What if we let our kids eat what they want? A radical new take on weight debate
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Re: What if we let our kids eat what they want? A radical new take on weight debate
#2If you make healthy, tasty food from ingredients your great grandma would have recognized and always serve protein, carbs and vegetables to each kid, no negotiating, then they grow up eating fine. The no negotiating part is important, if they choose to leave the table hungry, they can have some milk before bed and tomorrow they will probably choose differently. No kid ever starved to death from a couple of days of refusing dinner.
Re: What if we let our kids eat what they want? A radical new take on weight debate
#3Obesity is a massive and growing health crisis, just ignoring the problem by pretending that it's somehow OK for the majority of people to be obese is absurd. The article seems to be claiming that the health issues from obesity are more due to how obese people are treated, not the actual obesity itself? Which I don't find particularly convincing, if you know extremely obese people the physical issues over time are obvious.
If we let kids eat whatever they want, a significant portion will live on a diet of sugary drinks and fast food - that's not a good outcome. Of course we shouldn't be shaming fat children, but we should be working on instilling habits around eating actual food, and avoiding excess sugar intake.
You don't fix obesity by telling obese people who are eating garbage food to eat less of it. And you don't fix obesity by telling obese people to eat whatever you want. You fix it by eating actual food (not fast food/deep fried food, and not drinks full of sugar), that actually makes you feel full with a reasonable amount of calories.
Re: What if we let our kids eat what they want? A radical new take on weight debate
#4I don’t care. I literally do not care. These food science people have lied over and over and over again. Modern history is littered with nutritionists being wrong.
Reading this I have to wonder what her angle is. Paid by food companies? Desperate for attention? Convinced she is fighting for social justice? Whatever it is I don’t trust it.
As for me and my own we’re gonna stick to the age-old advice that I know works: eat food, not too much of it, mostly vegetables.
Re: What if we let our kids eat what they want? A radical new take on weight debate
#5> She advocates for trusting children to choose what they eat, allowing them to live by their likes and dislikes, to choose when they’ve had enough, and to say no when they want to, so that they learn to know themselves and their bodies.
Within reason. Anyone with kids will know that they will immediately gravitate towards sugary anything once they’ve tasted it. Additionally anyone who starts to understand themselves more in adulthood will see the disorder created with their own upbringing and try to avoid it. There are good points however around the disorders created if this goes out of check, but these radical acceptance attitudes are what accidentally create them.
Obesity is a killer in especially America and radical acceptance only takes away years of your life and potentially your kids by not intervening earlier.
Moderation in all things.
Re: What if we let our kids eat what they want? A radical new take on weight debate
#6We do. That's how we ended up on this obesity mess.
Re: What if we let our kids eat what they want? A radical new take on weight debate
#7How about we acknowledge that extreme sugary foods (soft drinks and other foods that imply a multiple gram uptake of added sugars in a single serving) represent a much larger public health risk than heroin or cigarettes, and require marketing material, labelling, taxation, and availability to minors reflect that fact?
Re: What if we let our kids eat what they want? A radical new take on weight debate
#8> Being told you’re too fat in childhood is associated with a higher likelihood of an obese BMI later in life.
Sentences like this make me think they are overlooking an obvious explanation.
On the other hand, since we don’t really know what is causing our epidemic of obesity, fat shaming is just cruel.
Re: What if we let our kids eat what they want? A radical new take on weight debate
#9Regardless of what you serve, forcing children to "clean their plate" even when they aren't in control of the portion size is very common and leads to strangely adversarial relationships with food as well as skewed ideas of fair portion sizes themselves.
Much better to allow them to serve themselves and permit to go back for more, while still maintaining a "eat what you take" rule, than force them to choke down an amount of food they didn't choose until they're feeling physically unwell.
If they don't eat enough, they will reach a steady state eventually. If they over-choose, they will regret that and correct in future. Some level of veto is necessary to prevent gaming of the system, but there's a difference between "you can't choose a single spoon of rice for your main course and fill up on ice cream later" and "eat this half-kilo of pasta because I said so and you'll sit here until you can miserably force it down".
Re: What if we let our kids eat what they want? A radical new take on weight debate
#10> As Sole-Smith writes: “It’s not their bodies causing these kids to have higher rates of anxiety, depression and disordered eating behaviours. The real danger to a child in a larger body is how we treat them for having that body.”
I had a friend in school. We were 17. He was quite tall but also very overweight. He had to get an exemption to use the elevators, normally reserved for staff only, as he had serious issues with his knees due to his weight.
At 17 his knees were already giving up because of his excessive weight.
Sure, we shouldn't fat shame kids. But we also shouldn't pretend it's good for kids to be obese.