The Government is in denial about childhood obesity

I am 82. My mother told me this and she had it from her mother – it is very beautifully put and we should all become familiar with it.

We spent between £4million and £7 million for our elite athletes to win each medal at Rio. Good for them; it does the country good. None of them were fat (some were very well muscled) so clearly exercise is good for your body. I would like to see a good chunk of that money spent benefiting a much greater number of people, starting with children in school
– I’d like to see mandatory exercise supervised by qualified people,
– I’d like to see competitive sports played in school in reasonable facilities,
– I’d like to see local sensibly priced sports centres where any child could go to pursue their interests
– from where talented people could be taken, if they wish, to further training for the benefit of UK competition.
It’s essentially National Lottery money that many of us pay into. It needs spending more widely. We might then see fewer fat kids and less obesity in future generations. Adults may be past educating, but our children are not; we should be looking out for them before it is too late.

In the same vein it would be a good idea to make all Council-run gyms free to use. And build more of them; the money to come from the vast sums that we’ll save as a consequence of Brexit and the surplus left from the NHS after they also benefit from the extra £360m per week they’ll be getting.

Schools do have mandatory sport lessons and they do bring in experts. However, a child cannot go to the gym, until they are 16, by which time the problem is there. Slimming World now have young slimmers. I think the problem is that ‘healthy food’ is expensive. So is sgoing wimming and playing outside school sport. If these were free, or cheaper, less people would be overweight. No one wants to overweight, but u can’t always afford the tools in which to loose it.

I guess some of them can’t keep up and haven’t reached the gates by the time you and yours have got away, Karen! I think there are several demographic, societal and cultural influences behind the data and the picture is far from consistent across the country.

I don’t see much gross obesity in children but there are plenty of youngsters who are obviously overweight.

We were followed through a checkout earlier today by a couple of women with a young girl [about six or seven] who was helping them unload their trolley. The women were in their late twenties/early thirties and it is no exaggeration to say they were enormous. I noticed there were eight of the biggest bottles of cola available, two big pizzas, three giant bags of crisps, various other drinks, tubs of ice cream, three large boxes of sugary cereals, two large white sliced loaves, and several other unhealthy foods. Not a single item of fresh or healthy food came out of the trolley. Perhaps this wasn’t their regular diet and they might have been getting stuff in for a party over the bank holiday weekend, but my feeling was that they were no strangers to that menu. The little girl was not obese but starting to get bulbous as you would if you were brought up in such a household. I was so tempted to make a sarcastic remark but I restrained myself and looked the other way.

That is very interesting John Ward. Those young ladies may be the first or second generation that eat like that. I see that the items in their trolley were all very heavy in carbohydrates. Carbohydrates are very easily turned into glucose by the body which issues insulin to aid the storage of glucose in the tissue and muscle cells.

If there is any glucose left over it is turned into triglycerides and the insulin stores that in the fat cells and you put on weight. Insulin does not have the ability to remove triglycerides from the fat cells so if you wish to eat in that fashion then you are on a ratchet which only goes one way.

This accounts for the size of the young ladies and I think I can predict that the child will be going the same way in the future.

Interestingly when you are questioned about any metabolic syndrome you are always asked if any blood relatives have it to see if it is familial (genetic). They never ask if a husband/wife has it. The Health Service has a blind eye when it comes to nutrition. If food is the problem then people sitting round the same table may all be fat because they are eating the same diet.

These comments are aimed at John’s comments below.

I know that sometimes eating sensibly is more expensive. The lesson has to be leaned though is that eating carbohydrates all the time will kill you. Chips, pizzas. dippers, nuggets, sausages, goujon, fingers, rice, potatoes, anything made with flour. Eat something else occasionally it could save your life.

The issue of eating more fat to reduce weight gain is gaining credibility. Seems counter intuitive, but it would appear it’s not fat per se that’s at the root of the problem. It would seem to be mainly convenience foods – with crisps in particular heading the list of deadly delicacies – and fizzy drinks. On the fizzy drink point, there’s now conclusive evidence that drinking sugar-free fizzy drinks has much the same effect as the sugared variety on the body’s metabolism.

The weight of evidence, however, increasingly fingers carbohydrates as the villains of the piece, and sweet things appeal to kids.

“Teenagers in the UK consume around 77 litres of sugary drinks every year – enough to fill a bathtub, according to “shocking” results of a survey.
The survey carried out in 2015 found a similar pattern across all ages of children, with sugar consumption far in excess of recommended levels.
Compiled by charity Cancer Research UK, it found that pre-school children drank close to 70 cans of fizzy cola a year.
Meanwhile, children aged four to 10 drank almost 110 cans a year and teenagers guzzled over 234 cans.
The findings help support calls for measures to stem the flow of sugar consumption.
These figures are an improvement on those recorded in 2014 and it is hoped a planned UK tax on sugary drinks will continue to curb consumption. However critics say this is too little, too late.”