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Fast food babies bbc three documentary


Documentary: Fast Food Baby

In the documentary Fast Food Baby, you can follow three families on a quest to change the way their children eat.

Each case is unique – a young single mom who doesn’t want to cook, a healthy-eating couple who gives in to their toddler’s junk-food demands, and a family of five resorting to carry-out over home-cooked meals far too often. 

But in the end, the results are the same: kids consuming far too much sugar, unhealthy fats and additives from a poor diet that’s already manifesting into health problems ranging from anemia and tooth decay to hyperactivity, all before the age of 5.

What Happens When Kids Eat a Fast-Food Diet?

Nutrients from quality foods are critical in helping your child reach his or her fullest potential. Unfortunately, many kids are not getting the nutrients they need, including in the US where:

  • Nearly 40% of children’s diets come from added sugars and unhealthy fats 
  • Only 21% of youth age 6-19 eat the recommended five or more servings of fruits and vegetables each day 

This is a veritable recipe for disease, and is a primary reason why many of today’s kids are arguably less healthy now than most all previous generations. Obesity, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and even liver disease — these are diseases that once appeared only in middle-age and beyond, but are now impacting children. 

Mental health is also at stake. One study from British researchers revealed that kids who ate a predominantly processed food diet at age 3 had lower IQ scores at age 8.5. For each measured increase in processed foods, participants had a 1.67-point decrease in IQ.

Along with the potential for lowered IQ, a junk-food diet can also set the stage for asthma, eczema, and a variety of allergies, inflammatory conditions and autoimmune diseases.

In fact, most of the leading diseases plaguing the US are diet-related, including heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer’s and cancer. The National Institutes of Health even states that four of the six leading causes of death in the US are linked to unhealthy diets.

Nutritional deficiencies in your child’s first years of life can even lead to deficits in brain function that put them at risk of behavioral problems — from hyperactivity to aggression — that can last into the teenage years and beyond. This is why the importance of proper nutrition simply cannot be overstated.

When parents fed their preschool-aged children junk foods high in sugar, salt and unhealthy fats, it had a lasting impact on their taste preferences (CroMary/iStock)

Your Child’s Taste Preferences Are Largely Formed by the Age of 3

The best time to shape your kids’ eating habits is while they’re still young, as kids learn very quickly to prefer certain tastes and textures. When parents fed their preschool-aged children junk foods high in sugar, salt and unhealthy fats, it had a lasting impact on their taste preferences in one study. All of the children tested showed preferences for junk foods, and all (even those who were just 3 years old!) were also able to recognize some soda, fast-food and junk-food brands.

The researchers concluded what you probably already suspect: kids who were exposed to junk food, soda and fast food, via advertising and also because their parents fed them these foods, learned to recognize and prefer these foods over healthier choices. This doesn’t mean there’s no hope for older children raised on junk-food; they, too, can learn to love healthy foods, but it is easier if they instead learn to love such foods right from the start.

Is Your Child Drinking Soda?

Per capita soft drink consumption has increased nearly 500 percent over the past five decades, and children, unfortunately, are a major reason for this staggering increase. Kids are introduced to soda at very young ages and consumption only increases as they get older. An estimated 56 percent of 8-year-olds drink soda daily, and once the teenage years come, some kids drink at least three cans of soda each day. In the documentary, some of the children featured were drinking 6 glasses of soda a day, and they were well under the age of 5!

Regular soda is, of course, a significant source of sugar (mostly in the form of fructose), with each can containing about 10 teaspoons of sugar. Consumption of sugar-sweetened soda and other beverages has been linked to the rising obesity epidemic, along with other health issues, among kids. And diet sodas are not an acceptable alternative. Diet sodas are actually worse for your health than regular soda, due to the artificial sweeteners they contain, and have been linked to weight gain, obesity, cancer, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, stroke, addiction, and other health issues. There’s really no reason for children of any age to be drinking soda, but toddlers and young children, especially, should not be wasting valuable calories on this health-damaging beverage.

