A quarter of a million 11-year-olds overweight – including almost half of the poorest kids

Supermarkets need to do more to limit the sale of UPF or else we should start to tax and label it like tobacco.

I appreciate the need for personal responsibility, but as it stands we’re creating generations of addicts whose brains are being wired to depend on junk food.

It’s all part of cost of living unfortunately. It’s £1.50 for a full pizza on offer or £4 for a meals worth of chicken for a family if you shop reduced before you even add the other ingredients if you’re not willing to eat the dark meat.

Let alone the added power requirements to cook a large meal vs 10 mins per pizza.

Food tech needs to focus on healthy affordable meals over baking a crumble or cupcakes imo. 

This sub truly is an enigma, banning and taxation “doesn’t work” when it comes to social media, vapes etc. but is the only solution for upf and fizzy drinks.

Isn’t it funny that all the clued up perfect parents with perfect children, who spend hours boiling bones for a week’s worth of soup who home cook from scratch who can see the obvious easy answer so processed food all happen to be on Reddit and able to post in this thread.

The problem is part of the cause is the increase in single parent households and that both parents now need to work full time. Good food isn’t actually that expensive, massive bags of carrots are pennies for example. But there isn’t a “mum” at home to make those home cook meals. Given that it’s the mothers that need time off following child birth. How do you solve for this without regressing on decades of societal change in women working and their rights?

Need to bring back that bellys gonna get ya reebok advert

Need to look at how cheap this food is compared to real food… cost of living means many families can only afford the cheapest crap, often on a weekly budget.

To bulk buy is a privilege, good food is a privilege, a safe home is a privilege, being educated on self sufficiency is a privilege…

I feel we need to look at the problem, not a symptom of the problem.

Some friendly advice for once (because I often get temp banned)

If you are a parent concerned about your child, or even a youngster worried about your weight and are too shy to do anything in public, buy a VR headset like the Meta 3/Meta 3S (depending on your vision needs) and download the boxing fitness apps like Les Mills (one time purchase), or FitXR (sub)

Don’t go for speed (due to bad form/tennis elbow), go for proper form/endurance. Treat it like the old P90 regimes, after 3 months you will have sweat the weight off.

If your child doesn’t like overtly fitness apps, you can buy games like star wars, or first person hack and slash games that are basically like skyrim. Its about getting up and staying up to move your arms around.

Treat it as a family investment, so everyone in the house gets to use it at different times and the whole family benefit from basically “one gym subscription”

We live in a culture of excuses. People aren’t accountable, they’re helpless victims. We can’t be blamed for the food we choose to put in our mouths. It isn’t our fault that we opted to drive around the corner instead of walk to the shop.

We only ate what the delivery bloke gave us. It isn’t our weak parenting to blame for our children’s behavior or their mental health. It isn’t even our job to toilet train them before they get to school (that’s not our fault either).

What a terrible time to be alive. How awful of the world to make us so helpless.

> “If you live in a deprived community or household

This is a point I think a lot of people are missing here.

While of course, the parent is the one feeding the children and deciding what is bought. When you live in a deprived region, it is insidious in how it can affect every facet of life from healthcare, education, lifestyle, opportunities. Poorer outcomes across a range of society are well known.

When a person has not been given a proper dietary education in the first place how can they be expected to apply that to their children?

I see so many fallacies that people fall for, even though they may know you should have fruit and vegetables in your diet somewhere, there are some things that trick up larger numbers of people.

Like, fruit juices being one of them. I have seen SO MANY people who swap fizzy pop for fruit juices, thinking that they are making a healthy choice that will help them lose weight. But the weight doesn’t go and why? Eating an apple is healthy but drinking bottles of fruit flavoured sugar and pulp is not. Juices can be some of the most calorific and sugar filled drinks out there. Orange juice being one of the worst. You may as well have a can of cola because in some juices, you are drinking the same if not more sugar per ml!

Another is cereal bars/protein bars – unless you have a medical or athletic reason for needing to intake protein. These bars are so unhealthy, full of dense calories and high fat contents.

Then there is the fact that sugar is added to food most people would not think it is in – like bread and pasta sauce. So not only all there all the tricks like I have mentioned above that have people consuming more calories and sugars than they understood, but then there is added hidden sugar to foods that you could argue it has no place being in.

The cards are stacked against someone unless they have had a decent education that has really taught them how to assess their food and the nutrition it provides, how to make better choices for their needs at the supermarket, what foods provide for different calorie/nutrient needs.

To add on top of that the pressure and daily life of a working family where the priority is just to make sure no one goes hungry and everyone is fed daily in a world where healthy food is harder to find, variety harder to access and it is more expensive.

If you look at Mince you can see it clear as day, the less fat in the meat, the more expensive and smaller the amount of mince g per bag gets.

How are people who haven’t had this education, who are trying to get through their daily life- working, tired, busy with all kinds of things, supposed to find the time to stand and calculate things like sugar content, fat content, nutritional % when they just need to grab something that will make everyone happy for dinner that cooks quickly and isn’t going to cost a ridiculous amount.

There is so much more to it. Like how people who struggle to find work or any opportunities can become depressed, many depressed people will turn to food for comfort if they are not the drinking/drugs type.

I have learned these things because I had a family who were sport oriented, in local football teams, in highly active jobs that required fitness – my grandad was a judo champion, my uncles in the army, my dad was a lifeguard and swimming teacher, my other grandad cycled 40+for miles everyday for fun – we were not usual in our village and I credit the education they directly gave me for what I know and do now with my diet choices. My school and the world around me certainly did not teach me anything beyond the bare basics.

I see a startling amount of middle age people being diagnosed with diet induced diabetes type 2, high blood pressure and other health problems relating to diet intake and long term effects who only really saw how poor their nutrition was when they were at the GP being told they needed to go on medication, who could attribute at least one major source of sugar/calories/cholesterol they did not fully understand could affect them like this.

Parents are the responsible party.

If they chooses to buy their kids crap and choose to not don’t do anything for exercise then you failed as a parent.

There is no excuse.

Not I’m tired from work slow cookers, timer on a Rice cooker(you will be surprised what a rice cooker can actually do) and batch cooking for the microwave is a thing.

Can’t cook youtube and a million web pages and cooke books exists. There is zero skill needed to cook a good health meal.

Can’t get the kid to exercise. You are the parent it your responsibility to encourage and promote healthy lifestyles.