Is your child overweight or obese? Here's how you can help

One in five British children leaving primary school are obese, and one in three are overweight. It's time to rethink our attitude to food

Child holding donuts up to his eyes
Do we need to take a closer look at what we're feeding our children?  Credit: Alamy

What with working from home, schooling at the kitchen table, sports facilities closed and even meeting friends in the park rationed, the past 15 months have been a challenge for parents and children alike. Is it any wonder that the kids have spent more time than ever watching screens of one kind or another, while exhausted parents reach for a bag of crisps come lunchtime? “Anything to get through” has been our mantra.

But for most of us, whether we’re parents, concerned friends or relatives, there’s a niggling awareness that the health of our kids is taking a serious battering. It’s not a new issue, of course. Lord Coe, speaking on the BBC Today programme on Thursday, admitted that “between the ages of 10 and 14, children become 50 per cent less active”.

Child obesity is a growing problem worldwide, with the World Health Organisation estimating that while in 1975 less than one per cent of children and adolescents were obese, the latest figures (compiled before the pandemic) stand at around seven per cent. In the UK, one in five British children leaving primary school are obese. Add in the children who are “just” overweight and the numbers grow to one in three.

Not only are these children at higher risk of health problems, but they’re more likely to be victims of bullying and suffer mental health issues as a result. As obese children move to adulthood, they are twice as likely as their less weighty pals to become obese adults – and complications from obesity currently cost the NHS over £6 billion a year.

Despite the fanfare over the Government’s Obesity Strategy announced last summer, with kids’ activity seriously down during lockdown (according to Sport England) and data published in the UK’s National Food Strategy review indicating that children ate more junk food and snacks but less fruit and vegetables during that time, it’s likely these figures will get worse.

Junk food, it seems, just keeps jutting in. Brace yourself if you haven't yet watched Dr Chris van Tulleken’s BBC programme, What Are We Feeding Our Kids? which aired on May 27 and shows how a diet of ultra-processed food caused his body to age by 10 years. And yet children are exposed to 15 billion adverts for “High Fat Sugar or Salt” foods a year online alone, promotions that amount to a major industry in themselves.

But the recent breakthrough, declared in the Queen’s speech, that advertising of HFSS foods will be outlawed online as well as before 9pm on TV, is encouraging.

It comes after pressure from a raft of organisations, including Public Health England and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health – and from Bite Back 2030, a youth-led group founded by Jamie Oliver and Norwegian philanthropist Nicolai Tangen in 2019, which campaigns for fairer, healthier food for young people.

But whether it was that which focused the Government’s mind, or Boris’s brush with death while fighting Covid-19 a year ago, is not clear. Certainly the Prime Minister blames the severity of his bout with the virus on his obesity: he was reported to have a BMI of over 36 when he was admitted to St Thomas’s Hospital in April 2020. He’s right, as Public Health England estimated that having a BMI of 35 to 40 could increase a person’s chances of dying from Covid-19 by 40 per cent.

So will a clampdown on advertising be enough to reverse the trend? The industry argues that there is no conclusive evidence that advertising and obesity are related. The Internet Advertising Bureau released a statement in response, urging the Government “to reconsider the smarter, evidence-led solutions that can be delivered more quickly and effectively by the existing regulatory system”.

Health campaigners disagree. The Obesity Health Alliance – an alliance of 44 health charities, medical colleges and campaign groups – has long campaigned for an end to junk food advertising to children. And it’s hard not to believe that a constant bombardment with enticing ads makes a difference. A recent experiment by Bite Back exposed eight teenagers to advertising for fried chicken, before taking each one separately to a restaurant and asking them to order from a menu of 50 items. They all chose fried chicken – even when they had no particular memory of seeing the advertisements.

Just how flooded your environment is with junk-food options depends on how affluent your area is. Data from Public Health England shows that more deprived areas of the country have as many as nine times more fast-food outlets per person as the most affluent areas, and there is a growing (although not conclusive) body of evidence linking exposure to fast-food outlets with obesity. According to Dr Max Davie, officer for health improvement at the Royal College of Paediatrics, childhood obesity “is becoming a disease of poverty, linked to the conditions people on low incomes live in: more insecurity, longer working hours, less access to healthy food because of price” – all issues highlighted in Marcus Rashford’s Feeding Britain’s Children campaign.

Which doesn’t mean that more well-off kids are immune to the problem, just that it is easier to avoid. The solution will involve all of us rethinking our attitudes to food, says Davie.

“It isn’t something that a single magic bullet is going to solve.” First off? “The first priority is for the plan to be implemented,” Davie says. It’s time to stop talking, and start walking.

