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Adults are welcome to be fat slobs as they wish, but when it comes to children I think there is a need for a limited government role, not least among the reasons for which is that childhood obesity leads to later health problems and those health problems cost money and are a drain on our economy. I wouldn't say they need to discourage buying junk food, but I also wouldn't be opposed to stricter rules about nutrition in school lunches or stronger regulations on advertising to children. Sugary beverages are a particular problem, and I would like to see vending machines selling soft-drinks banned from all public schools. Basically, when children are trapped for 6 hours a day in state-run educational institutions, the food given to them needs to be healthy. What they eat outside of that time is their parents' business. | |
Well, programs intended to reduce obesity have an annoying trend of being developed by people with no idea what they are doing. You get an awful lot of "raising awareness" campaigns, which involve exciting new ways of telling fat people they are a disgrace, in case they didn't know society doesn't like fat people. Alternatively, the celebrity endorsements...oh, the celebrities. "If I can be thin, so can you! Ok, maybe I'm genetically predisposed to a different weight than you are. And I can afford to spend 4 hours a day with my personal trainer. And get all my meals cooked for me using expensive ingredients you might not be able to afford. But, nevermind that, I'm a celebrity!" ... Now, taking steps that will actually help, I'm all in favour of that. But not the knee-jerk reaction quick fix bullshit that tends to occur instead. | |
I'm a bit split on this one. I had a friend who volunteered at a local elementary school for a few years, helping take care of kids in the special education department. There was one boy who was about 8 years old--he needed a wheelchair and couldn't speak very well. His parents packed his lunch for him every day, and they were always disgustingly unhealthy. Sticky buns, marshmallow creme sandwiches, pudding, potato and corn chips. My friend said he was noticeably malnourished. His skin was pale and flaky, his hair was thinning and dry and came out very easily. She asked the teacher about reporting him to DFS, but the teacher more or less said it would be hard to make a case that it was his diet causing those things. Also, I'm with you that the food in schools should be healthy, but they need to not let total nincompoops make the decisions of what stays and what goes. I was in high school when my school system decided to change over to "health foods." All of the sodas in the drink machines were replaced by flavored waters, gatorades, flavored teas, and V8 fusion things. Unfortunately, they didn't just do it for the students--even the soda machines in the teacher's lounges were required to only carry the health foods. Also, students weren't even allowed to bring in food to share. If a kid got a pizza or a cake for their birthday, they could have it, but sharing it with other students wasn't allowed. But they still served fries and pizza (but they got really nasty afterward, I think they started baking them or something instead of frying them). They took away the ice-cream and regular potato chips (baked ones replaced them), but they still sold pop-tarts, which are full of sugar and fat and have like 400 calories per pastry. Also, they took away the ice cream box at the elementary school my mom worked at. See, at her school, every Friday students could purchase an ice-cream for 25 cents. All the money raised from that would go toward helping pay for field trips, so they can go to the river or the nearby caves and whatnot more frequently and for free. But once that was taken away there wasn't anything they were allowed to replace it with, so the cost has now gone to the students, which makes planning and pulling off the field trips much more complicated. Overall it was very poorly executed. I still agree that the food in schools needs to get healthier, but not like that. Even the faculty was aware of how flawed the system was, but they were required to do it according to new legislation, so they didn't have much time to get the system well planned out and prepared. | |
education! thats the key! | |
No, waste of time and money. | |
I think of it this way: are you allowed to fail to teach your children to read? No. There are legal systems in place in most places to ensure that your children get an education, at least the basics. There are laws in place to ensure that people don't completely ruin their childrens' futures. Why should this be any different? | |
Yes. And by that I mean they should do "something", not control everyone diet. Im actually going to agree with Katatatori here (I thought it would never happen) and say that for a start, school lunches should be healthy, affordable if not free, and sugar or fat rich sweets and drinks should be banned. This sucked ass when I went to school in England, but looking back on it, it was a great thing. No crisps or fizzy drinks were allowed or sold, while the cafeteria sold semi-healthy food like pasta pots for low prices 4 days of the week and pizza on Fridays. On the subject of schools, sport needs to take a larger role. In England, sport was a big thing. We had PE teachers who would tell you to run 10 laps around a football pitch, and if you couldnt? Try, and keep running, until you vomit. If you throw up from exhaustion, you can stop. A little extreme maybe, but effective. In Germany, its a different story. Sport consists of jumping over a stick twice once a week. Not good enough. I dont know how it is in the US, but I have heard its something along the lines off "all in shape kids play American football, the fat kids sit around and do nothing". | |
