Healthy Parenting Part 2

This is the second post I am writing with regards to parenting and food. I hope you had a chance to read the first post I wrote directly on healthy parenting. It has a number of very important details about how the body is adversely effected by fast foods. I am continuing here because there really is so much that all people should know about fast foods and how harmful they are to our body.

In my posts from this point on, I will be referring to fast food as “Fat food”. Because that is what it is and that is what it does.

Love your kids enough to give them healthy meals all the time.

It is truly a shame that 1 in every 3 kids today is obese. There were never this many obese kids decades ago. It is very sad to see. It is also very hard for them because they have challenges to deal with that young kids shouldn’t have.  Concurrent with the obesity epidemic in youth is the incredible rise in diabetes.

Diabetes is one of the most common chronic diseases among children in the United States. There are about 215,000, or 0.26%, of all people younger than 20 years old who have diabetes. These is 1 out of about every 400 kids and adolescents- with type 2 diabetes. A disease that never used to effect kids, only adults when they were older. Until 10 years ago, type 2 diabetes accounted for less than 3% of all cases of new-onset diabetes in adolescents. Currently, 45% of cases are attributed to type type 2 diabetes in adolescents. That is stark!

The epidemic did not just appear suddenly. This epidemic was been in process for 50-60 years even. What is new about it though, is that never before in human history have human beings collectively experienced such a dramatic and heartbreaking reality.

“Fat food”  consumption during the last 50-60 years has escalated dramatically. In fact, the rise in Fat food consumption is parallel to the rise in obesity, From the early 1970’s when there were approximately 30,000 Fat food locations, to 1980 when there were 140,000 locations. Just that increase in Fat food restaurants is amazing!!! Scarier still is that in that same time frame the sales of Fat food rose about 300%!

Fat foods are loaded with more calories than a kid should be eating at one meal. (The fact is even adults are consuming more calories in 1 Fat food meal than they should consume too.)
Fat foods all give kids a very large does of trans fats. Trans fats eaten on a regular basis will lead to high cholesterol, being over weight, and even diabetes.

Fat foods also have a lot of added sugar. The un-necessary added sugar does of course contribute to weight gain. Sugar will effect a teenagers mood. The increased sugar will effect their skin, many teens already have acne and sugar will absolutely increase that. The sugar from the Fat food meals along with other sugars in their diet can of course be a path to diabetes.

The bigger picture here is, how are kids learning to eat these days? How are they learning to take care of themselves for their future…?