Child obesity a ballooning problem as one-quarter start school overweight

LONDON LETTER:Fast-food outlets and incorrect notions of ideal body size pose big threats to child health

A WALK down one street in Oldham, a struggling town near Manchester where one in five of 10-year-old children is officially overweight, reveals the crisis of obesity facing the population and health services.

In one half-mile stretch of the Huddersfield Road, between St James’s Church and the Ripponden Road, there are 19 takeaways of all kinds, from fish-and-chip shops to curry and kebab houses, with more seeking to open. “Every time a shop closes, some fast-food operator wants to open,” said Oldham councillor Rod Blyth this week.

“When you get that many, the number of people on the street in daytime falls away. The street dies off. It is only alive at night.”

Last night, Oldham council met to consider a plan to claw back some of the ground lost in recent years, agreeing that, in future, no more than two fast-food shops can be located adjacent to each other, and that the streetscape should be broken up by other types of shops.

But another element of the plan has grabbed local headlines – its call for a £1,000 levy from fast-food shops to go into a healthy-eating promotion fund. Inevitably, the headline writers dubbed it “a fat tax”.

The council does not have power to impose the tax, though it will lobby Westminster for a change of law to allow it to do so.

The decision to grant planning permission for a Kentucky Fried Chicken on Huddersfield Road last summer was the final straw for local Church of England rector Paul Plumpton, who has to clear his churchyard of litter and vomit every morning.

The decision to approve the KFC application, which had earlier been sanctioned by the planning inspector, was taken partly because councillors believed they would lose any subsequent legal action taken.

Ironically, children in Oldham, according to official statistics, are more physically active than their peers elsewhere and those younger than 10 are less likely to be overweight. However, by the time they are 10, one in five are classified as obese by doctors.

The scale of the challenge ahead is illustrated by British government adviser and consultant paediatrician Prof Mary Rudolf, whose research has shown that parents are often blind to the problem. Just one in seven parents of children classified as obese believed their charges were overweight, partly because the perceptions of what is, or is not, a proper weight for a child has changed over the years.

“Did you know that a healthy 10-year-old’s ribs should be clearly visible? Many parents would consider that such a child was quite underweight,” said Prof Rudolf.

In 2005, parents of primary school children in England were given information under the national child measurement programme about the ideal weights for their offspring.

Some were surprised and others angry at being told that some of their children were obese.

The problem of perception is also caused by the media’s tendency to accompany stories about childhood obesity with photographs of gargantuan minors. Most of those identified as overweight by the National Child Measurement Programme do not look obviously overweight, said Prof Rudolf. Indeed, they can look slim when compared to the media image, but even lesser degrees of obesity are an early marker for diseases from diabetes to circulatory problems later in life.

In Tunbridge Wells in Kent, obesity figures have been reduced with the help of the “Mind, Exercise, Nutrition, Do It!” programme, which is being run in 250 locations across the UK for overweight seven-to-13-year-olds.

Parents and children are brought together for two two-hour sessions every week for 10 weeks, where they are given advice about healthy eating, fitness and exercise. Some of the places are paid for by the National Health Service.

The course, designed by Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and the University College’s London Institute of Child Health, includes a visit to a supermarket, cookery lessons and instruction in how to reduce sugar, fats and salts as well as how to navigate the often-confusing world of food labelling.

Birmingham teenager Gemma Hardman (13), who was bullied relentlessly at school about her 13-stone weight, has become the poster-child for the campaign, having reduced to size six clothes.

"In February 2009, I was getting terrible chest pains, then started to have awful headaches which the doctor said was caused by me being overweight," Gemma told the Birmingham Mail."The teachers could see I was upset and having a hard time so made me go and see the school nurse who referred me on to the course."

Official figures released before Christmas indicate the scale of the challenge: one-quarter of all children on their first day in school in England are overweight. By their sixth year, the number has risen to one-third.

The figures vary by region. One in 12 four year olds in the southeast coastal region of England, one of the wealthiest parts of the UK, is obese, while one in eight fits into this category in London.