

Just stop eating sugary snacks and high calorie foods. Not easy to do nowadays due to all the sugar that’s in food but it can be done.