Only Americans are more obese than Scots, and unless we act now our children will die in huge numbers.
Every morning before school my nine-year-old daughter studies a leaflet: the lunch menu for primaries, published by the council.
It’s a masterpiece of misplaced apostrophes – ‘Vege’ hotdog with salad and saute’ potatoes’ – but more important, a sad read for anyone who enjoys food as much as she does. ‘Vege’ meatballs in a Yorkshire pudding with veg’; ‘Quorn dipper with baked beans & potato wedges’. There’s a daily default option of baked potato with a choice of fillings, but she gets very bored of that.
After much chin stroking, my girl will opt three times out of four for the school lunch, mainly because it’s fun to sit in the assembly room with her friends, many of whom qualify, through poverty, for free meals.
One day in four she will pronounce the menu ‘too disgusting’ (I agree with her, especially if they are serving the frozen chicken that school catering notoriously buys in from battery farms in Thailand and Brazil).
On those days she goes off with a packed lunch. The kids eat these in the classroom or the playground. There’s a good swapping trade in the sugary drinks, cheesy Wotsits, muffins and store-bought sandwiches that most parents judge suitable nutrition for the growing youth of Scotland. A piece of fruit is a rare and unloved thing.
The parents are terribly wrong, of course. Their ignorance – or laziness – is a key to the fact that, as everyone surely now knows, we are one of the most overweight countries in the world.
Our men are second in the weight stakes only after Americans. Our children drink more sugar than any others in the world, including the United States. Rates of the illnesses like diabetes, cancer and heart disease associated with bad eating are soaring.
Whatever Scotland has become by 2030, we will, if we go on as we do now, be a country of elephants: 43% of people aged 16-64 will be not just overweight but obese, according to the Scottish Government’s predictions (the rest of the current UK will be a few percentage points behind).
Scotland the Fat will be a sad place to live in, and an expensive one. The obese and overweight on average cost the health services 20% more than ordinary people, even though they die much younger (the direct costs of treating the overweight in Scotland today are around a third of a billion pounds). People talk as though this future is as inevitable as the oil running out, but it isn’t.
The problem is that for years we’ve tried to address bad diet with education and advice. Walk down any Scottish shopping street and you can see how that has failed – not least because the Scottish Government has promoted the absurd myth that more exercise is the answer to bad eating.
If you eat a Pizza Hut stuffed-crust 14-incher you need to run five miles to burn off the calories. Couch potatoes do not run.
The obesity epidemic is a national catastrophe: and it now needs the firm application of law. I’d start by making my child, and every one of them, eat the school meal. They also need to learn about food and home economics – it should be as important in the curriculum as sport.
The addictions that lead to obesity are set in place in childhood, and that’s where we must step in. Parents cannot be trusted to feed their children properly, with as many as one in six going to school without any breakfast at all. So let’s make school meals free and compulsory.
They’re obviously going to have to be better and more varied, or we’ll have a nation of starvelings and parents thrusting KFC packs through the playground railings.
(This feature was originally published in 2014)
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