Overweight Children in the UK

Chocolate bars in lunch boxes, fizzy drinks in school canteens and chips for dinner- no wonder about 2 million children in the United Kingdom are overweight, lots of them seriously obese.

There are several reasons for obesity. The most common is of course the consumption of unhealthy food. Many children eat fast food, reheated or pre-packed food every day. No matter whether their parents do not have time to cook healthily or whether they suffer from a lack of money to afford nutritious and low- calory food, this is not the right diet for children. But also school canteens have to improve a lot. Since Jamie Oliver, a successful British TV– cook, pointed out the bad quality of school dinners in one of his TV programmes the British Health Ministry introduced some new guidelines in order to improve school meals. Butter has to be used in a restricted extent, only low- fat milk, water and fruit juices are allowed as drinks in school, sweets vending machines have to be removed from school corridors and bread, fruits and vegetables have to be provided daily in every school. Jamie Oliver also started a new campaign named “Feed me better- campaign”. As part of this programme he visited many British schools, showed the cooking ladies how to cook good meals with just a few, affordable ingredients and taught children how to eat healthily. Moreover he introduced short courses for parents to make them implement what they have learnt at home and he achieved to establish the so called “School Food Trust” which steadily observes the school meals’ quality.

Furthermore we can recognise a huge deficit in physical exercise. A lot of children do not walk to school anymore and there are also just a few students attending sports clubs after school. To solve this problem British schools have introduced new schemes like the “walk or ride your bike to school- week” in which students can earn credits for participation in order to motivate them to get active. In addition many parents do not recognise the fact that their children are overweight or even obese and need special treatment. Mostly these parents suffer from predominance themselves and deny the importance and urgency to fight obesity. To make them sit up and listen students are measured in school and afterwards letters informing parents about their children’s health are sent out, telling them whether their child is healthy, overweight or obese. Unfortunately many parents didn’t react in a positive way to these letters which is why the word “obese” to describe children’s health was officially forbidden. Another way of trying to help overweight children is sending them to so called “Fat camps”. These are governmentally financed camps in which children have to stay for up to 6 weeks and where they learn a lot about healthy cooking and several sorts of diets. One example for the success of these camps is Georgia Davis who used to be “Britain’s fattest teen”. After she had returned from a “Fat camp” and had received special treatment she had lost about 96 kg.

Obesity is definitely something we have to take very seriously because its effects can be quite dramatic. We are not just talking about glucose intolerance, diabetes and a damage of the mental health caused by teasing here. Obesity can also lead to liver failure, amputations, blindness and an increased risk of cancer. At the moment about 150.000 children suffer from high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels, 160.000 children are at the risk of an heart attack and 1000 children are afflicted with Type 2 diabetes, which normally only occurs amongst elderly people.