My opinion on this tends to be very unpopular on this subject. I believe if a child reaches a obese weight the school they attend should be obligated to report it. What happens next is the state steps in and the child will be required to see a doctor at the states expense. It should be examined why the child is overweight and to find out if it is due to any medical conditions that cause it and not the neglect of the parents. If it is because of the parents first it should be a warning, and the child's health will be monitored from then on. The parents will now be responsible but have total freedom of how to make a improvement in the child's health. If no improvements are made over a reasonable period of time than once again a warning but with a little actions. The child and parents will see a doctor and a dietitian this time at their expense and must follow the plan made for the child. If once again this leads to failure the child is taken from the home and placed into foster care with the chance of getting their child back if they can convince a court that they are serious now in tackling the problem. If they get the child back and the child relapses than that is it, they lose any possibility of having custody of their child. I also believe that anything after the first doctor visit which should be paid by the state is now the responsibility of the parents including if the child is taken away. They should have to pay a form of child support for the child who is now in foster care. | |
We could stand to repeal some laws (pizza = vegetable anyone?) that may be helping kids become obese. | |
Not really. It's going to vary from state to state, but in Missouri (where I've lived all my life), PE classes were required every semester for every student until you hit high school, where you get the luxury of choosing your own schedule. Even then, you had to have a certain number of semesters of Phys. Ed. classes in order to graduate. The people who didn't want to do a lot of PE scheduled their semesters during the summer and only did easy classes like Weight Training and Team Sports, but it was at least something. OT: I think the state has a role, but it certainly shouldn't be intrusive. If a kid is obviously malnourished, we definitely need to do something about it. But if the only concern is that he's getting fat, I don't think the state really has any business interfering. And as others have said, schools need to have more healthy food. Right now, most US public school food is cardboard-flavored pizza and strangely-warped baked potatoes with a side of | |
Well that's good as an exaggeration lol. I am fortunate to be in a district where physical education is well funded and there are athletic oppurtunities for pretty much everyone. My PE course involves 2 days of sports, 1 day of cardio (running around the stadium for 30 minutes), 1 day of weight-lifting/conditioning, and 1 day of health class per week. But in my old school, we only had PE one day a week, so it differs widely by district. What I really think schools should do, at least in the case of elementary schools, is bring back recess/outside time. Honestly if elementary schools gave kids 30 minutes a day of time to be outside then this wouldn't be nearly as big a problem. It wouldn't even require the funding that PE eats up. | |
In the end it comes down to the parent/guardian. At a young age society dose not expect you to be able to make responsible decisions all the time (which is why you can't drive or vote until you reach specific age). So if the parents are allowing a child to become obese and subjecting them to the subsequent health problems then it is absolutely neglect and the child should be taken from the home. As a point of interest the government can (and has) taken children away from their family because of obesity. This was back in November of 2011 so it is pretty recent. As an adult you have every right to make decisions that lead to your obesity. You are capable of making decisions. You deal with the consequences. That right dose not extend to allowing a child in your care to become obese either because of your lack of care or incompetence. | |
I'm sceptical about lifestyle-changing measures and campaigns by a government, but in the case of obesity, it's easy to see that the problem has gotten to a size where something needs to be done about it. Especially in the case of children. There is no way a child can become obese without their parents being very negligent. In some countries though children have meals in school. Schools should be funded and compelled to make those meals be at least of a decent level. No 'pizza is a vegetable' crap. As for adults, that's more problematic as they make more own choices. Situations where becoming fat is preferable should be avoided. Studies in France and the US have shown for instance that for many poor people, unhealthy food is cheaper and more readily available than healthy food, for instance because the supermarkets that are cheapest or have the best food are outside of town and require a car. Then again, in the US this will prove impossible as it's social policies are based on abandoning people to their fate, and this requires the opposite of that. For one thing, there's still a huge taboo on confronting people with the consequences of their choice of being obese. Not only is it considered rude to call someone fat whereas for instance calling a drunkard drunk, or a drug addict a junkie is perfectly acceptable. But trying to sack someone for being obese, in my country, always leads to legal proceedings, and sometimes the employer even loses a case against an ex-employee who choose to become so fat they either couldn't work anymore or were vastly less productive. In such a case the jurisprudence or laws need to be changed in a way that obesity is judged for what it is: something that prevents people from doing their job. If I show up at work too drunk to stand on my feet, I get sacked. If I show up too fat to stand on my feet, I'd have to remain hired at the expense of my colleagues and employer? Bullshit. | |
Sadly, any government intervention, even at the general school level, gets people in an uproar. Remember Pailn's "Obama's coming for your sugar cookies" bit? And that was just on a general promotion of good eating, not intervention of any kind. I say sad because I don't think education is the answer, and I speak from my own experience. The lectures on the food pyrimid and the need to eat right never stopped me from over eating. The forced diet and exercise on the other hand worked like a charm. I'm slimmer now at 33 than I was at 12 before I hit puberty, and an extended period of it made it a habbit I could keep up on my own. Of course I think a large chunk of the population could be duped into eating healthier. I firmly beleive that if the marketing forces that got people to pay 2 bucks for something that comes out of the tap for pennies put their minds to it, they could make fruits and vegitables trendy. | |
Yes. My opinion: tax the hell out of it.
