> Experts found that seven in 10 British teenagers do not even consume 100g of fruit each day – the equivalent of around one small apple.
>
> Nine in 10 are not eating enough veg and 73% exceed the recommended limits of sugar consumption each day, researchers claimed
Early 30s and this sounds like most people I know
No kidding? I’ve never seen as many fat people as in the UK since I arrived a few months ago (and I’ve lived in the US for a year).
You need a study for that 😅
The price of shit food and the convenience of it lasting longer in your cupboards makes this no surprise really.
Not just teens, the 20spmethings I work with usual have breakfast from Gregg’s most days and then a single container meal from a local takeaway for lunch, along with minimum two bags of crisps, some chocolate and soft drinks…….then they wonder why they are all fat and unhealthy
Is there any wonder mental and physical health is at such a low when young people are basically malnourished.
Tbh I don’t think I ate any fruit yesterday either. Probably not much today either unless you count a small squirt of tomato puree. Everything else is veg.
Some selection of split peas, onions, carrots, parsnips, kidney beans, garlic.
Not to dunk on teenagers as us boring early 30s adults were there once, but its hard not to believe this when your office is across from a corner shop and you see them going there on their lunch break and with all lf them its the same fistfuls of sweets, crisps, energy drink and other junk food every time.
It was the same when I was 14. It was the same in 1950s “tuck shops”. We all ate shit food at that age. Let’s be honest.
We know all this. We know the trend towards obesity and all it’s complications. It has been crystal clear for years. We know what is causing it, and what would need to be done (individually at least) to combat it. These studies don’t add anything other than 5 minutes of shock value.
What’s needed is the collective will to change this. That doesn’t exist. Over-processed, calorie dense, nutritionally poor, cheap shit food is everywhere, in our schools, hospital cafes, pushed by the supermarkets, advertised heavily. Just look at the US to see where we’re headed. And with the ever increasing pressures on free time, money, and mental overhead of this, it’s not a big surprise people turn to oven chips and nuggets for a bit of easy short term satisfaction.
So you’re on your own. Fortunately I don’t give a fuck about most teenagers other than their burden on the health service. So I fed my kids well, and we all eat as healthily as possible.
Heart disease, diabetes and cancer and some of the NHS’s biggest foes. If we actually ate and exercised more as well and being more conscious of what we put in our body we’d be healthier, happier and have a more manageable health system.
I’ve saw plenty of adverts advertising new foods and McDonalds but not promoting exercise or showing its benefits? Heck, even a 5k or 10k step walk is a good number.
I can’t decide if they’re trying to dunk on kids or if they’ve just decided that everyone else is a lost cause.
I’m not expecting better from Sky (or the comments section in here) but I am fucking sick of these articles going “people eat shitty food” as if it’s some kind of choice that happens in a vacuum and not as a result of environment and poverty. Poverty is the biggest indicator of poor dietary health, [and one in five people in the UK live in poverty.](https://www.jrf.org.uk/data/overall-uk-poverty-rates) 14.5 million people. That’s not even factoring into it the fact that [1.2 million people live in a “food desert,”](https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/social-sciences/news/12-million-living-uk-food-deserts-studys-shows) where healthy food is not readily available. Hell, from this study itself:
> Nearly a third of respondents reported that lack of money was the biggest barrier to eating healthily. Ten per cent have even cut back on their own food consumption so that others in their family can eat. This increases to 14 per cent among individuals with a household income of less than £10,000.
Eating healthy and staying at a healthy wait need to stop being marketed as solely personal failings. People are dependent on their environments and collectively this country is one big shitty environment.
Was always shocked at the shite I saw kids eating on the bus home. Witnessed one tiny teenage girl chomping her way through an entire pack of custard creams. :/
When a home cooked meal is too expensive for their parent to cook, when families can’t afford not only the food but the gas/electric it takes to cook that food, those 99p burgers will feed your kids and keep them from going hungry. The issue, like for most issues, is poverty.
The generation that are raising them had cooking stripped from the schools plan and replaced with key skills that had no skills what so ever.
You could feed a family healthy and better for cheaper if you knew how to cook.
It’s almost as if prioritizing classes that reflect well on the schools by getting kids into Uni over classes like Food have had an adverse affect. Who would’ve known
When you consider that the peak of british health was during rationing – and we consider it a low point of British food, its not surprising.
We just have way too nuch access to sugar and meat. Our evolution as humans means we are built for periods of fasting – when we would have high sugar foods or meat we would feast on it, to keep is going when we get low again.
But we never get low anymore. Theres always more sugar and fat around the corner. Asking humans to ignore primal instincts is hard, asking kids is impossible.