Tackling the Reasons Why You’re Eating Unhealthy Is the First Step

The documentary is intriguing because it follows three different families, detailing the reasons why their diets have gone downhill. The top reasons mentioned, which are probably similar for many families, include:

  • Too busy or lack of motivation to cook 
  • Not believing the junk food is harming their children 
  • Battling with a picky eater and believing it’s better for your child to eat something, even if it’s unhealthy 
  • Trying to keep mealtime too strict for kids, such that they’re not free to explore and taste new foods 
  • Parents eating junk foods and teaching this behavior to their kids 

Experts were utilized in each circumstance to help the families overcome their unique obstacles, and this is what you’ll need to do in your own home as well. If you feel you’re too busy to cook, for instance, you’ll need to re-examine your priorities so nutritional meals can be made to be a part of your daily life. If motivation is the problem, you may need to consult with a health care practitioner who can tell you what health problems are in store for your kids if their diets don’t change…

Exposing Your Children to Healthy Foods Is So Important

As prominent celebrity British chef and food advocate Jamie Oliver explains in the video above, our food culture has changed so drastically over the last 30 years, a majority of young children of today do not even know what fresh, whole food is. This is a major setback, as the more different flavors a child is exposed to early on generally the easier time they will have developing a taste for a variety of healthy foods. This actually starts with breastfeeding, as the milk will take on the flavors of whatever the mother eats.

Then, it’s important to keep offering healthy foods to your child, even if they refuse them or seem to not like them. It can take 10-15 food exposures before a child becomes familiar with and likes a certain food, so persistence is important. Food is a part of crucial lifestyle choices first learned at home, so you need to educate yourself about proper nutrition and the dangers of junk food and processed foods in order to change the food culture of your entire family. To give your child the best start in life, and help instill healthy habits that will last a lifetime, you must lead by example.

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Dr. Joseph Mercola is the founder of Mercola.com. An osteopathic physician, best-selling author, and recipient of multiple awards in the field of natural health, his primary vision is to change the modern health paradigm by providing people with a valuable resource to help them take control of their health.

What Are We Feeding Our Kids? review – junk food exposé will leave you queasy | Television

Maybe we will come to measure out the pandemic in Tulleken time. The identical twin brothers – and practising doctors – Chris and Alexander (Xand) van Tulleken have had a busy year; they have rarely been off our screens for long. Respectively, they are a virologist at University College hospital, London, and an experienced public health doctor with years of experience on the frontline of disaster zones. The pair would doubtless have been commissioned to educate us on Covid – even if Xand hadn’t caught the virus and brought a personal view to the gig (Surviving the Virus: My Brother and Me). Their series Operation Ouch, and other online contributions, helped parents desperately trying to home school, in between fending off unemployment, sourcing supermarket deliveries and caring for shielding parents.

Alone or together, the Van Tullekens are very good at what they do. They turn potentially dark, heavy subjects – primarily, but not always, medical – into lighter, brighter fare, still informed by their in-depth knowledge, but delivered without ego and accessible to a mass audience. In What Are We Feeding Our Kids? (BBC One), we have Chris as a solo act, looking into the health effects – particularly for children – of our increasing consumption of ultra-processed food.

The statistics are as unwholesome as a microwaved lasagna: childhood obesity has increased tenfold globally over the past 50 years, while 21% of UK children are obese by the time they leave primary school. It costs twice as much to get 100 calories from fresh fruit, vegetables and fish in the UK as it does to get them from readymade food. In 1980, our food spending on scratch ingredients versus convenience food was split 58% to 26%. It is now virtually reversed.

Van Tulleken takes us through the science parts with his customary cheery aplomb and some help from various experts, notably Rachel Batterham, a professor of obesity, diabetes and endocrinology at University College London. The specialists explain the hormonal signals that tell us when we feel full, the brain mechanisms involved in eating and, crucially, how little research has been done into the effects of the very new, profoundly different kinds of food we have started putting into our bodies over the past few decades.

