Fat children, whose fault is it?

March 24, 2010 by admin
Filed under: Family 

There is a lot of discussion in the papers about Jamie Oliver’s trip to the States and how the general feeling is that he is losing a battle trying to convert the folk there to eat healthily and change the eating patterns inside the educational system.

It got me thinking, fat children, whose fault is it?

People seem to mostly blame the food industry. David Letterman says that you can’t lose weight unless you get medication and that so long as there is high fat food and high carbs available in the supermarkets, we may as well all but give up on healthy eating.

I’m no genius but I know that a bag of crisps isn’t good for me. I know that fizzy drinks are full of empty calories. I also know that apart from the school lunch, what my children consume is mostly my responsiblity. They don’t go shopping, they eat what I give them and what I fill my cupboards with, so surely if they get fat, that isn’t the food industry’s fault, it is mine.

Children come in all shapes and sizes, we are largely a product of our genetic make up and some of us will have slower metabolic rates than others. My youngest puts on weight much faster than her siblings, she’s by no means a skinny lass but if I let her drink fizzy drinks, snack on crisps and chocolates and eat croissants each day she would be enormous. So we try to educate her, teach her that those foods she would love to eat all of the time, she can have just some of the time. One day she’ll leave home and her food choices will be hers but at least whilst she lives at home I can try to give her the healthiest body that I can, the least fat around her organs that I can, whilst still allowing those treats now and then. When the fat starts to creep up, we just increase the amount of exercise that we do. Walking, cycling, on the scooter, dancing on the kitchen floor, joining a tennis group and in the summer daily swimming.

So I know there will be people that disagree with me, but for now, I still feel that fat children are the responsiblity of their parents. Yes there are fast food chains, yes the supermarkets are innundated with biscuits, crisps and cakes of each and every flavour. However what we put in our trolley is our choice and it should be a choice that we as parents take seriously.

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