Overweight kids- Who's to blame

I saw a scientific programme on TV (in the UK) which showed an experiment started 15 years ago where there was a strong correlation between what and how mothers ate during pregnancy making their children predisposed to obesity.

Parents. Someone has to teach them about nutrition. Kids aren't born craving junk food.

partly parents and partly schools/government!

Nope. Theres no partly. Its fully parents. If your school doesn't provide healthy foods and keeps pushing high calories junk foods then talk to them. Many communities are now doing it and for almost the same cost. The fact that NO parent screamed at the schools when they passed out pizza as a serving of veggies shows that parents are the one neglecting.

As a teacher, I would like to know how what I do is responsible for obese children who come to MY classroom? Am I the one feeding them junk food instead of nutritious food? No. Am I the one who allows them to sit on their butts and play video games, watch TV, text, etc, when they should be outdoors playing and getting exercise? NO.

AND, I would also like to add that I teach HEALTH, and right now I am making a very serious effort to teach these children all about healthy eating, nutrition and the importance of exercise. I'm not harming them, I'm helping them.

IT IS ENTIRELY the fault of the parents AND partially the fault of the pediatricians who refuse to tell the parents their child needs to lose weight, for fear of "offending" the parents.

Teach, good! wile you are at it, can you PLEASE get on teaching my kids to tie there shoes and not pee on the floor. Really what do you do all day? Maybe another set of common core will make you people shape up. Oh, also my son likes to burp in public, get on that too. Thanks.

a topic that is missing here is television commercials. The TV bombards kids with food commercials and I know that food commercials cause people to eat more than they need too. I certainly eat more when i watch networks with advertisements. televised sports is the worst. they advertise the worst food you can eat.

I agree. In terms of young children, if there is no medical condition, then it is the parents fault.
And this is coming from a girl whose entire family is overweight, there has to be a link somewhere?
At the end of the day, parents need to teach their children to eat healthily and exercise.

Yeah, I also did mean to say young children. If you have a teenager who goes out and buys take away with their wages I suppose it's hard to do much, that being said they should have been taught to eat properly by then

It's funny that you say this because a lot of the kids I know who's parents were super healthy ended up with kids who rebelled because they never had junk food and went nuts when they finally had access to it.

The parents, without a shadow of a doubt...providing there isn't an underlying medical problem that is causing the child to be overweight.
Child abuse.

I don't know - my daughter is overweight (age 5, 72 lbs) but her brother is not (age 9, 68 lbs). My daughter is very sedentary, and my son is very athletic, just like his mom and dad. Personally, I race triathlon and carefully monitor my intake but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to get her to be active and do the same. She's 5 - she just isn't into it yet.

At school, I assume she's eating pretty well with the lunches they provide. My ex and I try our best to feed them healthy meals at home, but she's still not losing weight. If we don't watch her portions she will eat, eat, eat! We went to a birthday party the other day, and there was pizza served. I came over to check on her, and asked how many pieces she ate. She said 4. I don't even eat 4 pieces! That's close to 800 calories.

She always complains about her belly being too big. I hate to think she has weight issues already at age 5. The only thing we can do is keep her on a calorie-restricted diet and get her to be more active. It's been challenging because her mom and I are divorced.

Not the parents. The mother. I bring them to hockey, she cooks. you do the math.

You are 100% right...I am a mother of 2 kids...one of them is a little overweight...and I take full responsibility for it... I buy the food that is in my house...I eat healthy...We eat at home...I cook from scratch...however I am the one responsible for buying chips, cookies....and sugary cereal...I am learning to say no ... and keeping that stuff out of my house since I am not the one eating it... but if there is no medical reason....the responsibility falls solely on parents...

Another thought on school lunches:

When I started teaching they gave us a handout with the rough calorie count for a school lunch. The high school portion was roughly 800 calories, so I asked why it was so high. I was told that it's because over 50% of our students were living in poverty, and we had to assume that school breakfast and school lunch were the only meals those students would get that day.

I say the parents based on my own experience.

