Unhealthy Parents = Unhealthy Kids? Duh?

I totally agree! Children learn habits from the environment they are in. There have been a ton of studies that prove children who have parents that smoke are also more likely to smoke themselves.

Awhile back, I had a lady email me and say she was at a loss for how to help her daughter who was entering her teenage years and was overweight. The mom said she has always struggled with her weight and didn’t want her daughter to have to go through being overweight as an adult like the mom was experiencing.

I seriously had such hard time responding to the email because I don’t have kids but I am a very opinionated believer in that children learn from their parents. So in some sort of nice but very direct way, I did not mention the daughter but gave my advice to the mom that she would have to learn healthy habits herself and to be a role model for her daughter.

Why would kids want to eat fruits & veggies if the parents don’t have to?

I definitely agree with home being a factor. I think the efforts in the school are somewhat good and yet terrible. In my school they offer fruit, wheat bread, baked fries but kids can buy “extras” like brownies or slushies (HFCS), ice-cream, etc.

In my opinion there should be a “fat” tax. Fattening food should be taxed at a higher rate since the government is having to subsidence the expense of obsess. This was talked about in the June issue of Women’s Health. Norway is considering it.

I have to say that you inherit certain physical tendencies (including your fat cells and metabolism) , and you learn behaviors (including eating behaviors) from your parents. That said, it doesn’t necessarily follow that fat parents have fat kids. When my daughter was growing up, she ate the best of what we could afford. I was the one who ate the rice and bread so she could have lean meats and veggies. She didn’t get fat until she was an adult.

I also have twins (fraternal, not identical). They see me eat the same food. One eats pretty healthy and is concerned about her body and what she puts in it. She exercises more, and is into sports. The younger twin eats noodles, turns up her nose at vegetables and sits in front of video games all day. If you take away the video games, she draws. If you take away her drawing supplies, she goes to sleep. The careful eater is a bit overweight, the younger one who never moves is skinny.

I think a lot of the media reporting of studies look to fix BLAME rather than find good preventative measures or solutions. The studies themselves are often small, and at best show trends. Obviously there is no way this particular study could separate the “NATURE” and “NURTURE” components of all this.

hmmm… just read the comment about taxing “fattening foods” Why should there be a tax on something simply because certain populations don’t control their intake? and what about people with the opposite problem? I have a disabled friend with a metabolic problem. She has to eat richer foods to keep weight ON. If she’s not careful, she can easily get into the 80s… she struggles to keep her weight UP to 114. I’d hardly say that taxing those foods to deter purchasing them would be fair to her, or to the general population.

Taxes aren’t the answer, behavior modification is.

And about schools… cool that your school has healthy offerings. I knew a school in Buffalo, NY that did that, but I’ve been parenting for almost 30 years now in 6 states and I’ve never seen another school that didn’t offer mostly fried and breaded. Ever since Reagan ruled that ketchup counted as a vegetable, it’s only getting worse. It really galls me that some schools are wanting to send out obesity reports on the kids, and some states want to make childhood obesity equivalent to child abuse, while all the time these state and federal funded lunch programs are pumping fats, carbs and sugars into our kids.

Poor kids have it worse… especially kids on free lunch and breakfast programs… programs whose goal (or so they say) is to provide nutrition for those who may be too poor to get good foods at home. Well, they still aren’t getting good foods at home… but the common response is “well, they’re poor, they should be happy with what they’ve got” and at the same time “they can’t be too poor if they’re that fat. They must be eating an awful lot.”

If you’re interested in studies, look at studies on obesity and poverty. Better yet, go back and look at the welfare challenge of a couple years ago, where legislators in the US took up the challenge to eat on what a family gets in food stamps for one month. They either went hungry or gained a lot of weight… and none of them were able to manage a healthy diet on the little they agreed to spend.

I totally agree that what parents eat and how active they are will affect the weight of their children. It starts before birth though… When we eat unhealthy foods we damage our DNA, and our cells – junk food makes junk babies, which is one of the reasons why childhood cancers and heart disease have sky-rocketed in recent years. So these kids are at a disadvantage from Day 1 and they now have parents who feed them unhealthy foods, which just hurts them further. So even if parents aren’t obese themselves, they could have children that are more prone to obesity because of their own poor eating habits prior to conception and during pregnancy.

I agree with Kate, the system is stacked against parents who want to raise healthy kids. Junk food is pushed on kids in schools, the nutrition “lessons” they learn in school are thinly disguised marketing materials from the food industry, and whenever they switch on the TV, they’re bombarded with advertisements for unhealthy food and snacks. Basically the only recourse open to parents who want to live healthy is to home school. The culture has become toxic.

Taxing junk food should not be necessary – all they need to do is remove the subsidies that make it so cheap. The tax payer in the USA is already paying for double for junk food – he just doesn’t know it yet. And then he still gets to pay the penalty in health care when the cheap food makes him sick.

The system is rotten to the core. And you will never change it from the top. People have to start voting with their dollars at the produce section of the grocery store and the farmers markets.

Totally agree with what goes on in the house effects how not only what we eat but how much we move! I grew up around lots of fattening foods & every get together was about food & we were all heavy. We learn early so I think it does start in the home. If you have an active mom & dad & good eating habits without being obsessive, you have a better chance of growing up with those attitudes.