The good doctor goes on a four-week diet that matches that of 20% of the population, containing 80% ultra-processed food. Lyra, one of his children (who, sadly, is not a twin, but how brilliant would that be? I think we have earned it after the year we have had), looks on enviously as dad wires into the junk. Van Tulleken’s eyes glaze over with happiness, even as he reads up on the endless research by industrialised-food companies and the precision engineering behind “hyperpalatability”, “mouthfeel” and “bliss points”. Unable to stop eating the deliciousness even when he wants to, he begins to realise that we are all essentially self-feeding foie gras geese at the mercy of big salt/sugar/fat comestible blends.

In essence, it is hard to overeat natural foods for long. With processed stuff, you can do it within six chicken nuggets. Its ability to bypass the gut/brain messaging service is remarkable and still fundamentally unexplained. The brain changes revealed by Van Tulleken’s post-diet MRI – lit up like an addict’s – are significant enough to be published and may yet secure Prof Batterham funding to investigate further.

Little of this, perhaps, will come as news to – if I dare posit such a figure – the average Guardian reader, who tends to be interested in this sort of thing. But – again, if I dare say so – most people aren’t Guardian readers, aren’t interested in this sort of thing and, beyond a vague understanding that, in an ideal world, we would all be eating salad for main and apples for pudding, tend to assume that food is basically food and nothing sold openly on supermarket shelves can be that bad for you. It is these viewers who are Van Tulleken’s intended audience.

A showdown in the final minutes with Tim Rycroft, the chief operating officer of the Food and Drink Federation, is the touch of extra rigour that is the Van Tulleken hallmark. Rycroft gives the standard line about needing to ensure people are empowered to make “good choices”. Van Tulleken pushes back about how much choice there is in an environment where everything – availability, price, marketing and so on – is designed to push the consumer one way. The killer moment comes when he asks which is the priority: profit or public health? “The priority is profit,” Rycroft says. A delicious moment and bitter truth at once.

Top 10 food documentaries

We spent the weekend watching some of the most famous food documentaries and they taught us a lot, a lot. There is something to see!

"Forks vs. Knives"

This documentary is based on the life work of two independent scientists - one of them is the famous Colin Campbell, author of The China Study. Here is a detailed description of how the study was conducted and what results it led to. The conclusions are the most disappointing for meat lovers: animal protein is declared fatal. If the process of formation of a cancerous tumor has begun in the body, when feeding on animal protein, the tumors grow and develop much faster. This is proved by the example of the Chinese cantons, where meat was consumed more widely. Americans, whose meat consumption is practically unlimited, are the sickest nation. The film also points out the dangers of consuming dairy products: as the authors found out, when consuming dairy products, acid is released, which the body can neutralize only with the help of calcium, which it extracts from the bones. That is why, despite the high amount of calcium in dairy products, dairy drinkers are more likely to develop osteoporosis. Diseases of the cardiovascular system, autoimmune diseases, oncology and diabetes - that's what we "earn" by taking an interest in animal protein. The film shows more than one fate that has changed dramatically for the better when switching to vegetarianism.

"Fast Food Nation"

A feature film based on the original book by Eric Schlosser "Fast Food Nation" (read the review here). It brings up all the topics of the book: the hopeless situation of guest workers in slaughterhouses, the frequent robberies of fast food outlets, the harm that this industry produces not only for health, but also for the economy. The film is interesting because a large number of stars starred here (which is only Bruce Willis in the episode with eating a hamburger or Avril Lavigne in the role of an indifferent teenager). The hardest scene is waiting for you at the end - shooting from a real slaughterhouse.

"I want to change"

Raw food propaganda film. Using the examples of people with incurable diseases, cancer of the fourth stage and severe obesity, he shows that when switching to vegetables and fruits, the body is able to heal itself. There is a lot of brutal truth in the film about sugar, sweeteners, diet drinks. Examples of raw food adherents glowing with happiness are incredibly convincing.