Unless you can make money off of it. From what I understand Japan had a literal fat tax. Maybe if governments take that route it would work out alright.
What laws? Also, pizza isn't a vegetable. The bill you refer to is actually just deciding how much tomato paste is needed to count as a serving of vegetables. Right now an eighth of a cup of tomato paste counts has about half a cup. That is what that bill is referring to. Although let's not forget that tomatoes are actually fruits, which means that if congress did declare pizza a vegetable (and I can't stress this enough: they didn't) it would be a fruit, but I digress. Even the news stories that I can find that outright say congress made pizza a vegetable are just saying that to grab your attention. The news stories admit that it is actually the tomato paste, and not pizza itself. This means that if pizza is implied to be a vegetable, it means so is spaghetti, chicken Parmesan, meatloaf, and lasagna which are all equally laughable. | |
I agree that exercise needs to play a larger role, but I'm quite suspicious of how at least the American schools I grew up in approached exercise. Exercise was always framed as some kind of competition, usually a competition where someone else was better than you. Consequently it wasn't until I was about 22 years old before I discovered I enjoyed exercise. This is a horrible lesson for schools to teach. If we had had a martial arts class in JHS and HS, you can bet I would have been the fittest, most committed-to-athleticism student in the school. Because I enjoy beating myself, doing what I never thought I could do before. But as long as athleticism is measured in how fast you can run a mile (compared to other students) or how many times you can throw some variety of ball through some variety of polygon, exercise has absolutely zero interest for me. I have no interest in competing with my classmates, especially when most of my classmates are pretty likely to beat me. You can bet pretty confidently that the only students who enjoy this arrangement are the students most likely to win at it. I once heard of a neat plan certain schools in Japan were doing. In order to engage the elderly in their local communities, old people who knew martial arts were invited to come to PE class and teach students what they knew. You can bet if some local expert in kung fu or karate made a guest lesson as opposed to our fat fuck PE teacher who rode around on a golf cart while the rest of us tried to run a mile, I would have grown up far more in shape. | |
We need a big food category to throw everything in and then work from there. This is all giving me a headache. | |
So true. Competitive sports need to be disengaged from exercise, pronto. | |
Depends. Children most certainly Government is needed to children don't get fat in the first place or at least form healthy excercise patterns. but if it gets bad: Your not fat because of you genes and healthy food is not expensive... meat is more expensive than vegitables... thats becuse animals are fed on vegitation... it just doesn't taste as good. OK... personally I'd put this lot in a cage and feed them only Salad until they were able to work again >.> Just me though... me and lots of other Britain's... too fat to work... Eat less, do more. | |
but to alot of the people who complain about kids these days science is scary! | |
I think there's part of the problem right there: school lunches. You say they need to be made healthier but there have been multiple laws, Federal and local, to make them so. The result is that they taste like trash and the kids don't eat them. When I was in high school I stopped eating the lunches. I went across the street to a local burger shop, a Mexican cafe, a diner or just went to a nearby convenience store for junk food. Last month there was a lunch lady protest against laws making foods "healthier" because kids wouldn't eat them. Hell, even when I did eat the lunch provided I would pick at the parts I liked.
