Over the past few years, a new and deadly epidemic has stalked the land. Britain and the US, just like much of the rest of the world, are getting fat. Around 60 per cent of adults in the UK are heavier than they should be. It’s a similar story in the US, where two-thirds of adults are overweight or extremely overweight (obese). That’s a pretty shocking statistic, but we all know that keeping in shape when you’re trying to balance the demands of work and family life is tough. Who’s got time to get to the gym? Who has the energy to do more than heat up a ready meal after ten hours in the office? Besides, we all get bigger as we get older, don’t we? It’s a metabolism thing—isn’t it? But if you think the statistics for adults are alarming, wait till you find out how our kids are faring. In 2003, 27 per cent of children under 11 in England were either overweight or obese. In the US, where different methods to measure obesity are used, nearly 20 per cent of children aged 6 to 11 were classified as overweight or obese in 2004. The numbers have almost doubled in a decade. How did so many children get to be overweight before they’ve even reached the ripe old age of 11? How do you become overweight when so much of your day is taken up with charging round a playground or park, when you can’t drive, and when you’re not free—like the rest of us—to stuff your face at will with chocolate, crisps, and alcohol? The answer, of course, is a complex one. If adults are eating much less healthily than they used to, so are their kids. Instead of spending their evenings playing outside, children now have the delights of multi-channel television, computer games, and the Internet to choose from. And then there’s the fact that increasing numbers of us just won’t let our children outside on their own. Back in the mid 1970s, we were 6 years old.
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