Childhood obesity strategy "lite"

I have read and enjoyed this thread especially the usual logical and sensible posts from bags who always seems to put exactly what I would like to say if only I was as able as her.

Just to open up the discussion a bit more, can I pose the question :

Given the concerns of the medical profession about the obesity epidemic in this country, should food rationing be introduced as it was in WWII? The Nation's health was probably at its best ever then, even though many people were hungry and longed for sweetness.

I think it is about what you eat. The problem about "calories in calories out" is that it implies that 1000 calories of doughnuts and fizzy pop is equal to 1000 calories of meat, fish and vegetables. Which it clearly isn't if we want to be remotely healthy.
I think we all ate sugar in our youth. It was mostly real sugar that you could measure though, not concealed in processed food and appearing under different names. If we asked for too many sweet things we were told not to be greedy. It wasn't cheaper tha staple foods either.
For me the basic message is still "eat real food".
Exercise is important but it should be about basic fitness, not burning off food that the body doesn't need.

Soryy, 'let them' not 'lthem'. No edit button!

I am quite small and have always watched my weight. When I had two children I ensured they had a healthy diet and didn't lthem binge on sweet or fatty foods. However, they inherited my husband's genes. He wasn't too large (until recently when he gave up the fight) but his mother, uncle and maternal grandparents were huge. In consequence, both children have a weight problem. My son is about three stone overweight and my daughter yo-yos.

I am, of course, extremely distressed by this given my efforts at self restrainst and my desire for my children to live long, healthy lives. What I have noticed though is that it is not a metabolism problem but a willpower problem. They can lose weight when they 'get a grip' but they cannot deny themselves for long.

Thanks, goab. And you can't really blame them when their lives are stressful.

Finally, just to push home my basic point: people cleverer than me and with far more scientific knowledge get fat too. It's about quantity not quality or knowing how many grams of this that or the other are in your food.

Quite, bags. It's hard. People want easy.

Besides which, eating sugary breakfast cereals doesn't make a person unhealthy. From the age of eleven when I started getting my own breakfast, I ate cornflakes well sprinkled with sugar pretty much every morning for the next seven years (my fast growing teenage years). It didn't affect my health because I didn't eat too much of that or anything else. We need to stop beating about the bush: it's eating too much that's the problem at the bottom of any obesity that isn't caused by a medical problem.

And the further problem is that it's hard to stop. That is the problem we should be tackling.

The food manufacturers are there to make a profit for their shareholders, mumsy. My food choices and my health are not their responsibility and I wouldn't want them to be. Freedom of choice is good. Suffering the consequences of unhealthy choices is not good, just inevitable reality. I think it is wrong to blame someone else.

If people who have been to school for twelve or thirteen years can't make some useful sense of food labels in this way, then our schools are failing and we should sack all the teachers.

Silly? Yes, it is. People are not that stupid or uneducated. Stop making excuses for them in such a patronising way, jess. I'm not saying that in a nasty way but I really do think your view of people's thinking ability re food is patronising.

I also think people know full well that consistently eating less than they want to eat will ensure that, slowly but surely, they will lose weight. The problem is not lack of knowledge; the problem is that eating less than you really feel like eating over a long period is hard. It's a very recent thing we've had to adapt to in evolutionary terms so it's going to remain hard for most people for quite a few generations to come, I reckon.

I still maintain that the information is there for anyone who wants to use it and you don't have to use very much of it to garner a very good idea of what's in a food. Even without reading labels, I reckon people know, for example, that buying plain porridge oats and eating it with some raisins, or even some syrup (or chocolate spread like my grandsons have) is not only cheaper but also better food value than prepared and fancy packeted stuff. But they don't like it as much. There's the rub.

I think companies who add all this sugar in their foods and drink should also be accountable as well as us the consumers who are having to pay the sugar tax!

I don't think one needs a high level of scientific knowledge to look at and understand the basic information on food labels. You only have to look at values per 100g and compare that with other similar products.

So, using the example jess gave of Cheerios:
- calories per 100g = 378
- carbohydrates per 100g = 74g
- of which sugars per 100g = 21g

I happen to have some Jordans Country Crisp Chunky Nuts cereal in my cupboard, which I eat sometimes with an own brand fruit and fibre cereal. Jordans box has:

- calories per 100g = 477
- carbs = 58.7
- sugars = 18.8

So it's higher in calories but lower in carbs and sugar. Surely it doesn't take much food knowledge to know that it's probably the nuts that are providing the extra calories and accounting for the lower sugar content? The nuts also provide more fat, more protein, and more fibre. Better food value, in short.

You don't have to read the whole blurb to get a good idea from a food packet.

