British children getting shorter? Blame all the junk food being pumped into our youngsters, writes former Government food advisor HENRY DIMBLEBY
- British five-year-olds are on average seven centimetres shorter than Dutch kids
Winston Churchill once observed that the most important asset a nation has is the health of its citizens, but these scandalous statistics show that his insight is not shared by today’s politicians.
Although height is largely genetically determined, what we eat as youngsters is vitally important too. Zinc, for example, plays a role in cell division and growth hormone production, while other minerals like calcium, phosphorus and magnesium are all essential to bone development.
Clearly, too many of our children are missing out on such vital nutrients. And as a former government food adviser who has long been pointing out the deficiencies in our national diet, I am appalled that we seem to be returning to a problem last experienced in the Victorian era.
Back then, the urban poor often survived on bread and tea, and Army generals expressed concern about the stunted height and physical weaknesses of the soldiers they were sending to the Boer War.
Today, the problem lies not in bread and tea, but in junk food. Britain is quick to follow American trends, including destructive ones, and we have already seen the consequences in our obesity crisis.
Today, the problem lies not in bread and tea, but in junk food. Britain is quick to follow American trends, including destructive ones, and we have already seen the consequences in our obesity crisis
By 2035, type 2 diabetes, just one of the conditions related to bad diet, is forecast to cost the NHS more than treating all cancers currently. Yet obesity is but one explosive in the ticking nutritional time bomb in Britain today.
Children in the most deprived 10 per cent of the population are shorter on average than those in the most affluent 10 per cent, and are three times more likely to have tooth decay at age five.
Their futures don’t look much brighter, with their parents being roughly twice as likely to die from ‘preventable’ heart diseases and cancers associated with environmental or lifestyle factors.
READ MORE: Diet coaches to be rolled out for fat kids as young as TWO as data shows number admitted to hospital with obesity has almost tripled in a decade
The poorer you are, the harder it is to find non-processed food. In low-income areas the streets have been colonised by fast food joints. There are almost twice as many in the most deprived areas of England compared with the richest.
Getting to a supermarket is harder too, since 40 per cent of the lowest-income households lack access to a car, almost twice the national average.
One economist pointed out to me that for only 70p you can make a low-budget meal of jacket potatoes with a knob of butter, one chicken drumstick, and mixed veg.
But you can’t buy supermarket ingredients in this way. You have to get a pack of drumsticks and a bag of frozen peas and a block of butter, which takes you over the 70p threshold. And cooking from scratch takes time, knowledge and confidence. If you’re living on a tight budget, you can’t afford to learn through trial and error. It ends up being cheaper, quicker and less risky to get a box of chicken and chips.
There’s evidence that subsidising the cost of fruit and veg for people in poverty and helping them with cooking lessons improves their diets. And funding could be raised by taxes on bulk sales of salt and sugar to the food manufacturers profiteering at the expense of the nation’s health.
But the Government is failing to take meaningful action. There is an ideological debate within the Tory party about whether it’s acceptable to intervene in markets, and fear of becoming a ‘nanny state’ has seen them push back popular proposals such as the banning of junk food ads to children.
British five-year-olds are on average seven centimetres shorter than Dutch children, with a poor diet being blamed for youngsters falling behind in height rankings
We hear that Labour are afraid to act for fear that it would lose them yet more votes in the deprived ‘Red Wall’ areas.
Andy Haldane, former chief economist at the Bank of England, said that the primary thing holding the economy back was that 2.5million workers are off sick.
Many of those illnesses are diet-related. Unless we act, we will end up sick and impoverished. Failing to take action is both grotesque and deeply irresponsible.
Henry Dimbleby is co-author with Jemima Lewis of Ravenous: How to Get Ourselves And Our Planet Into Shape.
UK 5-year-olds are 7cm shorter than children on Continent
British five-year-olds are on average seven centimetres shorter than Dutch children, with a poor diet being blamed for youngsters falling behind in height rankings.
The trend has been described as ‘pretty startling’, with British children ‘falling behind’ Europeans and dropping 30 places down height charts since 1985.
Then, British boys and girls ranked 69th out of 200 nationalities for average height – boys are now 102nd and girls 96th.
Professor Tim Cole, an expert in child growth rates at University College London, explained that height is a clear indicator of living conditions. The average five-year-old boy in the UK is 44.3in (112.5cm) tall compared with 47.1in (119.6cm) in the Netherlands.
The average girl is around 43.9in (111.5cm) tall while her Dutch peer is 46.6in (118.3cm), national data collected by the Non-Communicable Diseases Risk Factor Collaboration shows.
The trend has been described as ‘pretty startling’, with British children ‘falling behind’ Europeans and dropping 30 places down height charts since 1985
Professor Cole, who was not involved in this study, told The Times that data on the height of 19-year-olds suggested economic factors were to blame for British children’s faltering height.
This age group grew up in the 2010s, he said, ‘which happens to coincide with the period of austerity… [telling] me that austerity has clobbered the height of children in the UK’. He said height can be affected by illness, infection, stress, poverty, sleep quality and diet.
He added that it is ‘quite clear we are falling behind, relative to Europe’ and that things have become ‘particularly rough for UK children’ in the past 14 years.
READ MORE: Children exposed to high levels of ‘forever chemicals’ in womb more likely to be obese, study finds
Henry Dimbleby, a former government food adviser, also explained that children’s diets in the UK are one of the ‘clearest markers of inequality.’
‘Children in the poorest areas of England are both fatter and significantly shorter than those in the richest areas at age ten to 11,’ he said.
GPs in poorer areas have also reported a resurgence of Victorian diseases such as rickets and scurvy, he added, ‘largely caused by nutritional deficiencies’.
Earlier this year it was found that British toddlers have among the worst diets in the world, The Daily Telegraph reported.
Mass-produced foods make up almost two-thirds of children’s average energy intake, a report by First Steps Nutrition, cited by the paper, suggested.
Children’s diets have also been severely impacted by the cost-of-living crisis.
Data published by the Food Foundation showed that 27 per cent of households with youngsters under four years of age were food insecure in January 2023.
Anna Taylor, of The Food Foundation, called on the Government to do more to hit targets with its Healthy Start scheme, a system which helps low-income pregnant mothers or those with toddlers to buy milk and food.
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