Irish Children amongst fattest in the world

Zamboni

http://www.independent.ie/national-news/children-among-worlds-fattest-but-healthy-diet-is-too-expensive-1890222.html

A kilo of most types of frozen veg is around a euro.
I will never buy into this healthy eating is expensive nonsense.

ya-what-now?

They should bring in the equivelant of butter vouchers but for fruit and veg in. Then lets see people find an excuse. If you want to eat healthy and are on a budget the likes of aldi and lidl do great offers on fruit and veg, and if you cook the right things, that can be made in large quantities there should be no problem in eating healthily. Like if time and money are tight, on one evening a week or on a Sat / Sunday, big a big pot of chilli / bolognaise / curry / lasagne. Put it into portions and freeze it or at least if there's a large family try and get two days out of it!

I do that for myself and it saves so much time and effort, and for very little money, I can get 5 healthy, filling dinners out of one evenings cooking!

metamorphosis

This is what happens when you place pasta, bread, chocolate, fizzy drinks, cereal above fruit, veg, nuts, dairy etc.

It's 95c for a 50gm bar of dairy milk. It's 59c in lidl for a 200gm tub of cottage cheese or 500gm pot of low fat natural yogurt.

Just as cheap to eat healthier. Shop smart. If you are invested in your health you will do it. I see some peoples diet as cereal bar in the morning, bread through out the day and a dinner andnthey think it's healhy just because there is no chocolate or crisps in their. All calories are NOT utilised the same by the body.

Malari

I don't know how that claim can be made because it just isn't true anymore.

Look at the 49c offers on fruit and veg every week in Aldi. Chicken is usually on offer in butchers, you can get pork chops for next to nothing, there are dozens of celebrity chefs using cheap cuts of meat for recipes now.

It's being smart and planning the shopping and meals. It takes extra effort, maybe and that's why people aren't eating healthier. Buy your frozen chips and stick them back in the freezer for the next time. Maybe that's easier than boiling/baking a few spuds then letting the rest of them go soft and rot then throw them all out. But don't tell me it's cheaper.

I know so many people who waste food because they just don't bother using up what's in the fridge.

Or else you have people comparing cheap frozen ready-made crap to supermarket ranges of Healthy Choice ready-made crap, which can be more costly. Or thinking you have to buy organic to be healthy.

rubadub

A survey carried out by the Irish Independent yesterday showed that a meal made from fresh ingredients -- chicken, potatoes, vegetables -- cost twice as much as one made from heavily processed ingredients -- chicken nuggets, chips, onion rings.

I would like to see the figures, it is very easy to sway stats & figures for the sake of a sensationalist headline.

I would admit there is some extremely cheap own brand junk food these days, but likewise dirt cheap own brand fresh unprocessed food too. 1kg of porridge oats is 99c in tesco, that is 20 decent sized 50g breakfasts (most quote 30-35g as a portion), 5cent a pop.

I saw a butchers with 10 chicken fillets for €8 the other day. 500g of 3.5% lean mince is something like €3.65 in tesco.

ronaneire

Diet is one issue, exercise would be another?

El_Dangeroso

This all stems from the fact that people are time poor, so processed food is the easy option when both of you work to pay a massive mortgage and commute long distances and have precious little time or energy to cook at the end of the day, in fact many children will be fed dinner in childcare as it's too late to eat when mam and dad get home.

I know some of you will reply that healthy food can be quick and cheap. That is the case but it does require a considerable amount of forward planning and effort unless you want to eat a monotonous rota of food. I find it difficult keep variety in my diet and I only have to look after myself.

You also have the increased guilt factor of spending little time with your children and so compensating with treats some of which include mcdonalds at the weekend.

I'm not justifying the behaviour but I was a kid who wasn't allowed white bread until I was 12 and then immediately gained weight as soon as I could access junk food. I think it's important not to instill neuroses in our children about food. I would also worry that in a bid to keep our children's weight normal, children will be deprived of enough fat to feed their rapidly expanding brains, if anything should be cut out it should be sugar and refined starches.

jdivision

I'm gonna blame the food pyramid here, while some of the other points are true, i think that's the key problem. Parents filling kids with junk they think is healthy and then "treating" them with further junk, not realising how much they've already had.

Pembily

My mum had the time to feed 6 of us a very healthy diet (portions a bit too big maybe) for years on a low budget without my dad around as he was working in Dublin and my mum was working part-time!! She did the dinner each day before she left, people are time poor cos they are disorganised, and that is all!!!

I am now 25 and have to be organised about what I eat due to being a celiac and each night I do my lunch (general cost €2 and time 20 min while I do other stuff) for the next day and have my snacks with me too - chopped carrot (99c for 500g), pineapple (99c), grapes (€1.99 for 500g), melon (€1.99) and apple (€1.99 for 6). The fruit lasts me for the week!!! Cheaper than ww bars or other snack food!!!

