Obese toddlers - The time has come to tax killer foods

IT IS a victory for relentless marketing over sanity — not to mention self-preservation and education — that so many of us equate indulging a child with giving them a chance to overload with high-fat, salt-laden junk food and sugar-based soft drinks.

Rather than rewarding the child we are harming them by encouraging destructive and dangerous eating habits.

If this was confined to an occasional binge it might just be tolerable but as figures released yesterday, through the ESRI study Growing Up in Ireland, show it has gone far beyond that.

Already a quarter of Irish three-year-olds are either overweight or obese and the trend is accelerating at such a pace that an obesity epidemic, and all the avoidable associated illnesses and the destruction of health budgets that implies, is anticipated with dread.

The figures mean that one-in-four Irish pre-school children are so overweight that they cannot easily take part in the kind of activities that lead to a healthy lifestyle. Rather than play or take even moderate exercise — not to mention sport — they waddle and wheeze around play-school incapacitated by their parents’ poor food choices.

There are many reasons for this dangerous habit and the time pressures created when both parents work outside the home must play a significant part in this. It is far easier, after a hard day away from home, to bung a frozen pizza in the oven than it is to find the energy to cook a healthy meal. This truth, as the ESRI have shown, has terrible consequences and places even greater demands on already busy and stressed parents but it must be confronted. The lack of parental responsibility must be challenged too if a great number of today’s children are not to lead lives defined by illness and fat-induced lethargy.

The report shows too that education has a huge role to play in preventing, if it is not too late, the kind of self-destruction an inappropriate diet guarantees.

A child’s weight child is directly linked to the level of education enjoyed by their parents. Just one-in-20 children in families in the professional/managerial class are overweight, while that figure almost doubles in disadvantaged families. The use of energy-dense foods like crisps, sweets, chips or fizzy drinks increases as parents’ educational levels fall. Almost two thirds of children whose mothers have a lower secondary education or less ate at least one portion of crisps a day compared with half that figure for children from degree-level backgrounds.

This proves two things — that education works and that we must provide more of it. At the very moment when our Government is about to remove something approaching €4 billion from the economy it would be unwise to anticipate any great official crusade to confront obesity so personal responsibility must be the driving force in changing our eating habits.

However, the Government might kill two birds with one stone. By introducing taxes to make the mostdestructive foods far more expensive they might generate some badly needed revenue but more importantly discourage their consumption and the ensuing obesity. However, Government can only do so much in an area like this. The real heavy lifting must be done by individuals and parents and not doing it will have lethal consequences for tens of thousands of Irish people.