I disagree with that wholeheartedly. Extorting money from people for what? Because they eat a lot of junk food? This reminds me of that ridiculous soda tax nonsense. | |
this is why you should have listened to Jamie Olivr | |
This is a good idea as well. In England we had a 1 hour long break every day. If the weather was alright we went and played football or rugby all on our own in that time anyway. | |
Mandating healthy food in public schools and subsidising the cost of fresh fruits, vegetables, certain quantities of lean meat and nutritious, low calorie prepackaged food in supermarkets. Far more important than these, if most of America's cities were more densely populated, had less suburban sprawl and had adequate public transport systems so it would actually be more convenient to walk most places instead of being forced to drive most places then I don't think the country would have nearly as much of an obesity problem. It's a bit late to do anything about this now, though. | |
It's not that easy. School lunches have to meet regulations for healthiness while also meeting legal regulations for safety and practical needs for transportation and storage. I don't know where you are that you're blessed enough to have had your lunches cooked on demand, but ours were essentially precooked, frozen and heated up in time for lunch. There's really no other way to get that much food to where it's needed. | |
Huh. I dont really know about that. I was pretty good at just about everything they threw at me in England, apart from maybe rugby. Personally, I enjoyed the competition, but I never really looked at it from the other side. | |
Yes. As much as the "fat acceptance movement" (Google it, have a sick bucket to hand) would shrilly deny it, being obese IS unhealthy. It reduces quality of life and shortens people's lifespan, and should absolutely not be seen as "ok". We live in a society where smokers are looked down upon, and parents who smoke around their young children are seen as irresponsible and negligent. I'd like to see the exact same attitudes towards obesity: if an informed adult decides to be a fat f**k, that's their choice, but don't bring up your poor children in an environment where obesity is normalised. Yes, there have been plenty of obesity/nutrition initiatives, many of them incredibly patronising and misguided. It's a game of stick and carrot, but even a donkey will dig its heels in and eventually kick back if you use the stick on it too much. For an example of what I feel is Health Awareness Done Right, look at the kids TV show Lazy Town (which I confess to being a closet fan of) - promote exercise and nutrition and the obesity will go away, no finger-wagging required.
You're absolutely right that this needs to start in childhood, but anything that even slightly feels like the hand of Big Brother on society's shoulder tends to get screamed down as an act of fascism. A few years ago, the British TV chef Jamie Oliver took it upon himself to reinvent the school dinner from scratch, banning the traditional chips and pizza and focussing on more portions of vegetables, organic food, low-fat, low-sugar, and so on. This resulted in the (in)famous media shots of parents smuggling fish and chips through the school gates to the "starving" pupils, and a sharp increase in children opting to travel home to eat lunch.
You just listed my least favourite excuses used by the Fat Acceptance Movement, and they're almost universally fallacious. Congratulations! You're helping to spread the patently untrue propaganda that exercise and healthy eating is cruelly out-of-reach for the average Joe (or Jolene) and therefore they should thinking too hard and order another Big Mac.
I don't think that's a national trend; from my experience PE provision and teaching varies wildly from one school to the next even within the same county, let alone country. In my (English) secondary school, the average PE lesson consisted of getting bullied in a damp and freezing changing room for 15 minutes, 15 minutes of standing around choosing teams or arguing about rules, 10 minutes of playing a "game" (often relegated to a role where you'd be standing stock still - outfielding, or goalkeeper, or whatever), followed by 15 more minutes of being bullied in aforementioned damp, freezing changing room. School PE made me hate sports until the age of 18 when I joined University. By contrast, my family in Germany seem to have had much more positive experiences with school sports and games. | |
In what sense? In the sense that it's not a problem worth dealing with? I think the AMA is likely to disagree on that. Or in the sense that there's no cost-effective manner of dealing with it? | |
Imagine you had an academic class, let's say calculus or physics (substitute whatever subject you personally found difficult here.) And while the teacher graded you on your ability to complete the assignments, all of your assignments were placed on display for everyone in the class to see (after being graded and covered in the teacher's red pen, of course). Imagine your classmates' performance depended on your participation in a team assignment, where you failing to perform to their standards (not to the maximum of your abilities) would earn you scorn and derision. Which do you think is more likely: You master the subject you are already weak at, or you do the bare minimum to get by and never take it again? | |
Well actually, to be fair, out math and science classes looked like that half the time to teach us the value of teamwork and constructive criticism. And I havent been to a school in my life where grades for work (be it team or solo projects) werent put up for the whole class to see. I dont know if thats just by chance or whatever. Oh yeah, and I better mention this to clear it up: in England we were split into 4 tiers for every class. 1 was for the over achievers, 2 for the upper average, 3 for the lower average and 4 for people with dyslexia and stuff like that, so there typically wasnt all that much parity between one student and the next. So thats why the system even worked. If everyone was in one class, yeah, team assignments would be a terrible thing, but not splitting students into tiers is an extremely stupid way to do things anyway. | |
That's what a typical PE class is. Every students' performance is put on display for the rest of the class to see. If you can't throw a ball to save your life or run the mile in the required time limit, everyone knows. Imagine the fuss to be had if we approached academic classes the same way- you don't know how to compute the derivative? Now the whole class gets to see you! It takes you half as long to compute the velocity of the ball rolling down the hill? Well, while you struggle with the problem, the rest of the class who are better than you get to sit around and chat and goof off. You have to sit at your desk and keep plugging away until you get it, and if you don't get it, you're lazy. PE classes are taught so backwards compared to what we have learned through research about how young people acquire skills. Its just absurd that our education system still thinks effectively bullying fat kids is an effective way to get them to enjoy exercise.