Healthy eating takes thought and practice but the more you do it the quicker it is, an automatic timer on the oven is a great timesaver too, just put the dinner in the oven in the morning and it’s done that night!!!

Turkey is generally cheaper than chicken and is better and has less water and hormones added!!!!

Its laziness that we are overweight...

El_Dangeroso

Pembily wrote: »

Its laziness that we are overweight...

It's actually a highly stressful lifestyle combined with a toxic food environment combined with the fact that mothers don't have time to teach their children how to cook, they mightn't even know how themselves.

My mom worked part-time too and we always had 'proper food', I think there's a difference between working part-time and commuting to a demanding full-time job, which a lot of mothers now do.

I think these issues need to be addressed before children with weight problems are labelled 'lazy'. Many studies have shown that active kids can become overfat too.

Pembily

Temple_Grandin wrote: »

It's actually a highly stressful lifestyle combined with a toxic food environment combined with the fact that mothers don't have time to teach their children how to cook, they mightn't even know how themselves.

My mom worked part-time too and we always had 'proper food', I think there's a difference between working part-time and commuting to a demanding full-time job, which a lot of mothers now do.

I think these issues need to be addressed before children with weight problems are labelled 'lazy'. Many studies have shown that active kids can become overfat too.

Think that is a personal opinion!!!

I commute to college, 4th year so stressful and the one thing i look forward to is my nice dinner that i will cook, or re-heat from the freezer and i do it for two other people too!!!

El_Dangeroso

Pembily wrote: »

I commute to college, 4th year so stressful and the one thing i look forward to is my nice dinner that i will cook, or re-heat from the freezer and i do it for two other people too!!!

That's admirable but I think you'll be the first to admit that it takes more effort and planning. I'm just saying that we have never been so time poor as a society and this is contributing to the whole population consuming more junk food, including children. These issues need to be addressed, just tut-tutting and judging other people isn't really going to help anyone.

Sapsorrow

Pembily wrote: »

Think that is a personal opinion!!!

I commute to college, 4th year so stressful and the one thing i look forward to is my nice dinner that i will cook, or re-heat from the freezer and i do it for two other people too!!!

I'm a 4th yr nutritional science student and while I can agree that it is very stressfull and time consuming it can in no way be compared to the hecticness of a family in which both parents may be working full time in possibly very stressful and challenging jobs, commuting and trying to fit in looking after any number of kids aswell!
Obesity is an incredibly complicated condition that even researchers in the field don't presume to understand very well and like a previous poster mentioned there is a lot of research that shows the physical activity often isn't a predictor of obesity in children and neither is over-eating. I don't think this is a problem we can presume could so simply prevented as just by buying frozen veg in Lidl, obviously theres a lot more going on and if it was this simple to sort out we wouldn't be in the situation we're in now.
The responsibility is not only the parents it's not necesarily their fault if they're underprivalged, undereducated or whatever we need a complete revolution in health promotion which isn't backed by organisations or researchers with vested interests and to incorporate nutritional/health education as a fundamental part of our education system from an early age.
It's also the repsonsibilty of our goverment to get dieticians out there to start educating the adult population regarding nutrition, meal planning, cooking and financial budgeting where necessary.
Bad doctors aslo compound this problem we need doctors who have to balls to come out and tell a parent that their kids are overweight before they becomes obese and make genuine efforts to set them up with further help in the form of dieticians, counsellors etc.. without the parent specifically looking for the advice themselves.

lizzyvera

It takes me less time to cook a curry sauce from scratch than it takes for the rice to cook. People are lazy and don't know how to cook properly. I come home and cook, and my mam used to come home and cook.

Back in nana's day when women didn't work outside the home, work in the home was a LOT harder. They had more children, they had no washing machines for clothes, no tumble dryers, no dishwashers. That was more than 9-5 work and they cooked.

If you're going to have children you should put them first and look after them. There's no excuse for that kind of negligence.

I agree that doctors don't take it seriously enough. It's very serious.

Sapsorrow

lizzyvera wrote: »

If you're going to have children you should put them first and look after them. There's no excuse for that kind of negligence.

