Children's eating habits

Children's eating habits

Child obesity can be prevented before birth, according to a leading food campaigner.

Susie Orbach has criticised plans to tackle child obesity in primary schools, suggesting that further training for widwives would instead help mothers to deal with their own food issues before their child is born.

Research from an EarlyBird study revealed that 25% of children aged four to five years old are overweight, while 10% are obese.

This comes in conjunction with England’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson’s latest report, which asked: “Are parents of obese children bad parents?” and “Should fat patients go to the back of the queue for NHS treatment?”

"Mothers themselves are troubled by erratic eating, fear of food, preoccupation with body size, frequent dieting and bingeing"

But Orbach believes that the issues are more complex than this, and implies that mothers aren’t at fault for allowing their children to eat excessively, as many women have problematic relationships with food themselves.

In a letter to Sir Donaldson, Orbach said: “Mothers want to give their children all that is best and most reassuring. But in many cases, this doesn’t happen because mothers themselves are troubled by erratic eating, fear of food, preoccupation with body size, frequent dieting and bingeing”.

She says that if women learn to control their own eating habits, they can set a better example for their children. However, mothers often use food as an incentive to reinforce good behaviour from children, and children tend to mirror the eating habits of their parents.

Orbach said: “People eat when they aren’t hungry because they are bored, anxious, angry, conflicted, nervous, sad or overexcited. The feelings don’t get dealt with”.

She added: “It shouldn’t surprise us that when children become independent eaters they reflect what they have learnt [from their mothers], not only in their eating choices, but in the emotional feelings of safety, anxiety, fear, pleasure or satisfaction that go with food”.

She also insisted that tackling eating issues early on in a child’s life will prevent increased spending on treatments for obese adults in the future.

Stomach stapling and gastric bands contribute towards obesity’s estimated cost of £15 billion to the British economy. Obesity drugs, such as ‘orlistat’, which stops the body absorbing fat, and ‘sibutramine’, which suppresses people’s appetites, cost the National Health Service £47 million each year.

Orbach argues that increased spending on health visitors’ training would help women to develop healthy relationships with food, and would be more cost effective than treatments for obesity-related diseases later in life.

She said: “Helping mothers to come to grips with their own eating difficulties is surely the sanest and most effective way to help two generations in one go”.

Sir Donaldson agrees that parents should be encouraged to take an active interest in solving Britain’s obesity epidemic, but outlines in his report that the word ‘obesity’ has become such a taboo that it is often difficult to engage parents to take more responsibility.

He states that parents at a recent focus group preferred the term ‘very overweight’ compared to ‘obese’, and that child health professionals are concerned that ‘obese’ children will be bullied and stigmatised.

He said: “Precisely because body size has become a personal, social and political issue, the use and meaning of words to describe it is important”.

Orbach refutes that the term ‘obese’ is only unpopular amongst parents who are in denial about their child’s health issues, and instead believes that because ‘obese’ is defined as a disease rather than a body size classification, people are more reluctant to use the term.

By Kay Taylor