Overweight Children - a conundrum

C

clofthwld

Well-known member
I'm overtired, it's 1:30 am but this is in my head and I have nowhere else to vent, so here I go:

When I was a kid in the 60's, I ate Lucky Charms for breakfast (we are Irish) and I always picked out all the marshmallow pieces and poured milk over them (I was the oldest and got up first to steal all the marshmallow pieces). Sometimes we ate Cream of Wheat with so much sugar in it that you couldn't see the wheat. For lunch, we ate school cafeteria poop, then for supper (my dear mother was the cheapest woman in our parish and Dad worked 2nd shift) we ate canned potatoes fried with hamburger & onion, chipped beef on toast, creamed chicken with peas on toast, etc.

On weekends we ate golumkis, lasagna with loads of mozz and riccota and noodles, and after church on Sundays we all went for a "special treat" to McDonalds'.

Anyway, I was a toothpick. A toothpick! I didn't develop breasts until I bought them 30 years later.

I ate Drakes cakes, penny candy, cotton candy...

Well, you get my drift.

Why are children so overweight nowadays? When I was in school, you'd have the occasional overweight kid, but they grew out of it as they got older.

We're supposedly eating healthier, yet our children are getting obese. Any ideas? Could it be all the preservatives? I just don't get it.

 
I would imagine there are a number of factors, but here are a few that affect...

...my family and our friends.

Living in a suburban area, within a couple of miles of the downtown core, we do not let our kids "run the neighborhood" every afternoon, and all day on Saturday. My kids get less exercise than we did.

There is more to keep kids occupied inside now than when we were kids, so even if kids can go out an play, they often choose video games, internet, Ipods, etc. No physical exercise.

Fast food is easier to get and cheap, and our kids, in general, have more pocket money to spend now than we did.

It is my personal belief that less families cook, and the ones that do, cook less often. There's take out... prepared processed foods and more stuff than ever for the microwave. That, as you pointed out, is nothing new, but combine it with so much less physical activity and you have a time bomb.

Less and less emphasis on P.E. in public schools. As budgets get tighter, the first things to go are PE, music, and the arts. For those so inclined, the pattern for a life-long love of physical activity is less likely to be formed in childhood.

Just my thoughts...

Michael

 
Physical exercise is probably a huge factor...

You're absolutely right, Michael. When I was a kid (in much safer days, of course), my mother would shove us out of the house and we spent our days in the woods; building treehouses or snow-forts, playing basketball or hide and seek, running in the fields, hiking up mountains. We only had to be home for dinner.

I was never allowed to watch much tv (of course, there were only 3 channels). Mighty Mouse, Boomtown, Wonderful World of Disney, Roy Rogers, Superman, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Leave It to Beaver(yikes, I'm on a nostalgia trip here)

PE in schools is non-existant. Back in the old days the emphasis used to be on the arts and now its on the sciences and technology. COMPUTERS.

 
Michaelø took the words right out of my mouth

I think many kids eat too much fat from fast food and pre-made food, and the exercise a lot less than we did.

 
I think you've hit it on the head - exercise and fast/processed foods...

Don't get me started - but unfortunately you did.....

We discussed this at length and researched it in our Nutrition class. While we did eat fatty foods and white sugar and white bread, on whole, we did eat more home cooked meals that were not quite so pre-made and ready - hence less processed than a lot of the foods eaten today. Yes it was canned green beans in the casserole but it was cooked from 'scratch' and the cook controlled the other ingredients that went into it. When you buy a green bean casserole out of the frozen foods section, you have no control.

Fast food is far more available and prevalent than it was back then. Back then it was as you said, a treat, a special occassion. And even restaruants back then made most of their food from scratch and not prepackaged convenience foods and sauces that required minimal prep.

We didn't have snack machines and coke machines in school and ate a fairly healthy lunch. We didn't have the choice to buy chicken nuggets and french fries every day for lunch (like my 14 year old typically does) nor did they serve Otis Spunkmeyer cookies. It was a big deal when we were finally allowed to purchase off a separate food bar that had hamburgers and pizza but I don't even think that was an every day thing but just once a week. But because they weren't trying to meet these government mandated ridiculous rules for school lunches, they cook cook tasty food that would satisfy the kids and could serve extra or larger portions. A friend was talking that her son is a big eater and after going to eat with him she understood his complaint - the portions were ridiculously small. This mandate is forcing kids to eat even less healthy in my opinion. Unless they are kids on meal tickets, they buy stuff like the chicken nuggets and french fries and a cookie and a bottle of water. Now doesn't that sound healthy? And then when they get home because they didn't like their lunch, they eat another meal of not so healthy options (thank goodness my daughter usually makes a meal of edamame or a bowl of some sort of beans I keep in the fridge most of the time) and then eat supper a couple of hours later.