The deli, butchers and fresh fish counter in our local Sainsbury’s closed 6 or 7 years ago. It’s been replaced by shelves full of catering-sized packs of carbs/biscuits/sauces. I presume the staff were made redundant.
The chilled fish and seafood fridges are seriously reduced in choice and now mostly stocked with booze and fresh pasta. The range of meat and poultry cuts are down to the absolute minimum.
Any fruit and veg used to start at £1.50 but has only very recently come down and started to compete with Aldi and Lidl after a decade of being massively over-priced.
I have noticed that some fresh produce from the EU is less likely to be available and when it is has declined in quality and far less likely to last, like grapes for example. This is across all supermarkets.
This sounds like most adults i know also. Chips, kebabs and energy drinks as a main diet, with a late night wank as the exercise for the day.
Healthy food IS expensive, no matter how many middle class people tell you otherwise. And buying fresh everyday is unrealistic for many. Until healthy food becomes cheap, and cheap bad food becomes more expensive. Then tbis will keep happening.
We have a greedy and lazy country, the amount of excuses being made in this thread alone for teens and adults is laughable.
Educate your kids that being overweight is not good
All kids should have decent cooking lessons at school. They should focus on the fundamentals required to cook basic main meals from scratch.
It’s very simple to cook cheap, healthy and delicious food with a little bit of knowledge.
It’s not until you need to drop a few pounds that you realise just how calorific most food is and how little of it you should actually be eating to maintain your weight, the exception being fruit and veg which you can pile high. Its no wonder kids are fat these days. A sandwich, a bag of crisps and a bar of chocolate for lunch is easily 800 calories. For some youngsters that will be a third to half the calories they need all day. There’s next to no education on this. No proper courses at school or college. There really should be, we have to give kids the knowledge they need to maintain a healthy weight throughout their life.
Not just teenagers.
Can’t really blame people, we’re worked to death and don’t get paid enough to buy good quality food.
When people are on their feet for 8 hours a day working, coming home and cooking a good meal isnt that appealing. I work in a kitchen, I’ve been cooking all day and simply can’t be arsed most of the time.
I wonder if this is the reason why they quickly flood confined spaces like buses and trains with a sour smell similar to sweaty socks or an improperly dried towel.
Who has the time to cook from scratch? In addition to the extra time that meal planning needs, theres the need to ensure that perishable ingredients are used in date, the clean up after too. This article should say current work life balance prevents peoples from eating healthily.
There’s just not a lot of choice when you survive off a food bank, where because of the disjointed, decentralised nature of food collection, you end up receiving 20 potatoes and 3 packs of digestives to live on.
Read most comments here & while I agree with many people across the country that eating/cooking healthily can be expensive & therefore not the most feasible, I think there are other issues at play.
We, as a country, are overworked & underpaid. I’d argue that because everyone leads such busy lives, especially if you have kids, that there just isn’t enough time for eating/cooking healthily (regardless of cost) and exercising.
In an ideal world, we’d all be working 25-30 hour weeks, maintaining a good work/life balance so that you can spend time on your hobbies, kids/family, exercising & cooking/eating healthily.
However, for the majority of people, that isn’t the case. Instead, people are working 40, 50, 60 or even 70 hour weeks, getting shit pay, getting fucked over with just one 30 min break a day while having a 1-2hr commute on top…
To highlight, I worked in a Curry’s for 6 months as a brand rep. While I had the freedom to come & go as I please and took an hour for lunch everyday which allowed me to go to an M&S, sit down properly & get some soup, this luxury wasn’t afforded to the Curry’s employees however. Some of them did bring food but for the ones that didn’t, there were few options. Going into the shopping centre where M&S was & other food places would have eaten up most of their 30 mins break time so for many of the Curry’s staff their only option was a 5-10 min trip across 1 road to McDonald’s or KFC.
Now, I’m doing PT courier work with UPS. While I make an effort to take some tangerines, a banana, a sandwich & some oat milk, the driver that I work with does not. Everyday because he’s under significant time constraints which means working through his 45 min break, he’s either eating a curry pie out of a newsagent or cold sausage rolls & cookies from Sainsbury’s.
Until we work less & are paid more, these problems such as the diets of children & adults alike as well as a lack of healthy living/exercise are only going to worsen.
I’m just here to sit back and watch the excuses roll in from fully-grown adults who are afraid of fruit and vegetables. The UK attitude towards food and nutrition is by and large, a disgrace. It’s no wonder the teenagers don’t eat well when their parents are addicted to sausage rolls, meal deals and frozen junk food.
28 comments
> Experts found that seven in 10 British teenagers do not even consume 100g of fruit each day – the equivalent of around one small apple.
