This is a bizarre phenomenon I’ve always thought. I was watching some program a while back going on about obesity in kids. They seem to blame the foods they give them at schools according to report. This got me thinking, what was so different in the diet I had at school ot now? Nothing! If anything there’s probably less “E-numbers” in their food than when I was at school. We have Jamie Oliver’s gurning mug on school dinners now encouraging this “healthy” food at lunch and yet you still see hordes of gratuitously epic children shuffling out of schools at half past four.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m quite thin (not sickly thin, just toned-ish without being particularly big) and I ate all the rubbish like “Top Secrets” (remember them?), Smarties and those grotesquely unhealthy iced buns. Not to mention the extravagantly coloured “Panda Pops” which masqueraded as refreshment, when the amount of chemicals inside them would be more suited to killing germs in a public toilet. Yet despite this gross sugar intake, my generation of kids at school were not shaped like The Death Star. I don’t hate kids because they’re fat either, it’s just that the diets are supposed to be better these days and yet there seems to be a growing frequency of this in schools. I understand that some of it is partly genetic but if that was totally the case it would mean that only people carrying big genes have reproduced in the last twenty years.

So why is it? One possible answer is laziness. You hardly ever see kids playing football down the park (ah the old “jumpers for goalposts” scenario) or riding bikes like we used to. They’re inside playing on Playstations or watching TV, every waking hour when they’re not at school. Now don’t get me wrong, I play a lot of Xbox myself but I don’t camp on it when I’m either not eating or on the loo, OK maybe that’s not entirely true, but I’m certainly the correct weight for my height! At what weight do kids have to get to before the parents think “hmm better do something about this”. 10 stone? 15 stone? And they’re only 8 years old?! I personally like pies but I usually stop at ONE! I don’t care if you’re hungry, surely something in your head should tell you that eating five pies in a row can’t be a good thing?

Some parents these days are more than happy just to throw their kids in front of an idiot box than actually interact with their kids. And when the child can differentiate between right and wrong they blame the game. Now seeing that this “epidemic” of child obesity sweeps through our lush green lands I have to ask, are they going to blame games for that? I guarantee that that if there was a game that involved the gratuitous consumption of PIES then that game would have the media furore that Manhunt got when some kid got on the wrong end of a screwdriver. It’s again the lazy parent syndrome of sticking the child in front of the television rather than interact with them in an active way. I understand that people do work harder these days but surely toddlers should be encouraged to run about?

So in conclusion, I understand that some cases of obesity are genetic or medical…I’m not poking fun at that at all. What I am saying is because kids these days are so bloody lazy, they gain weight and blame it on diets. Prevention is better than cure, and I for one will never let my kids (one day when I have some) become video game zombies, who are unable to kick a football.