Of course no one can disagree with the first part of that statement but it's only that simple if you come from an educated and/or privaleged background. The point is that in western society we have adopted a very new way of life that simply isn't compatible with traditional parenting/housekeeping and some people have no choice but to function in this way. Should a copule who have to work long hours in order to provide the basic needs of a family not fufil their desire to have children? At the end of the day we are all only human and I barely have the energy to wash my hair when I'm busy in college socan only imagine how exhausted a lot of working mums must be.
Also as I mentioned already we can't blame or judge people on how they raise their kids as a lot of it is cultural and due to a lack of education, understanding and money which isn't always their fault. So there are in some cases 'excuses' for this sort of parenting. They wouldn't even consider that what they were doing was negligence as it would probably be what they learned from their parents.

jam_mac_jam

khrystyna100 wrote: »

Of course no one can disagree with the first part of that statement but it's only that simple if you come from an educated and/or privaleged background. The point is that in western society we have adopted a very new way of life that simply isn't compatible with traditional parenting/housekeeping and some people have no choice but to function in this way. Should a copule who have to work long hours in order to provide the basic needs of a family not fufil their desire to have children? At the end of the day we are all only human and I barely have the energy to wash my hair when I'm busy in college socan only imagine how exhausted a lot of working mums must be.
Also as I mentioned already we can't blame or judge people on how they raise their kids as a lot of it is cultural and due to a lack of education, understanding and money which isn't always their fault. So there are in some cases 'excuses' for this sort of parenting. They wouldn't even consider that what they were doing was negligence as it would probably be what they learned from their parents.

I completely agree with this, its education and I think not knowing how to cook and it is easy to judge. I also think lack of excercise is huge, ok I wasnt out playing sports all the time when i was a kid but I walked or cycled everywhere and was out playing on the road, I think this is a huge factor. Irish kids are fat but then again so are Irish people so its hardly a suprise.

watna

I just don't get how healthy food is more expensive. It's cheaper to buy meat and vegetables and make meals from scratch than it is to fill the trolley up with biscuits and cakes and frozen meals. Having cut snacks out of my diet in the last couple of weeks (went through a bad eating patch and am feeling whale-ish) I've noticed that we're getting more food for less money cutting out the junk.

I agree that a lot of it is being time poor but I think if you've got kids, they don't have a choice what they eat, it's up to you to make sure they eat healthily. I'm sure it can be tough. Sometimes I find in an effort to make something after a long day of work and there's only me and my OH and I live close to work - when that happens I usually have something in the freezer tht I've made one weekend. It is tough sometimes and it does involve a lot of planning (I plan my meals before I do my weekly shop) but it is worth it, especially for the health nd education of your kids.

They have a huge weight problem in kids in NZ and it's mainly Pacific Islanders/Maoris who are considered the poorer members of society. The exact same arguments are made is that it costs to much. That's just an excuse. These people need to be educated - they come from a culture where being overweight is a status symbol (means you are rich), that's what people need here and at home in Ireland, not hearing excuses that healhy food is too expensive - that just reconfirms that they are correct in saying they can't eat healthy on their budgets. What annoys me even more is that they have ads on tv here for "healthy living" where they show recipes using a certain brands products (watties - who are the NZ equivalent of Heinz, they're owned by them). They show recipes and then use instant frozen mashed potato with cheese instead of chopping your own potatoes and using a little milk. It drives me around the bend. These ads are made out to be healthy when they are advertising a brand instead. No wonder people need education on healthy food.

El_Dangeroso

watna wrote: »

They have a huge weight problem in kids in NZ and it's mainly Pacific Islanders/Maoris who are considered the poorer members of society. The exact same arguments are made is that it costs to much. That's just an excuse. These people need to be educated - they come from a culture where being overweight is a status symbol (means you are rich), that's what people need here and at home in Ireland, not hearing excuses that healhy food is too expensive - that just reconfirms that they are correct in saying they can't eat healthy on their budgets. What annoys me even more is that they have ads on tv here for "healthy living" where they show recipes using a certain brands products (watties - who are the NZ equivalent of Heinz, they're owned by them). They show recipes and then use instant frozen mashed potato with cheese instead of chopping your own potatoes and using a little milk. It drives me around the bend. These ads are made out to be healthy when they are advertising a brand instead. No wonder people need education on healthy food.

The reason the maori gain weight so quickly is that their traditional diet has been co-opted by the western diet, which they haven't had any time to adapt to, namely grains. We as Europeans have had exposure to grains for about 10,000 years, not enough time for even us to adapt to eating them some would say. The Maori consumed no grains whatsoever until less than 200 years ago and the shocking rates of obesity and diabetes are the result of this unnatural diet.

The same phenomenon is repeated around the globe, google the Pima indians in north America. They were very successful traders with the first western settlers and had an abundance of all the food that they wanted, but no incidence of obesity and very good health. They were then moved to reservations and made to live off rations of beans and wheat flour, their health deteriorated rapidly and obese mothers were observed alongside malnourished rail thin children. You can either believe that these mothers were overfeeding themselves and starving their children or that they were eating foods that were totally alien to their traditional diet and this resulted is obesity and malnourishment.

Theirs is a great documentary called 'My big fat diet' that took a population of Canadian native americans that had shocking rates of obesity and placed them on a diet only composed of foods that they ate prior to contact with the west, lots of pemmican (a type of beef jerky), fish, moose and starchy root vegetables. All the participants lost huge amounts of weight even though the diet was not limited at all in quantity, many had no more need for diabetes medication.