Another basic idea is the order in which ingredients are listed because the proportions are listed in descending order. So, for example from Jordans packet: wholegrain cereals, sugar, nuts and then a few peripherals. Compare with the Cheerios: wholegrain cereals, sugar, peripherals.

Food value-wise, not a lot of difference between them, then, except for the nuts.

And Anya's posts re learning how to cook meals from scratch, and easy access for all to fruit and veg.

But no foods are inherently fattening, including cheerios. What's causing obesity is eating too much of the wrong things. We are falling into the trap of demonising certain foods, without thinking about the impact our overall diet is having on our waistlines. Together with lack of activity, too much food, and particularly too much of the wrong food, is a toxic combination.

We know where we are going wrong. But it's easier for many people to blame poor education and poor labelling for the crisis when in fact the problem for many of us is lack of discipline and willpower. It's actually quite simple.

Eat less, move more. Or more specifically, eat substantially less and move substantially more. And stick with it.

Here you go
"The school food standards apply to all maintained schools, and academies that were founded before 2010 and after June 2014. They must provide:
high-quality meat, poultry or oily fish
fruit and vegetables
bread, other cereals and potatoes
There can’t be:
drinks with added sugar, crisps, chocolate or sweets in school meals and vending machines
more than 2 portions of deep-fried, battered or breaded food a week".

My GD's school was founded between thise dates but has obviously chosen to adhere to the policy.

I was thinking about the way French schools enforce the healthy three-course lunch across the whole country. Firstly it is very rare for packed lunches to be allowed, lunchtime is an hour and a half and if you don't like school lunches, you take them home and feed them (not many do). This means that even our little tots leave the village on the school bus just after eight and are delivered back at about 5.45. Can't see that going down well in the UK?

I think it is more complicated than that and only applies to Academies started between certain dates. Have to say the Academy my eldest GD attends has a pretty good policy which is implemented in the food available, though.

We have a government that chooses not to spend money on health education advertising. You're supposed to go and look for the information on the web these days. Tricky if you cant afford a computer or smart phone.

One of the problems with schools is that "free schools" and academies in England are allowed to do their own thing. Under the Blair government state schools were not allowed to sell sugary drinks or confectionary on the premises and school dinners were highly regulated e.g. you were not allowed to serve chips every day. In academies and free schools they can make their own policies.

I think one of the easiest things to target should be sugary drinks. Zero nutritional benefit, bad for teeth and water is cheaper.
Don't want to repeat my nine suggestions for action from earlier in the thread, but a public health campaign ought to be fairly easy for that.

I agree with you, Jess. I have a problem with omitting the total amount of carbohydrates from the main colour-coded label (although it's there underneath). The reason for that is that I eat a low carb diet and the total carbs aren't always quite so obvious..

Sausage rolls and Mars Bars don't make people fat. Eating too many calories lead to obesity. I'm surprised nobody has mentioned portion control as a way of cutting down childhood obesity.

PS. I realise that a diet made up of 100% sausage rolls and Mars Bars would lead to maltnutrition, but that's a different issue.

Thatbags I believe you have a high level of scientific education. Therefore I expect you find it quite easy to look at food labelling and work out what the information about ingredients and nutritional contents means. However many of the parents who have overweight kids don't have that advantage.
Here's the information on Cheerios breakfast cereal for those who don't have a packet (and a magnifying glass) to hand. It is awash with confusing information.
I think it would require a grasp of science equivalent to an A level to get your head around all this information, along with pretty good arithmetic. I could write quite a challenging set of exam questions e.g.

If a your child serves herself with 10 spoonfuls of cheerios and eats them in front of the TV without the addition of milk, what % of her daily recommended amount is she consuming for:
a/ calories, b/fibre c/ Vitamin C.
??

www.tesco.com/groceries/product/details/?id=261370566

Sorry, goab, I see I've repeated what you said: that anyone who wants to can find out what is in their food.

True, anya and goab about the small print etc. But anyone who actually wants to know can find out because the information is there and freely available. I have yet to find a label where "sugars" was/were ambiguous.

Plus, with a Mars bar and similar stuff, anyone with two brain cells knows it's nearly all sugar.

Don't they?

anya I'm with you on labelling; however nutritional information is easily accessible via other sources and takes seconds to look up.

People who want to know, will make sure they do.

An example for you bags ...mars bars and snickers. Usually their info is hidden under that fold in the paper and very hard to find never mind read.

Which is of course why I never eat them

thatbags I find that the information is all there, but it can sometimes be ambiguous. Another thing: I can barely see it!

However, if you're motivated enough to look at a label you're probably motivated enough to attempt to understand it.

In that case, easy enough. However I bet most people don't even bother. In which case, labelling probably won't make a difference, clear or not.

Please could someone post an example of "unclear" food labelling. The labels I read are always very clear about ingredients, the proportions of fats and sugars and the number of calories per helping or per 100g.