Education is key to remedying obesity
November 7, 2009
Britain is becoming a fast food nation
Abi Mowbray
Children are being taken into care at a time when obesity appears to be spiralling out of control.
A healthy alternative to a dial out pizza has become a reduced fat ready meal while a work out has become a twenty minute session on the Wii.
An unhealthy trend
The Americanisation of the UK food industry, which started with the bombardment of British high streets with 1960s milk bars, is almost complete as pram battles against pram in the queues of fast food restaurants across the country.
The ‘happy meal’ is the fast food industries’ key assault weapon. Adding a toy to a calorific meal in a brightly coloured box is a marketing ploy designed to satisfy the appetite of increasingly fat children and tired parents.
The Boar War highlighted the ill health of the British underclass. Conscription today would undoubtedly reveal a similar issue; a large portion of the nation would simply be too fat to fight.
Impact on families
In an era when child abuse is constantly being redefined, killing a child with kindness (or a week’s worth of happy meals) now constitutes as child abuse, just as starving a child does.
But whether it is fair to remove a child from overweight parents straight from birth is an issue of contention. Surely the answer is not to swoop into a maternity ward all guns blazing but instead to provide parents with the educational tools needed to transform their lifestyle.
We have saturated society with calorific easy options and now there is a responsibility to remedy the situation. The answer is not to punish the most vulnerable families who have fallen foul of the bargain bucket but instead to educate them.