THE TEEN CAMPAIGNER

Christina Adane
Christina Adane Credit: Heathcliff O'Malley

Junk food ads have been junked, and one teenager at least is delighted. Seventeen-year-old Christina Adane chairs the youth board of Bite Back 2030. When she heard the news about the ban, she was “absolutely shocked”.

The victory for Bite Back and Adane has capped a whirlwind six months for the Lambeth teen. In November she was listed as one of the 100 most influential women in the world by the BBC, and in December she featured on Meghan and Harry’s first podcast for their charity, Archewell. “It was mad,” she recalls. “I had 24 hours to think about what to say and record it.”

This Friday, Adane will be appearing in a free online event as part of the British Library Food Season. A film Adane made with Giles Coren and two other Bite Back campaigners, Barakat Omomayowa and Jacob Rosenberg, will feature in its  closing event. In “The Fast Food Flood”, the three young people show how the proliferation of fast-food joints close to schools, and the cheap appeal of junk food, is an irresistible draw for kids – especially when, as Adane says, “companies spend a fortune making things attractive to us.”

She adds: “We need to reimagine our high streets. Instead of a chicken shop or McDonald’s, we want a place that is safe and dry, with healthy, nutritious food.”

Sounds like an old-fashioned youth club – but good luck finding one, as funding cuts have led to the closure of 763 in the past decade. So we are left with the commercial replacement: fast-food shops. It’s what Professor Chris Whitty calls “a highly obesogenic environment”, or as Nicki Whiteman, Bite Back’s director of communications, puts it: “When you’re in an environment flooded with junk food… behaviour change is nigh on impossible.”

Adane sees cutting back on ads as only part of the solution. “It’s a systemic issue that comes from marketing, advertising and environment,” she says. “All these other things we have to battle with as young people.”

The time between leaving school and going home is the weakest point, according to Bite Back, as young people – who may not have especially appealing home lives – gather. How do you avoid this trap, I ask Adane, who is far from obese. “I couldn’t for a long time,” she replied. “The chicken and chip shop is the only safe and dry place kids have after school when they want to hang out with their friends. When free school meals aren’t that great, of course they are going to chill where there is affordable food, even though it is not nutritious.”

So how does Adane’s reimagined future look? Plenty of clean, attractive water fountains to start with: the one at her sixth-form college is covered in dust so “no one wants to touch it”. Better school meals: as a recipient of free meals herself, Adane is keenly aware of the shortcomings; and her Ethiopian mother was, she says, shocked by the poor quality. And maybe the return ofthose youth clubs. “Somewhere to go and just be young.”

The Fast Food Flood, May 28, 1.15pm

FIGHTING OBESITY - AND THE STIGMA THAT SURROUNDS IT

Girl eating hamburger
Credit: Alamy

While campaigner Christina Adane applauds the new advertising measures, she and Bite Back don’t support some of Johnson’s rhetoric that has gone alongside the Obesity Strategy, in particular his line that tackling weight issues is a matter of “personal responsibility”. Adane stresses that “no one chooses to be obese.”

This is echoed by Professor Whitty, who, speaking at a lecture in March, warned against stigmatising obesity. “There is no reason why people should feel any shame or embarrassment about obesity,” he said. “It is purely something to be concerned about from a medical point of view.”

Davie argues that it’s important to be mindful of cost. “Asking, ‘Have you tried eating apples rather than crisps?’ when five apples are going to cost more than five bags of crisps it isn’t helpful.”

Judy More, a leading children’s dietician, points out that there may be other factors. “A lot of parents worry about children not eating enough rather than eating too much,” and this may stop them from noticing that “some children don’t have the feeling of satiety that others do”.

How you can help

  •  Act soon by “engaging with health visitors and parenting support services”, says Dr Davie. “It needs to be tackled from early years.” He recommends the Henry scheme for advice about diet for younger children; see also Bite Back’s Cook with Jack series.
  • Think twice before using food as a reward or “behaviour management”. According to Davie “it will not only increase the consumption of those foods, but also associate them with positivity and pleasure. It’s better to give positive attention when the child is doing the right thing.”
  • Make sure children get enough sleep, which may mean banning screens an hour before bed. “The less you sleep, the bigger your appetite for sweet or fatty foods,” says Davie. “So you will gain weight and then not sleep as well, because people who are obese sleep worse.”
  • Ask your children’s school what their policy is on food brought in for break time or in lunchboxes. If they have one but don’t enforce it, put pressure on them to make the rules meaningful.
  • Be careful with snacks. Pre-school children should have a mid-morning and mid-afternoon top-up, says Judy More, and older children need something nourishing when they come in from school – nuts, yogurt, veg sticks and dips.
  • Cut out sugary drinks, which make up as much as 30 per cent of children’s sugar intake. Juices and bottled smoothies contain as much easily-absorbed sugar as most fizzy drinks, so limit them to once a day.
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