World Obesity Day and our Community Farm

Today is World Obesity Day. On current trends, 2.7 billion adults worldwide or 1/3 of the world's population will suffer from overweight and obesity by 2025. Obesity is responsible many diseases including heart disease, diabetes, many types of cancer and liver disease. It will cost the world more than a trillion dollars.

The UK's annual bill will rise from $19bn to $31bn in 8 years time, which could easily bankrupt the NHS.

​In Britain more than 1/4 of teenagers eat chocolate or sweets and around 20% drink cola or a fizzy drink daily. Young people are eating way more than the recommended limit. For the record the WHO recommends less than 10% of calories consumed as added sugars- those sugars incorporated into food and drinks during production, such as soft drinks fruit drinks pastries and sweets. Young people are also eating too little in the way of fruit and vegetables. And they spend over 60% of their lives sitting down, mostly in front of a screen of some sort.

Various myths, largely fueled by the meat and dairy industry have encouraged British people to believe that drinking milk, eating eggs, cheese and lean meat is the best diet for children. Sadly the push to encourage youngsters to have their five portions of fruit and veg a day is not strongly funded and almost mocked at by many parents.

However the nutrient composition per 500 calories of energy (1/4 of the daily recommendation) is generally much greater in plant based foods than animal foods as the following table shows

Nutrient Compositions of plant and animal based foods (per 500 calories of energy). Source: TC Campbell and TM Campbell, The China Study. Texas 2006.  p 230

 

Nutrient	Plant based foods: Equal parts tomatoes, spinach, beans, peas and potatoes	Animal based foods: Equal parts beef, pork, chicken and whole milk
Cholesterol (mg)	0	137
Fat (g)	4	36
Protein (g)	33	34
Dietary fibre (g)	31	0
Vitamin C (mcg)	293	4
Folate (mcg)	1168	19
Vitamin E (mg)	11	0.5
Iron (mg)	20	2
Magnesium (mg)	548	51
Calcium (mg)	545	252

 

So if we want our children to grow into healthy adults we should be trying to keep their Body Mass index (BMI) between 18.5 and 24.9, and encourage them to maximise their fruit and vegetables and to rein back on junk foods, sugars and fatty foods, meats and dairy products.