Perhaps this is more of a political issue, considering people’s reactions.
Basically, Weight Watchers acquired a diet app a year or so ago and have designed it to be useful for kids ages 8-17. If parents pay a huge amount, they get video coaching but, otherwise, it’s basically appears to be general info on portion control, etc.
Social media flipped out. I couldn’t find anybody supportive of the idea on Twitter with the primary reaction being that they were either killing kids by getting them to diet or fat shaming them by teaching them they shouldn’t stuff whatever they want into their pie holes.
Non-social media, if there’s any such thing, isn’t that much more supportive.
Now, in the US, 20% of kids are obese and over a third are overweight. The gov’t subsidizes the sugar industry to the tune of $4b each year and 80% of schools have contracts with either Coke or Pepsi to keep vending machines in their buildings.
But, a nutrition app is bad? Am I entirely misreading this?
Obesity is another problem that happens to other people’s children. Other than cook your own food at home and not be stupid, I don’t really know what to say.
Childhood obesity is totally on the parents. Kids don’t know about nutrition yet and they certainly don’t have money to buy their own food and cook it.
It’s almost child neglect in a way. It’s not just the health issue due to obesity during childhood that’s the problem. You’re instilling a life time of habits that will become a life long struggle for them to go against. Most always like to eat what they ate as a kid.
Imo, they need to have nutrition education for parents on how to feed their kids. There’s a lot of misinformation on how to feed kids.
To be fair to parents who allow children to become obese (how is that even possible?) they are subjected to shed loads of fructose in things you wouldn’t imagine could have added sugar. Even so… How can a child possibly get fat? It’s beyond belief to me.
I know, children are meant to be able to eat quite a bit to grow. I think they must eat a lot of processed sugar. I ate a lot as a kid and was so skinny. But never ate much sugar or desserts.
I ate a lot of crap too. Fried food and all. Even sugary drinks like milk tea from 711 often. So I can only imagine how much sugar and crap these fat kids much be eating.
I was talking to somebody a few months ago who was worried about her kids gaining weight. It turns out they like to eat loads of cookies and other snacks before bed and don’t sleep unless in a food coma of sort.
“How do they get the cookies in the house? Do they go out and buy it?”
“Of course not, I buy it for them.”
“If you don’t want them to eat it then why do you keep it in the house?”
Oddly, this is generally the comment that I saw most often on social media related to the app.
Some version of “kids should be permitted to eat everything and anything they want in endless quantities and any restriction is a DIET and people know diets don’t work.”
Imo, it’s also likely children like this can also develop other issues like addiction. If you can’t discipline yourself against instant gratification on what you want all the time, it’s going to be a life long struggle and possibly make you more susceptible to things like addiction to drugs, alcohol, and gambling. Some people are born more susceptible to it I believe, but if you reinforce these neural pass ways it’s definitely not positive.
Also this family definitely has parents that enable their kids this way. In my experience with people with addiction, it’s also a family issue. Mostly family who enable their kids or neglect their kids. Possibly both. I saw it with almost every addiction patient when I interned at an mental institution.
This is my theory. Since kids don’t produce much of either sex hormones yet. We know fat increases the conversion of estrogen. It messes with their hormones and estrogen also makes someone store fat more. It’s also why many overweight boys develop breast tissue aka man boobs during puberty when they pump out testosterone. A lot that testosterone converts to estrogen and triggers the growth of breast tissue that’s not normal for boys. It must also fuck with their metabolism in this way.
Its stupid because:
A) weightwatchers is bullshit. Superstition. Flim-flam. And it doesn’t even work.
B) as everyone else said, people get fat because they eat a very specific combination of shite and sugar, not because they eat too much. It really is pretty hard to make a kid fat.
C) weightwatchers not only doesnt work, it perpetuates the idea that people get fat because they eat too much. Next stop: eating disorders.
D) kids need a lot of fat, and weightwatchers also promote low-fat foods … most of which are full of sugar and other crap.
Btw, the NYT nutritionist wants a jolly good kick up the ass. The tl;dr version is “we nutritionists know so little about human metabolism that we have no idea why people get fat, cannot advise them how to lose it, and suggest they simply embrace being fat and ill as the new normal”.