Obesity linked to poverty

Children should be taught to cook in schools they always used to. I have just grown beans and potatoes in lockdown seeds for beans from neighbour and an old potato from a bag delicious and free. Plenty of cheap meals can be made from chicken and mince just need onions carrots peppers etc batch cook and freeze. Lidl has offers every week on fresh fruit and veg so you buy the offers

I'm not that good but I do try but exercise ie walking is difficult pro tem. Being locked down didn't help.

My DC are good, though.

Callistemon thanks for the reply. DD is a good cook and knows what she should be eating. SiL wouldn’t know a saucepan from a grater. He has never cooked and never shopped. I suggested he go shopping with her to get some idea, but no go. I might quietly suggest those food boxes, that seems a good solution.They truly need to do something

DD started them in the hope that her partner would be inspired to cook on the nights she got home after 9pm.
It didn't really work but she enjoyed using them.

She was too skinny and wouldn't have bothered eating much otherwise so they were a good thing.

He's now 28, is vegetarian and eats his greens with gusto, Oppsminty my son is the same, struggled with vegetables when little, hated peas, would only eat chopped cucumber and diced tomatoes.......is now vegetarian, and stirs spinach into everything. But, going back the the OP, it is astonishing how many people are virtuously pointing out how many meals they can get from a chicken ( I believe 10 is the record, must be a bloody ostrich), how they all make every single meal from scratch, never, ever, eat junk food, blame young feckless parents......but we are the over weight generation, so was it our parents that got it wrong?

Franbern - our adult children can all cook. Just basic meals.
They had to take turns to make tea after school. But sorry to say that 3 out of the 4 now mainly buy take aways after work.
None of them are overweight though, except one SiL is rather chubby.
Another point - teenagers look at a lot of stuff about new recipes, which aren't always healthy. Talking to a friend, a mother of teens, I told her we had leftovers today. She said her children would never eat leftovers. She has to "serve" somethingdifferent every day! I told her I was shocked - they're hard up as I know.

Another question - are oven chips healthy?

Home economics is no longer a priority in the school curriculum most pupils are lucky if the get one or two terms and even then they are only about an hour long we had a full afternoon and it's been a lot more useful to me than some of the other subjects I was taught

Too much fat is also dangerous if you have to have surgery as an anaesthetist will usually ask a patient to lose weight before an operation if it isn't an urgent one.
Overweight patients are pretty high risk under an anaesthetic which is probably why so many died of Covid, not so much the Covid but the anaesthesia when being intubated.

Up to 25 BMI is ideal--over 30 is obese.

I haven’t read the full thread but I left apples out on my wall , last year, with a note saying. Help yourself and no one took any. I live in a lane where adults and children, walk, dog walk, cycle!

How sad Lyndie, I'd have been delighted---apple pies, stewed apples, baked apples, apple sponge. I'd have also left a donation too.

I am not and never was a great cook but my son was never a fat kid and isn’t a fat adult. However, we didn’t live on unhealthy food either. When he used to go kids clubs in the holidays he was the only one with a healthy lunchbox and he complained because none of the other kids would swap with him. Maybe genetics I don’t know. He cooks for himself and his wife.
As parents we should take responsibility for our children‘s health and diet and just maybe some of what we say and do will stick as they grow up.

In the 80s I had to take over a cookery class (older teenagers)for a teacher who was ill. Nice children but all they wanted to learn was how to make cakes and pizzas and had no interest at all in nutrition.

Jenpax I totally disagree. We were in the situation when my husband lost his job years ago. A, a Macdonald’s burger is not a meal and B, you can cook a pot of nutritious food for a family so much cheaper and it’s more filling. Salad isn’t that expensive if you shop around either to go with a pasta and homemade bolognese, it is if it’s all bought pre cut in bags. Fairy cakes cost hardly anything to make, milk is inexpensive and custard powder for a pudding. Homemade soup. Bananas are the cheapest most nutritious food you can buy already packed in a take away skin. People are too lazy to bother these days.

My son learnt to cook at school and it was healthy meals. He now does the cooking at home and they are far from overweight.

Also a delicate question, how many of us are overweight and not poor.

Growstuff the definition of harangued is

“ a scolding or a long or intense verbal attack; diatribe.
a long, passionate, and vehement speech, especially one delivered before a public gathering.
any long, pompous speech or writing of a tediously hortatory or didactic nature; sermonizing lecture or discourse.”

I was picking up on Oop’s hyperbole.

We seem to be blaming today's parenting skills for obesity. Look around to see very overweight people of all ages, maybe it's not just the quality of food but the quantity consumed.

Furret

Growstuff the definition of harangued is

“ a scolding or a long or intense verbal attack; diatribe.
a long, passionate, and vehement speech, especially one delivered before a public gathering.
any long, pompous speech or writing of a tediously hortatory or didactic nature; sermonizing lecture or discourse.”

I was picking up on Oop’s hyperbole.

My hyperbole?

Hilarious.

You clearly have no idea how intimidating and hurtful women can be towards others who choose (for whatever reason) not to breast feed.

And the definition of haranguing is spot on so thanks for posting!

Needless to say, there were no fat kids in my class either.
Nobody was rolling in money, but children were bought up properly with proper meals, exercise in the form of play, no snacking and were not all high as kites on E numbers and sugar.
Yes, we had sweeties, yes we had the occasional glass of fizzy pop, yes we had a take-away in the form of good old fish and chips (that was the nearest thing to fast food around).
We did not have crap food on every street corner, or the overwhelming amount of sweet stuff in shops and supermarkets everywhere, not to mention the adverts on TV. We were not chauffeured around in cars, we walked to school, and we ran around at playtime.
Girls had lessons in sewing and cooking, whilst boys had lessons in woodwork and metalwork.
The system worked.
But that was then and not now.
Life is easier now, and people become lazy, so unless parents get up off of their fat arses and make a change, we are always going to have fat kids.

That is sad Lyndie but I am not surprised. I was sad to see a homeless man at our community lunch pushing the greens to the edge of his plate as though they were a frill. His little DD was watching him.
I volunteer at a local leisure centre (I did before covid) One day I went into reception to see a huge box of lollipops - a catering jumbo pack - with a note on the side "for the Kiddies"
It is an uphill battle. (sigh)
And to think kids used to go "scrumping" for apples

As a child of the 50s I remember being poor, cold and often hungry, one of the best meals was bread and dripping. But my Mother was at home to do the cooking, cleaning, and also worked part time cleaning and sewing to fit in with school times. Somehow she made a chicken last for three days for a family of six, I still don't know how that worked. Society has changed so much and nowadays young women are not encouraged to stay at home with children. In order to have the things we are told will make us happy - house, car, TV, holidays etc - both parents have to work.

My observation is that it is young women who are mostly overweight/ obese, teenage boys and young men are mostly slim with legs like drainpipes in skinny jeans whereas some of the teenage girls and young women have legs that can only be described as tree trunks. I think it's becoming the norm and instead of dressing to disguise their bad points ie legs bums and bellies they seem to wear clingy clothes oblivious to what they look like lol.

And another thing to remember about today's society is the fear of "stranger danger" which developed since the 80's. Today's children are not able to go out by themselves exploring their neighbourhoods as we did on bikes or walking. If we do see groups of children/teenagers out on the streets they are seen to be "up to no good". So children don't get the same exercise and fresh air as we did in the "good old days".