How to shield your children from being obese

Where I grew up you didn’t see many fat children running around for the obvious reason that we only ate enough to live for and worked in the farms.

We saw fat girls and boys when former villagers came from urban areas to show off their expanding waistlines, with their well fed brood in tow.

Fat was cool at that time, still is in rural areas, because it tells a story.

It announces to unbelieving villages who, only the other day, knew you as a dirty, scrawny little kid whose skin clung tightly to the bones, that you had put a distance between yourself and them. Only a car told that success story better.

I saw an advert the other day featuring a child, waddle-running through a paddle of water.

Perhaps the message the advertisers wanted to convey, I imagined, was that children should be allowed to go out and play without worrying too much that clothes would get dirty because now there is a potent dirt remover.

Most children in urban areas are obese due to the kind of foods they eat and lack of play as the only leisure game they appear to ever do is holding the computer game console while seating on the couch gorging themselves on tonnes of popcorn if not ice-cream.

Obesity in the West is a condition that afflicts the poor because of their propensity to eating junk foods.

We are in no danger of that; we can hardly feed ourselves as a nation so the problem is confined to a very small group — the middle class and perhaps high-end group.

Research shows a lot of children from this demographic group are at risk of being obese because there is still a pervasive belief in Kenya that a family whose members look fat is a successful family.

And maybe it still does, but it also has profound effect on a child’s life. It is unlikely an obese child in Kenya will suffer the same level of social exclusion and bullying that a child in the West will.

But being overweight still traumatises a child emotionally; he or she doesn’t like the way they look and they can hardly join in to play the games other kids play.

Most importantly it exposes the children to diseases like stroke, heart disease and diabetes type B which are lifestyle-related.

There are five main causes of obesity in children; food choices, sedentary lifestyle, genetics and lack of physical activity.

The most common is of course the diet or food choices that you make for your family.

If you are the type that believes a child should be allowed to eat as much as they can then you are doing a disservice to that child especially if the food she or he eats is energy rich.

Our bodies store the energy it cannot use as fat.

There is absolutely nothing you can do if your child has a hormonal imbalance, which predisposes him or her to obesity.

Neither does a child have much of a choice if he or she has inherited the genes from you, but genes alone do not cause obesity.

If your idea of a child minder is the television and video games and stacks of junk food and your idea of a family outing is a roasted meat treat and beer then you better rethink.

As a parent you have a role to play by ensuring your children remain healthy and can avoid being bullied by their peers because of being overweight.