PE was mandatory in school as was good old recess. We were allowed to go out and ride our bikes all over and I live in an upscale community and still worry that my daughter walks 3/10ths of a mile to get home - so I gave her a cell phone in case of any problems. Yes we have a generation of soccer kids but when we only do that a couple of hours a week and then run through a fast food joint as a substitute for putting home cooked food on the table, well, it just doesn't seem to balance itself out.

 
I totally agree. But genetics has a lot to do with it too.

My DH's side of the family is very skinny no matter what they do or eat. My family runs to plumpness. I have three kids...the oldest and middle child eat exactly the same thing, and get almost exactly the same amount of exercise. The oldest is mildly overweight and always has been, and the middle is skinny and always has been (the youngest is probably going to follow in his eldest brother's footsteps). I think in the days that kids got lots of exercise, the ones whose genetics run to obesity didn't show up until later in life. Now, it becomes apparent much sooner.

You see skinny people who eat whatever and get absolutely no exercise. Keira Knightly boasts about how she doesn't exercise at all. The luck of the genetic draw!

 
I agree on some points, but my parents never restricted our food intake...

In fact, when I was a kid, my Dad sent me down to the corner store to buy him $.36 packs of cigarettes (Working class hero) and always gave us extra to buy candy (but we rode our bikes!).

I don't think parents have the time anymore to instill in their children the fundamentals of life.

To be honest, I'm a smoker. From the time my kids were old enough to understand me I told them that, yes, I smoked, but that it was a stupid mistake I made as a teenager and that I wouldn't let them be that stupid.

I also told them that they were all going to college, that if they needed birth control devices they could come to me or my sister or I'd hunt them down and put them in nunneries.

They all went to college, none of them smoke, (well, not cigarettes), and my oldest daughter decided to get pregnant when she felt she was ready for it.

To keep this food-related:

REMOULADE SAUCE

3/4 cup mayonnaise
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
1 1/2 teaspoons whole-grain mustard
1 teaspoon tarragon vinegar
1/4 teaspoon Tabasco sauce
2 teaspoons drained tiny capers, chopped
1 tablespoon chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
1 scallion (3 inches of green left on), very thinly
sliced
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Combine ingredients in a bowl. Set aside, covered, in
the refrigerator.


Makes 1 cup (16 tablespoons).

NOTE: The BEST Tartar Sauce Ever!!
Don & I loved it w. crab cakes.

Simply Delicious® by Sheila Lukins

PARADE®
April 2002

 
Ye, the two "sizes" - Exercise and portion size, are definitely the biggest culprits

Since our kids don't play the same way we did, they get significantly less exercise. I remember, like clofthwld said, about going to the store to buy candy - but it was enjoyed after riding my bike to and from to get it, not like now. I'll bet we regularly logged 1-2 miles per day bike riding "for fun" as a kid!

Couple that with our appetites for super-size things, and it is definitely a problem.

Even if you don't eat a lot of fast food, have you really ever measured out an official serving size of food as listed on the pyramid? My nutritionist friend suggested I do that for a few days before I ate or served anything, and I was shocked at how much I was overserving myself and my family. I am much better at eye-balling a proper serving size now, which definitely helps.

 
Timely topic, my son's school just sent home a notice to parents today

I will quote part of it:

Did you know that for the first time in U.S. History, our children's life expectancy is less than our own? The onset of childhood obesity and diabetes are reasons for this. Did you know that 23.9% of XXX Unified School District children are obese? Did you know that only 2% of children meet food pyramid nutritional requirements?

The district has changed some of their policies because of this, including not allowing birthdays to be celebrated at school with food items, and including phy ed activities as part of weekly homework assignments.

They also included the food pyramid serving guidelines. For children ages 2-8, the servings are as follows:

Meats & Beans..... 2-5 ounces
Vegetables.........1-2 cups
Fruits.............1-1.5 cups
Grains.............3-5 ounces
Milk...............2 cups

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top