Archived entries for Obesity

Strapping kids to a treadmill isn’t the answer

Building on his Health of the Nation post, Young Fabian Tim Nicholls takes another look at the importance of our relationship with food and argues that good habits need to start early.

In a previous post, I talked about the need for radical thinking to tackle increasing rates of obesity in the UK. Though I spoke in more general terms, particular attention needs to be paid to childhood obesity. This builds on the policy ideas in my last post: particularly vital is making good food cost less.

This is for two reasons. Firstly, if children grow up fit and healthy, they’re more likely to stay that way. Secondly, increasing rates of obesity in children are leading to rates of juvenile diabetes and other health conditions that are, in themselves, sufficient cause for action.

But what to do?

A great leap forward was made a couple of years ago. Say what you like about Jamie Oliver, he got school meals on the agenda and budgets were increased. Children were getting healthy food in schools and it was getting results. Already, there is news that this agenda is for the chop.

This would be a colossal mistake by the Government. This is not just because a move away from healthy school dinners will make our children less healthy; it is because the lessons you learn in early life are vital. If we can teach children about food – about what’s good for them and how much better you feel when you eat a balanced diet – half the battle is won.

Free school meals should be universal; ensuring that every child has one solid meal a day.

No school should be without a kitchen. Full stop.

Children should be involved in making dinners: not every day, but enough to give them a proper appreciation of what they are eating. This should not just be a schools agenda: we should be encouraging parents to cook with their children too.

But how do we do that when the work-life balance of many working families is so skewed and healthy food costs more? How does a single mother of three, who is working two jobs manage this? She would have to be Supermum. A living wage, childcare and flexible working should all tie explicitly into this agenda.

The point is that we should not just see child obesity as a health issue. It will not be fixed by strapping a child to a treadmill. To a child, life does not neatly split into home life and school life, it’s just life. A consistent message of healthy living has to span both.

The health of the nation

In this guest post Young Fabian Tim Nicholls looks at the issue of long-term challenge of obesity and asks how can we be radical but still sensitive on such a touchy and personal issue?

Last week, Anne Milton caused, in her own inimitable fashion, an all-too-minor stir when she suggested that overweight people should be called “fat” in order to motivate them to lose weight.

To say that obesity is a public health timebomb is axiomatic. Comparatively low food prices and increasingly sedentary lifestyles have caused our waistbands to expand. We’re getting bigger and our children are too. But it occurs to me that name-calling is not the best way to lessen our collective mass. It deserves more time and more debate.

Getting people to eat more healthily and exercise more (the one consistently proven weight-loss technique) requires a cultural shift on a daunting scale, but it also requires a proper understanding of the causes. The truth is that most people aren’t overweight because they want to be. Constraints on our time and our purses can make healthy living incredibly hard.

This requires much more than name-calling. In fact, in a society where the stick-thin are celebrated, to stigmatise being overweight is likely to have an anti-motivational effect. Furthermore, I don’t understand how the Right could accuse the last Government of making children too body-conscious, but stigmatise being overweight in a way that will clearly filter through to kids.

Change 4 Life, though much criticised, was a good programme that promoted healthy living in small – if you’ll forgive the pun – bite-sized chunks. But I think we have to go further; be more radical. Councils ban junk food shops near schools, but how do we get kids to not want to go to the chippy on the way home? Nutritional information covers our food packets, but how do we make sure this is understandable?

We have to look at all the behaviour that needs to change and we need to approach this from both the supply- and demand-sides. One of the ideas that interests me the most is to place an extra tax on junk/unhealthy food, in order to subsidise healthy food. The truth is that it is expensive to eat healthily. Subsidies would lower prices for consumers, but they will also force producers to change their behaviour. As prices for healthy food fall, demand will increase, with correlating calls for supply. In short, Burger King would move to selling healthy food.

Is this perfect? No. Is it complete? Clearly not. But the obesity epidemic in this country demands revolutionary and proactive solutions.

Public understanding is also key: we’ve got to move beyond “if you eat chocolate you’ll get fat”, because it’s not true and living without any chocolate would not, let’s face it, be much fun. Simple signs, like the traffic light system identify healthier food. But there is not yet a similar system for judging portion size.

It also demands wider thinking: this is not just a discussion about food. It’s about PE and health education in schools; strong and active family units; a living wage; greater corporate responsibility; tackling excessive alcohol consumption; and a better balance between work and family life.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to try to unpack some of these issues but what do people think about the issue?…

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