Growing up my mother always cooked very healthy while my dad was the junk food junky. I was never a fat kid growing up thanks to a mother who didn't believe in microwaves, instant anything or fast food. Both my parents worked full time and my mother doesn't drive so she biked everywhere so it wasn't like she had nothing but free time to cook. She made all our food from scratch and she did it by spending each Sunday buying fresh food and prepping all our food for the week so that after work it was just a matter of putting something in the oven or heating it up on the stove for us to have dinner. Dessert was not a regular part of dinner. We had it occasionally and usually it was a fruit cobbler or fruit pie. Ever so often she would order pizza for us as a treat and a break for herself.

My dad, on the other hand, loved Burger King, soda, chips and having seconds. As a teenager, I started eating double servings at dinner like he did and enjoyed fast food and would get it with my own money ever so often. Since my parents had me do chores and wouldn't let me wallow in front of the TV all day, I didn't get huge, but I did start to get a bit pudgy around this time.

But the real weight gain for me started in college when I became responsible for my own food choices. It took me years until I realized there were psychological reasons for the way I used food. I just thought I was meant to be fat. But that is a whole 'nother Oprah...

Not the parents. The mother. I bring them to hockey, she cooks. you do the math.

when they have no front teeth it will be your fault!

















*note to mods and report happy people...attempt at humor*

Hey, nothing better than a few lost teeth or a broken jaw to help you along the weight loss path.

Does the marketing, cheapness, and high availability of processed high calorie junk food and sugary drinks make us want them or are they that cheap and available and tasty because that is what we really want? It is a bit of both I think. The food companies have turned food into a fix for our overstressed American style lives. It is not a drug, but they know exactly, and test to make sure, how to make their products have the perfect combination of sugar, fat, and salt to make them very tempting. At the same time, they tend to be low satisfaction foods once they get into your stomach so you don't feel full when, calorie wise, you ought to.

The food industry can be blamed for some of the problem, especially among poor children who often can't access or can't afford healthy fresh foods. There is also strong evidence that television advertising is much more effective on young children than adults.

The government has some blame in this because for decades they let the food industry sell their surplus ingredients to be made into cheap school lunches, much more likely to be eaten by poor kids than rich kids. They also kept the price of sucrose artificially high to protect a small number of wealthy sugar company owners in the south which pushed the junk food industry to replace sucrose with HFC wherever possible.

Government economic policies have also been uniformly anti-family. In most rich countries, everyone gets some paid leave, often more than big companies in the US offer voluntarily, and paid parental leave, nonexistent in the US, is guaranteed in most of Europe. At-will employment also factors into it, since particularly at the low end of the market, parents will often be forced to choose between disobeying an employer and risking termination, or getting home in time to feed their kids a proper meal. European countries also subsidize child-care and universal pre-school too. There is a good argument that most women serve the larger economy better by working and letting a smaller group of professionals and semi-professionals watch children all-day, then we ought to make pre-school affordable.


Still those who can afford to buy fresh food and don't share the blame.

partly parents and partly schools/government!

Nope. Theres no partly. Its fully parents. If your school doesn't provide healthy foods and keeps pushing high calories junk foods then talk to them. Many communities are now doing it and for almost the same cost. The fact that NO parent screamed at the schools when they passed out pizza as a serving of veggies shows that parents are the one neglecting.

As a teacher, I would like to know how what I do is responsible for obese children who come to MY classroom? Am I the one feeding them junk food instead of nutritious food? No. Am I the one who allows them to sit on their butts and play video games, watch TV, text, etc, when they should be outdoors playing and getting exercise? NO.

AND, I would also like to add that I teach HEALTH, and right now I am making a very serious effort to teach these children all about healthy eating, nutrition and the importance of exercise. I'm not harming them, I'm helping them.

IT IS ENTIRELY the fault of the parents AND partially the fault of the pediatricians who refuse to tell the parents their child needs to lose weight, for fear of "offending" the parents.

true, doctors in general are sorely lacking the will to tell people the truth. But, I think this is in part due to the food industry somehow influencing the medical industry as well as the government. don't ask me how. its just too convenient a dynamic not to suspect some influence.

Some in the medical research community are speaking out but they must tread lightly as they are often dependent on government grants for their research funding. And government, is, of course, highly influenced by Big Ag and the Big Food conglomerates.