>
> Nine in 10 are not eating enough veg and 73% exceed the recommended limits of sugar consumption each day, researchers claimed
Early 30s and this sounds like most people I know
No kidding? I’ve never seen as many fat people as in the UK since I arrived a few months ago (and I’ve lived in the US for a year).
You need a study for that 😅
The price of shit food and the convenience of it lasting longer in your cupboards makes this no surprise really.
Not just teens, the 20spmethings I work with usual have breakfast from Gregg’s most days and then a single container meal from a local takeaway for lunch, along with minimum two bags of crisps, some chocolate and soft drinks…….then they wonder why they are all fat and unhealthy
Is there any wonder mental and physical health is at such a low when young people are basically malnourished.
Tbh I don’t think I ate any fruit yesterday either. Probably not much today either unless you count a small squirt of tomato puree. Everything else is veg.
Some selection of split peas, onions, carrots, parsnips, kidney beans, garlic.
Not to dunk on teenagers as us boring early 30s adults were there once, but its hard not to believe this when your office is across from a corner shop and you see them going there on their lunch break and with all lf them its the same fistfuls of sweets, crisps, energy drink and other junk food every time.
It was the same when I was 14. It was the same in 1950s “tuck shops”. We all ate shit food at that age. Let’s be honest.
We know all this. We know the trend towards obesity and all it’s complications. It has been crystal clear for years. We know what is causing it, and what would need to be done (individually at least) to combat it. These studies don’t add anything other than 5 minutes of shock value.
What’s needed is the collective will to change this. That doesn’t exist. Over-processed, calorie dense, nutritionally poor, cheap shit food is everywhere, in our schools, hospital cafes, pushed by the supermarkets, advertised heavily. Just look at the US to see where we’re headed. And with the ever increasing pressures on free time, money, and mental overhead of this, it’s not a big surprise people turn to oven chips and nuggets for a bit of easy short term satisfaction.
So you’re on your own. Fortunately I don’t give a fuck about most teenagers other than their burden on the health service. So I fed my kids well, and we all eat as healthily as possible.
Heart disease, diabetes and cancer and some of the NHS’s biggest foes. If we actually ate and exercised more as well and being more conscious of what we put in our body we’d be healthier, happier and have a more manageable health system.
I’ve saw plenty of adverts advertising new foods and McDonalds but not promoting exercise or showing its benefits? Heck, even a 5k or 10k step walk is a good number.
I can’t decide if they’re trying to dunk on kids or if they’ve just decided that everyone else is a lost cause.
I’m not expecting better from Sky (or the comments section in here) but I am fucking sick of these articles going “people eat shitty food” as if it’s some kind of choice that happens in a vacuum and not as a result of environment and poverty. Poverty is the biggest indicator of poor dietary health, [and one in five people in the UK live in poverty.](https://www.jrf.org.uk/data/overall-uk-poverty-rates) 14.5 million people. That’s not even factoring into it the fact that [1.2 million people live in a “food desert,”](https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/social-sciences/news/12-million-living-uk-food-deserts-studys-shows) where healthy food is not readily available. Hell, from this study itself:
> Nearly a third of respondents reported that lack of money was the biggest barrier to eating healthily. Ten per cent have even cut back on their own food consumption so that others in their family can eat. This increases to 14 per cent among individuals with a household income of less than £10,000.
Eating healthy and staying at a healthy wait need to stop being marketed as solely personal failings. People are dependent on their environments and collectively this country is one big shitty environment.
Was always shocked at the shite I saw kids eating on the bus home. Witnessed one tiny teenage girl chomping her way through an entire pack of custard creams. :/
When a home cooked meal is too expensive for their parent to cook, when families can’t afford not only the food but the gas/electric it takes to cook that food, those 99p burgers will feed your kids and keep them from going hungry. The issue, like for most issues, is poverty.
The generation that are raising them had cooking stripped from the schools plan and replaced with key skills that had no skills what so ever.
You could feed a family healthy and better for cheaper if you knew how to cook.
It’s almost as if prioritizing classes that reflect well on the schools by getting kids into Uni over classes like Food have had an adverse affect. Who would’ve known
When you consider that the peak of british health was during rationing – and we consider it a low point of British food, its not surprising.
We just have way too nuch access to sugar and meat. Our evolution as humans means we are built for periods of fasting – when we would have high sugar foods or meat we would feast on it, to keep is going when we get low again.
But we never get low anymore. Theres always more sugar and fat around the corner. Asking humans to ignore primal instincts is hard, asking kids is impossible.
