A new study adds to evidence that severe obesity is becoming more common in young U.S. children. There was some hope that children in a government food program might be bucking a trend in obesity rates.
I suppose it depends on where you live and/or your socioeconomic status, but I dont really see that may fat kids in my area. see a lot of fat adults who let themselves go though
I live in the southern US in a middle-to-lower class area. I’m seeing severely overweight kids all the time. It’s really sad because their parents are also very overweight and it’s easy to see where the kids are learning their bad habits from.
I think lower income parents are just very low on overall bandwidth in terms of time, energy, and money.
Low quality processed food is quick to prepare and relatively affordable. These people also disproportionately live in “food deserts.”
And when you’re low on said bandwidth you’re not as likely to be able to support your kid through extra curricular activities. Instead, plopping them in front of the TV is a real easy way to get some downtime for yourself.
I just don’t think these folks are getting home from their soul crushing low wage jobs and cooking up organic balanced meals from whole ingredients and then taking the kids to soccer practice and ballet by and large. They’re fucking spent in more ways than one.
It’s a failure of our education systems, financial systems, stagnant wages, and city/suburb design for sure.
But it’s also on the parents. It’s so easy to cook rice and broccoli and beans, or stick some chicken in the oven, or throw salads together, that laziness isn’t much of an excuse, especially when it comes to the health of your child. You do you, but as a parent, your child needs to come first and those bad eating habits follow them for life and eventually impact their kids too.
When you’re fat, you have a personal problem. When a large percent of your population is fat, you have a social problem. It’s super easy to say, “All these fat people need to eat better and exercise more” but it’s harder to look for answers to… Why aren’t these people eating better and exercising more?
It’s definitely a bigger thing in some parts of the country and those areas for sure seem to line up with economic factors. When I lived in the US I spent most of my life in the southeast. Then when I moved to a bigger west coast city I was really struck by how much thinner the population as a whole was there. Same with states like Colorado.
I suppose it depends on where you live and/or your socioeconomic status, but I dont really see that may fat kids in my area. see a lot of fat adults who let themselves go though
I live in the southern US in a middle-to-lower class area. I’m seeing severely overweight kids all the time. It’s really sad because their parents are also very overweight and it’s easy to see where the kids are learning their bad habits from.
I think lower income parents are just very low on overall bandwidth in terms of time, energy, and money.
Low quality processed food is quick to prepare and relatively affordable. These people also disproportionately live in “food deserts.”
And when you’re low on said bandwidth you’re not as likely to be able to support your kid through extra curricular activities. Instead, plopping them in front of the TV is a real easy way to get some downtime for yourself.
I just don’t think these folks are getting home from their soul crushing low wage jobs and cooking up organic balanced meals from whole ingredients and then taking the kids to soccer practice and ballet by and large. They’re fucking spent in more ways than one.
It’s a failure of our education systems, financial systems, stagnant wages, and city/suburb design for sure.
But it’s also on the parents. It’s so easy to cook rice and broccoli and beans, or stick some chicken in the oven, or throw salads together, that laziness isn’t much of an excuse, especially when it comes to the health of your child. You do you, but as a parent, your child needs to come first and those bad eating habits follow them for life and eventually impact their kids too.
When you’re fat, you have a personal problem. When a large percent of your population is fat, you have a social problem. It’s super easy to say, “All these fat people need to eat better and exercise more” but it’s harder to look for answers to… Why aren’t these people eating better and exercising more?
It’s definitely a bigger thing in some parts of the country and those areas for sure seem to line up with economic factors. When I lived in the US I spent most of my life in the southeast. Then when I moved to a bigger west coast city I was really struck by how much thinner the population as a whole was there. Same with states like Colorado.
When you compare these maps
https://stateofchildhoodobesity.org/demographic-data/ages-10-17/
https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/prevalence-maps.html
To this one
https://www.americanprogress.org/data-view/poverty-data/poverty-data-map-tool/
There’s some obvious correlation happening