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Obesity among children
CHILDREN IN Britain are putting their health at risk by refusing to exercise and "eating themselves sick" on a diet of fatty and sugary foods, a conference in London was told recently.
The snack culture was fuelling the rise in obesity among youngsters who preferred crisps, chips and sweets to fruit and vegetables, said experts at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. Diets had become so poor among children that rickets, a disease associated with Victorian industrial slums, had re-emerged as a health concern in some age groups.
Despite Government attempts to improve children's eating habits, more than two thirds of pre-school children were fed a diet of white bread, chips and sweets.
Inactive lifestyles and fatty diets mean obesity. Britain is rising faster than in almost all other European countries, with one in five adults in England classed as obese and more than half as overweight.
The rate of obesity among children has almost doubled in the past 10 years as young people spend more time watching television and playing computer games. Television footage of the Queen's Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977 demonstrated the extent to which children's eating habits had changed over the past 25 years, a separate conference at the Institute of Physics in London was told. "There are hardly any people who are substantially overweight and there are certainly not any obese children," said Dr Susan Jebb, of the British Nutrition Foundation. The conference was told that people worried about weight-related health problems should measure the circumference of their waist.
Men with 37-inch waists would be considered "at some risk" and at 40 inches the risk was "substantial".The corresponding figures for women are 32 inches and 35 inches.
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