We are told that the obesity epidemic is largely down to gluttony and sloth.
Leaving gluttony aside I'd like to adress the sloth side of the equation, with emphasis on children.
Kids spend too much time in front of the TV and computer we are told and as a consequence they're getting fatter. It's an easy cliche to swallow and doesn't take much thinking about. So let's take another look.
I was raised in the 50's and 60's and I'd like to compare the activities of me and my contemporaries with kids today.
Playtime looks just the same to me now as then, the screaming excitement and running around are exactly paralleled (and the overweight kids are doing just as much). I walked to school, (yes, the school run winds me up as well, but looking at it a little deeper it means those misguided folk love and care for their kids as much as I do) but when I got home I did no exercise whatsoever - I mainly read and listened to the radio. I had no interest in football (filling my leisure with angling) and was always rail thin, as were my school mates. But I notice nowadays the pitches round here on a Saturday are always full of kids racing around. I don't think they'd swap their football for their PSP's. Likewise there are generally lots of kids in our local pool and playgrounds!
This is just a snapshot of a subject too big to address in a blog post, but you probably get my drift. In my day there was no emphasis on the benefits of exercise for weight loss (the craze started in the 70's), but fat kids were the exception rather than the rule. Now it's a world wide epidemic!
There has to be a reason, outside of exercise, for obese 6 month old babies and children undergoing bariatric surgery:
i was born in 1954 and two things strike me immediately about our lifestyles now.First is the growth of "fast food" outlets, they are everywhere (particularly aware at the moment as trying to lose weight). Secondly, the use of cars, mother in law full of tales about pushing shopping back in the pram and husband remembers having to walk!
People are always trying to give me a lift and look in pity at me when I say I would rather walk.
Looking back at family photos I think we all looked pretty chubby, but back then that was a sign of good health and in my opinion it was!
I agree and I think I'd put them the other way around. Everything is just set up for cars as the default now. Lots of them. I turn up places by bicycle and there's rarely anywhere to park it unless there's a locally-owned shop or a public building nearby, but almost every office outside the old town centre has a car park. But you can't prove this as a cause, obesity and car use are correlated, but so are lots of things.
Fast food outlets - particularly the chains like Subway and MuckyD (look over their back gate and tell me if you want to eat there ever again) - are widespread but it's easier to regard them as optional. If you need a quick meal out, support the simpler local fast food providers, the local bakeries and cafes that make food quickly yet simply (Stones on Knightstone Island if you're in Weston-super-Mare, for example) and probably pick their ingredients for taste and quality, rather than how many the supplier can deliver cheaply. If you have to pick a chain somewhere, I suggest the older pub chains (Marstons, Whitbread/table-table/Brewsters) or the refurbished Little Chefs may be better than the American imports.
I think that probably you are looking at this with some tinting around the edges I would think that in your childhood and teenage years you walked much more than a child / teenager today. This in itself would have been hugely beneficial in the calculation of energy consumed and energy expended. You probably also did not view spending a Saturday in a shopping centre eating donuts and drinking soda drinks as your leisure activity. More likely as kids of your generation did you where a member of an organised group scouts or similar. Whilst you said I won't mention gluttony I would also say that in general terms your diet was less processed and as such you would have had less SUGAR in your diet overall. Soda drinks are a big culprit of the hidden sugar in a child's diet today and they are absolutely more sedentary this combined with the explosion of quick service restaurants of all types with heavily processed foods and high starch and sugar contents are the main issues surrounding kids helath today. It is true that previous generations had higher fat diets BUT they had the unseen benefit of walking and manual labour and where far less sedentary a quick look at car ownership will give you all you need to know about how our lives have changed. Much more than we first think it is the compound effect that matters here starting with the mothers diet in pregnancy. Lots of stuff has changed the important thing is how do we address it? What if anything can be done?
I was a child of the 50/60s and adored sport of all types. Our school had the best of both inside and outside sports and gymnastics facilities. I think the main reason for the obese children is diet too much rubbish. I would also mention that many of those school run parents are no so much being loving parents as rushing to work but modern life has dictated this. However I know from friends grandchildren that com games and the television are used as baby sitters but children can no longer roam free the way we could and I was a real tomboy so outside and the countryside was of enormous interest to me and I was never still and even though television was quite new then I had no interest.
When I was a child, (1950s as well!) I remember my Dad having a breakfast of bacon and eggs, washed down with two cups of tea with two sugars. He would get on his bike and pedal away with a billycan of hot sweet tea and his snap tin with two rounds of sandwiches with cheese, tomatoes and a piece of Mum's homemade fruit cake. An orange or apple completed the meal. Tea time came and we would have a full home cooked meal, meat, potatoes and vegetables with dessert to follow. After I had gone to bed, Dad would have a pint mug of cocoa with full fat milk and two teaspoons of sugar and cheese and crackers! He never got heavier than 8stone 7lbs. His job? He worked out of doors on a plant nursery and worked from dawn until dusk, in all weathers. He lived until he was 87 years old from cancer brought on by the Players cigarettes he smoked as a young man, he reckoned. Either that, or all the DDT he sprayed on the plants in the 1950s!!
My parents' generation ate a lot more calories than we do today, because they didn't have cars (couldn't afford one!) and had to walk or bike everywhere. I walked a mile to the busstop to get the bus to school, and still walk everywhere. I have tried, and failed, my test 4 times so I don't drive. I have to walk everywhere if the busses are not running!!
I agree about the fast food outlets, and also blame the schools for taking proper domestic science off the curriculum. It's all very well knowing how to lay out a kitchen or the minerals in an apple but if you don't know how to cook how can you feed yourself properly! I had to teach both my daughters to cook, even though they both took "food technology" at school!!!
My two older grandchildren went through the obesity test brought in by the last government and they were told that they were overweight. My grandson, aged 12 at the time, by 3 lbs and my granddaughter, by 1 lb. For over a month we had trouble getting them to eat anything!! They were so worried about getting fat! What worries me is that we are raising a whole generation of anorexics!!!
They walk, play, are active after school, with football, Sea Cadets, band practice and cycling and they eat a healthy balanced diet with chocolate as a treat or reward plenty fruit and vegetables and sugar free drinks and semi skimmed milk.
They are doing well at school and now have a much healthier outlook on food after a struggle!!
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