Obesity Time-bombe

Double chocolate bombe. Mmmm!

Following the World Pie Eating Championships in Wigan, children in Blackpool are today under the spotlight as it was announced that almost a third of 11 to 12 year olds are overweight; three quarters of whom are obese.

As Gordon Brown often says, “more help is needed”. There surely has to be more weight loss help around now than at any other time, so that doesn’t explain it.

Strangely it has been suggested that sugary and high fat foods should be taxed more. This knee jerk has never worked for anything and never will: think petrol, cigarettes, booze, etc. You’ll never price kids out of buying sweets, particularly kids that are indirectly spending money that has no value to them: our money. I’ll come back to that later.

When I was a kid, I went to Hawes Side school on Hawes Side Lane. In the infants, we were given bottles of milk during mid morning so that by lunchtime we were not gasping for any food we could get our hands on.

Sport was actively encouraged and there were after school practices for cricket and football, and we played energetic games such as “British Bulldog” during breaks. When approaching summer we were allowed on the large playing field and lunchtime was an hour solid of sport, including a 5-a-side football league which was started by just-retired Mr Rhodes and was a great success. You could “sign” other players and everything.

Outside school I’d play football in the street and occasionally on Fisher’s Field. I was always on my bike riding all over the place, in particular around the Moss, around where the Moore Brothers estate now is, and on a makeshift set of ramps that used to be next to Stanley Conservative Club.

My dad used to play football with me a lot and take me to places like Fairhaven to ride my bike or on the beach to fly kites.

You can probably see where I’m going to go with this.

At breaktime in schools these days are kids being active, or are they hanging around in groups messing with Facebook on their mobile phones? Is milk still supplied to younger kids?

When I used to play football in the street, sometimes the ball would go into someone’s garden. They didn’t mind as long as you didn’t trample their plants, didn’t deliberately boot the ball at their house and made sure you closed their garden gate. You’re not even allowed to play in the street now because many children are of a much more aggressive nature and neighbourhoods started to frown upon kids playing out: prejudging them all as bad apples.

Why is this? I believe it’s down to lack of discipline both from parents and schools. Schools have their hands tied because kids know their rights these days and no teacher wants to risk their job because they were seen by politically correct governors to have mentally assaulted a child. Maybe schools have bottled it, though, and don’t bother instilling discipline at all because of these risks.

On the other hand how do you control a rebellious child? Intimidation always used to work. It worked for traditional police who’d be visible and would give them a clip round the ear. It worked and continues to work in public schools. I used to know that if I did something my dad didn’t like, I’d suffer one way or another for it, but in Chavland the parents look proudly upon the misdemeanours of their offspring.

Chav culture has made it more dangerous for normal, studious kids to venture far from their homes without supervision. Go on Fisher’s Field you might find drinking gangs of chavs. Go through Stanley Park you’ll find the gangs of chavs high on drugs. Go through any park you’re likely to find loitering youths up to no good. Kick a football around and a glue-sniffing chav comes up and steals it or boots it away. Walk down Highfield Road and you find intimidating gangs of chavs hanging round street corners. They’re everywhere you go.

It’s often said that kids spend too much time playing on their PS3 or Xbox 360, but is it any wonder? For your average 12 year old that does his schoolwork and just wants to play football or ride his bike, it’s a dangerous world. I used to play on my computer a lot as a kid, but that didn’t mean I was inactive.

The difference now is that as public spaces are closed down, streets are off limits and places like Stanley Park are chavved up with skateboard parks. Concerned parents might even keep their child indoors because of their fears (with all these fears its starting to sound like a Gasjet article…)

I think one of the most important reasons for kids becoming fat is lack of self respect, instilled by lack of values in their upbringing. Yep, the parents. Blackpool is a hotbed of benefits claimants with couples surviving by having more kids. Because they don’t appreciate the value of money and have benefits on tap, they’re happy to toss a few benefits pounds to their child so that they’ll fuck off out and leave them to their mid-morning chat shows, then come back and put their tea in the microwave meaning the parents don’t have to do anything.

It’s hard for a child to feel good about themselves or aspire to anything if their parents don’t give a shit. Neglect from parents can cause a child to end up just like they are: the child sees the easy life on benefits at the cost of the ratepayer and decides that they want that too.

Blackpool has poor breast-feeding rates, which contributes.

Yeah, it might do, but I think it’s probably one of the most insignificant factors. Microwave meals and frozen food are often blamed too, but to take one single cause and say this is the cause of our kids getting fat is just ignorant.

Kids only build muscle by exercise and without muscle they can’t burn off the food they eat. It’s that simple.

In some cases it’s poor diet caused by parents that wont say no. Often they are enormously fat themselves. In some cases the child has separated parents who are both competing for the child’s affection and will spoil the child with everything they want, such as McDonalds.

In some cases it’s a child that does play on their Playstation to excess, but this is the social stereotype that everyone that has a Playstation is a fat person with no friends that sits in a dark room and plays video games all day being played upon by “health” organisations. You notice that because of the way Nintendo has marketed it, they never say fat kids are sat indoors playing on their Wii…

It’s misguided to judge a child at such an early age as 11 or 12. You don’t finish growing in height until about age 19 and it doesn’t follow that your body fat percentage remains the same.

Furthermore, the Body Mass Index which is used to define obesity is flawed and only works for people with slight body frames and average height. Like so many quantitative scales such as speed limits, it no longer works for modern society. There used to be a guy at work who was around 6 foot 4, was extremely fit and runs the London Marathon every year and his height/weight ratio determined that he was clinically obese. How can that be right?

Overall I’m a bit sceptical about this because as the Gasjet article reveals, there are a lot of publicly funded jobs being fuelled off the back of the scaremongering. You could say the same about the whole climate change thing: that’s so important that no countries want to make the cuts that we’re told are necessary to stop the planet imploding into a black hole of despair.

On the other hand, though, does anyone actually give a shit whether other people are fat? Surely if the hysteria is to be believed they die far quicker than “normal” people, which in the days of overpopulation has to be a pretty good thing.