What if we let our kids eat what they want? A radical new take on weight debate | Hacker News Reader

What if we let our kids eat what they want? A radical new take on weight debate

theguardian.com

10 pointsKaibeezy16 comments

Obesity is a massive and growing health crisis, just ignoring the problem by pretending that it's somehow OK for the majority of people to be obese is absurd. The article seems to be claiming that the health issues from obesity are more due to how obese people are treated, not the actual obesity itself? Which I don't find particularly convincing, if you know extremely obese people the physical issues over time are obvious.

If we let kids eat whatever they want, a significant portion will live on a diet of sugary drinks and fast food - that's not a good outcome. Of course we shouldn't be shaming fat children, but we should be working on instilling habits around eating actual food, and avoiding excess sugar intake.

You don't fix obesity by telling obese people who are eating garbage food to eat less of it. And you don't fix obesity by telling obese people to eat whatever you want. You fix it by eating actual food (not fast food/deep fried food, and not drinks full of sugar), that actually makes you feel full with a reasonable amount of calories.

> As Sole-Smith writes: “It’s not their bodies causing these kids to have higher rates of anxiety, depression and disordered eating behaviours. The real danger to a child in a larger body is how we treat them for having that body.”

I had a friend in school. We were 17. He was quite tall but also very overweight. He had to get an exemption to use the elevators, normally reserved for staff only, as he had serious issues with his knees due to his weight.

At 17 his knees were already giving up because of his excessive weight.

Sure, we shouldn't fat shame kids. But we also shouldn't pretend it's good for kids to be obese.

Regardless of what you serve, forcing children to "clean their plate" even when they aren't in control of the portion size is very common and leads to strangely adversarial relationships with food as well as skewed ideas of fair portion sizes themselves.

Much better to allow them to serve themselves and permit to go back for more, while still maintaining a "eat what you take" rule, than force them to choke down an amount of food they didn't choose until they're feeling physically unwell.

If they don't eat enough, they will reach a steady state eventually. If they over-choose, they will regret that and correct in future. Some level of veto is necessary to prevent gaming of the system, but there's a difference between "you can't choose a single spoon of rice for your main course and fill up on ice cream later" and "eat this half-kilo of pasta because I said so and you'll sit here until you can miserably force it down".

Tell me you've never had kids...

You will "force" (let's admit it's not really force, but more nudging) children to clean their plate because they can't come back later and ask for food anytime they want. Learning to eat at fixed time, and to share a common meal (which is also a social bonding ritual), instead of expecting to be served at any time on a whim and live their life aloof of other's schedules, is part of socialisation and education.

No one's saying you don't have mealtimes, this all happens at a mealtime. You just don't overface them with huge (to them) one-shot platefuls and make them eat it with a combination of threats and guilt. They can ask for seconds if they want, strictly at the same mealtime, and it's obviously better for them to take less at first and do that rather than take too much because then they actually do have to eat it all.

They will quickly learn not to undereat and expect to be allowed to raid the snack store later (not that we had a snack store as such, but even if I knew there was, say, a cake to be had, "consequences of your own actions" would be the phrase used while being firmly denied access).

It isn't, you're just failing as a parent to set boundaries.

> She advocates for trusting children to choose what they eat, allowing them to live by their likes and dislikes, to choose when they’ve had enough, and to say no when they want to, so that they learn to know themselves and their bodies.

Within reason. Anyone with kids will know that they will immediately gravitate towards sugary anything once they’ve tasted it. Additionally anyone who starts to understand themselves more in adulthood will see the disorder created with their own upbringing and try to avoid it. There are good points however around the disorders created if this goes out of check, but these radical acceptance attitudes are what accidentally create them.

Obesity is a killer in especially America and radical acceptance only takes away years of your life and potentially your kids by not intervening earlier.

Moderation in all things.

If you make healthy, tasty food from ingredients your great grandma would have recognized and always serve protein, carbs and vegetables to each kid, no negotiating, then they grow up eating fine. The no negotiating part is important, if they choose to leave the table hungry, they can have some milk before bed and tomorrow they will probably choose differently. No kid ever starved to death from a couple of days of refusing dinner.

What did they learn from you giving them reheated crap over and over until they ate it? I'm not entirely sure they learned anything other than their parents have to control what food they eat... It doesn't impart the neccessary nutritional knowledge for successfully eating healthy when you're older, and it creates an adversarial relationship between your kid that involves food. From my experience that's just one of the many first steps to creating a child with disordered eating habits.

The people I know that do this "no negotiation" method, their kids sneak snacks from friends, neighbors, school, and wherever they can get them. They also have no idea what is good just that they are forced to eat certain foods they don't like. They constantly are on alert about whether their parent is around to by ask if it's okay to eat whatever snack/food because they don't know, or are trained that only their parents can know, what is good for them and what isn't.

Basically it has the opposite affect from my observation of creating adults with good nutritional understanding. Involving your kids in food preparation, giving them agency over what they have for dinner (like having them pick the meal and food prep once a week), and educating them on where food comes from, nutrition in general, and just food overall will get you further than any sort of dictatorial bullcrap where you slam a plate down and say, "eat it cause that's all you get."

I just don't understand the thought process that goes into that sort of parenting. Would you like it if someone did that to you? Would it help you understand why one food is healthier than another? From my perspective it isn't teaching them anything other then "my parents know best." Which doesn't help them understand why they are eating something or what is healthy or unhealthy. It also churns out a bunch of emotions around food that don't necessarily exist beforehand. Those weird emotional attachments to food is a major factor in a lot of disordered eating habits...

I have no idea what you are talking about.

I'm talking about proposing new freshly cooked healthy meals with no complex discussion. Take it or leave it, no big deal. The story the kid gets is: You won't go to bed hungry, and all you see is the people you love eating the same attractive food that's put before you. Of course you're going to get hungry/curious and eat with the family.

Kids adapt to the reality laid out before them. Construct a healthy reality and you get healthy kids.

(I do agree with cooking with your kids of course. I'll even raise you one: we work in the field 3 half days a year with our kids, so that they know the farmer that grows their vegetables by name.)

One of my brother's classmates was morbidly obese for a kid 6 years of age. His daily lunch would be more than what I can manage to eat even today in one meal, not to mention calorically heavy on sugars. He passed away soon enough from a heart attack, a few weeks after his 7th birthday if I remember correctly.

Letting people eat what they want is not the answer.

> Being told you’re too fat in childhood is associated with a higher likelihood of an obese BMI later in life.

Sentences like this make me think they are overlooking an obvious explanation.

On the other hand, since we don’t really know what is causing our epidemic of obesity, fat shaming is just cruel.

We do. That's how we ended up on this obesity mess.

I don’t care. I literally do not care. These food science people have lied over and over and over again. Modern history is littered with nutritionists being wrong.

Reading this I have to wonder what her angle is. Paid by food companies? Desperate for attention? Convinced she is fighting for social justice? Whatever it is I don’t trust it.

As for me and my own we’re gonna stick to the age-old advice that I know works: eat food, not too much of it, mostly vegetables.

Look no further than the American book-industrial complex.

>Virginia Sole-Smith, author of a brave and radical new book...

It's just click bait in literary form. Make "radical" claim to get attention --> sell books.

How about we acknowledge that extreme sugary foods (soft drinks and other foods that imply a multiple gram uptake of added sugars in a single serving) represent a much larger public health risk than heroin or cigarettes, and require marketing material, labelling, taxation, and availability to minors reflect that fact?

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