Do you also do that for PE? Because in America at least when I was in school, people didn't. Every academic subject gets streamed based on skill level, but for some reason people thought that needed to fly out the window when PE class started. Why shouldn't the kid who has never thrown a football in his life play against the captain of the team? | |
To a lesser extent, yes. For stuff like football and rugby we were split into kids that could play well and kids that couldnt, so some kid whos never kicked a ball in his life didnt have to play against another kid whos a starter for the Birmingham youth team. For running and such the same thing was done. Overweight kids and out of shape kids were put into a different group with their own teacher, doing different exercises. Stuff like "run until you throw up" happened, but you didnt get someone fit smugly running past the fat kid. Overweight people still got the fat kid treatment for being in the second group, but theres no real way to avoid that; if you are fat, and you are in school, you are going to catch some hostility one way or the other. Still, we regularly had people coming out of the second tier group into the first tier group after weeks of proper exercise, so I guess thats kind of rewarding. As much as I hated it at the time, I have to say that was the best school I ever had the fortune of visiting. Going to a German school really put shit in perspective for me. Man, I thought they did things wrong in England, and then I witnessed the 16 year old elite of the school reading 50 page books about the dangers of marijuana. No joke, this is considered advanced stuff in Germany. Terrible. Anyway, im getting off topic, so let me recap: we were split into two groups and not four in sports class, and while it certainly didnt eliminate bullying and ridicule entirely, its the best system I have seen or heard of. | |
The latter. It'd end up being a 20 year expensive program with now percievable results. | |
Except some measures pay for themselves. If one were to ramp up food quality rules in the US to European Union levels, you'd see instant results. And it would be law, so any company required to adapt their crappy food can book it as investments and still have happy sharesholders, and you'd see pretty instant profit because the absolute bottom rung of crappy food is simply eliminated, and the price gap with healthier food also becomes smaller at the same time. What doesn't work is 'preaching to the choir' type ad campaigns while the underlying mechanisms as to why people get fat remain unchanged. As for more structural solutions, those are even more simple. Switch the urban planning policies from unlimited suburban sprawl to more decent concentrated deconcentration, as they call it, and you'd see profit on many fronts, including the average health of inhabitants of new neighbourhoods. In all such examples, the free market voluntarily pays for the necessary changes, and the gain is strucutural. All it takes is throwing the republican "regulations of any kind = satan himself!!"-gospel out of the window. Over here it's self-service, and any visit to the supermarket would soon turn into a reminder as to just how unpractical obesity is. | |
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Childhood obesity is becoming a pretty big problem in the US (yea I know haha fat Americans). Now most people seem to be able to take care of themselves pretty well, but there's a growing portion that either cannot or decides not to do so. Now,obesity often starts in childhood. You probably can't blame a 6 year old for not knowing the long term health consequences of eating loads of junk food. But if you're the parent and your child is getting heavier and heavier (and thus less and less healthy), and you're not doing anything about it, it's pretty obvious you either don't know enough or don't care enough. One argument is that some people just don't have enough time to prepare a healthy meal for their kids, due to their jobs. Be that as it may (I know work can be quite stressful), the health of your children is something you should MAKE time for. And really, how long can it take to heat up some frozen veggies and give the kid a banana?
Should allowing your children to eat themselves into obesity be considered neglect? Should the government use incentives to discourage buying or producing junk food?