The deli, butchers and fresh fish counter in our local Sainsbury’s closed 6 or 7 years ago. It’s been replaced by shelves full of catering-sized packs of carbs/biscuits/sauces. I presume the staff were made redundant.
The chilled fish and seafood fridges are seriously reduced in choice and now mostly stocked with booze and fresh pasta. The range of meat and poultry cuts are down to the absolute minimum.
Any fruit and veg used to start at £1.50 but has only very recently come down and started to compete with Aldi and Lidl after a decade of being massively over-priced.
I have noticed that some fresh produce from the EU is less likely to be available and when it is has declined in quality and far less likely to last, like grapes for example. This is across all supermarkets.
This sounds like most adults i know also. Chips, kebabs and energy drinks as a main diet, with a late night wank as the exercise for the day.
Healthy food IS expensive, no matter how many middle class people tell you otherwise. And buying fresh everyday is unrealistic for many. Until healthy food becomes cheap, and cheap bad food becomes more expensive. Then tbis will keep happening.
We have a greedy and lazy country, the amount of excuses being made in this thread alone for teens and adults is laughable.
Educate your kids that being overweight is not good
All kids should have decent cooking lessons at school. They should focus on the fundamentals required to cook basic main meals from scratch.
It’s very simple to cook cheap, healthy and delicious food with a little bit of knowledge.
It’s not until you need to drop a few pounds that you realise just how calorific most food is and how little of it you should actually be eating to maintain your weight, the exception being fruit and veg which you can pile high. Its no wonder kids are fat these days. A sandwich, a bag of crisps and a bar of chocolate for lunch is easily 800 calories. For some youngsters that will be a third to half the calories they need all day. There’s next to no education on this. No proper courses at school or college. There really should be, we have to give kids the knowledge they need to maintain a healthy weight throughout their life.
Not just teenagers.
Can’t really blame people, we’re worked to death and don’t get paid enough to buy good quality food.
When people are on their feet for 8 hours a day working, coming home and cooking a good meal isnt that appealing. I work in a kitchen, I’ve been cooking all day and simply can’t be arsed most of the time.
I wonder if this is the reason why they quickly flood confined spaces like buses and trains with a sour smell similar to sweaty socks or an improperly dried towel.
Who has the time to cook from scratch? In addition to the extra time that meal planning needs, theres the need to ensure that perishable ingredients are used in date, the clean up after too. This article should say current work life balance prevents peoples from eating healthily.
There’s just not a lot of choice when you survive off a food bank, where because of the disjointed, decentralised nature of food collection, you end up receiving 20 potatoes and 3 packs of digestives to live on.
Read most comments here & while I agree with many people across the country that eating/cooking healthily can be expensive & therefore not the most feasible, I think there are other issues at play.
We, as a country, are overworked & underpaid. I’d argue that because everyone leads such busy lives, especially if you have kids, that there just isn’t enough time for eating/cooking healthily (regardless of cost) and exercising.
In an ideal world, we’d all be working 25-30 hour weeks, maintaining a good work/life balance so that you can spend time on your hobbies, kids/family, exercising & cooking/eating healthily.
However, for the majority of people, that isn’t the case. Instead, people are working 40, 50, 60 or even 70 hour weeks, getting shit pay, getting fucked over with just one 30 min break a day while having a 1-2hr commute on top…
To highlight, I worked in a Curry’s for 6 months as a brand rep. While I had the freedom to come & go as I please and took an hour for lunch everyday which allowed me to go to an M&S, sit down properly & get some soup, this luxury wasn’t afforded to the Curry’s employees however. Some of them did bring food but for the ones that didn’t, there were few options. Going into the shopping centre where M&S was & other food places would have eaten up most of their 30 mins break time so for many of the Curry’s staff their only option was a 5-10 min trip across 1 road to McDonald’s or KFC.
Now, I’m doing PT courier work with UPS. While I make an effort to take some tangerines, a banana, a sandwich & some oat milk, the driver that I work with does not. Everyday because he’s under significant time constraints which means working through his 45 min break, he’s either eating a curry pie out of a newsagent or cold sausage rolls & cookies from Sainsbury’s.
Until we work less & are paid more, these problems such as the diets of children & adults alike as well as a lack of healthy living/exercise are only going to worsen.
I’m just here to sit back and watch the excuses roll in from fully-grown adults who are afraid of fruit and vegetables. The UK attitude towards food and nutrition is by and large, a disgrace. It’s no wonder the teenagers don’t eat well when their parents are addicted to sausage rolls, meal deals and frozen junk food.
Excuses already found in the comments:
– healthy food is too expensive
– I have no time to make anything healthy
– fruit isn’t good for you anyway
– UK produce is poor quality