"The Whole Truth About Food"

A BBC Science and Education series that demystifies food myths. It has several chapters: how to become slim, how to become beautiful, how to become desirable, how to become the best - only 6 episodes of 45 minutes each. In the process of watching, you will learn a lot of useful information for slimness: which macronutrient is more satisfying, what saturates better - soup or solid food, is red wine good for the heart, is it really necessary to drink a lot of water to improve skin, why some people eat a lot and do not get fat ... And not all answers are as obvious as you think!

"Habitat.

Still a Fruit"

Russian documentary elm based on Russian realities. He talks about the origin of vegetables and fruits on the shelves: why does a cut apple not darken? How to distinguish normal fruits from mutants? Where to find healthy fruits? We recommend watching this movie to start taking proper care of your body and feeding it really healthy food.

Double

This 2002 movie really changed the world's fast food industry a little. The film's director, screenwriter, and lead actor Morgan Spurlock set up a ruthless experiment on himself. What will happen to him if he eats at McDonald's 3 times a day for 30 days? To begin with, Morgan went to the doctors and carefully checked his health. It turned out to be wonderful: no diseases and complaints, an excellent heart, liver and all internal organs. Fat percentage - 11%, no sign of excess weight.

And so it began: at first Morgan felt happy, eating mountains of junk food, but already on the second day he felt sick. Every day he felt worse and worse, and the weight increased by leaps and bounds. Two weeks later, doctors urged to stop the experiment, as health indicators were deteriorating before our eyes. One of the conditions of the experiment was that if the restaurant offered a double portion - supersize portion - Morgan had to agree. In total, a giant portion (200 g of french fries, a glass of soda, in which 1 liter 200 ml of liquid) was offered to him 9times, of which 7 times - in the "thickest" state of the country, Texas. When the experiment was completed, the doctors were shocked: until recently, a healthy person was on the verge of diabetes. His liver almost failed, weight increased by 11 kg, the percentage of fat increased to 18%.

After this movie, you will never want to go to McDonald's!

"Fed up"

Film about the catastrophic food situation in the United States. A lot of shocking stories and investigations. Why in American free schools is a slice of pizza equated ... to vegetables? Why only 25 out of 400 students eat right - and how can children resist cravings for burgers and fries from the famous fast food chains that schools have contracts with? Why do they advertise candies, chocolate bars and soda on TV - and never show vegetables and fruits? Why Michelle Obama's "Let's Move!" on the improvement of children's diets so quickly faded away when representatives of Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Kellogg companies took up the problem? . .

From this film we learn more about the real epidemic of obesity among children and adults. Scary facts: modern children will live less than their parents. One in three American children born after 2000 has type 2 diabetes. And among small African Americans and Latinos, the percentage is even worse - every second! This film makes you reconsider your attitude to nutrition and change it. Great motivation!

Food Corporation

The film "Food Inc" is so controversial and honest that the producers budgeted for the cost of lawsuits in its budget. This movie is against several topics at once. big concerns for the production of chicken meat are sold? Do you know how hard it is for farmers today when all types of products are patented by serious business players? Do you know how livestock is kept? What makes corporations wash meat with ammonia? What is it like for guest workers to work in meat factories?

The idea of ​​"Kevin's Law" runs throughout the film. Kevin was two years old and perfectly healthy until he ate an E. coli burger. Unfortunately, the mother of the deceased baby never managed to get justice from global corporations. What can I say, if even America's favorite Oprah Winfrey is being judged for incorrect words about food producers?

This movie is all about why modern food corporations are killing us. No wonder the film's slogan is "You will never look at your dinner the same way again."

"Sugar"

Follower of Morgan Spurlock, director, screenwriter and actor of the film "Sugar" Damon Gamo also puts on an experiment: what if you eat foods marked healthy for 60 days? So much for healthy: in 60 days of a “healthy” diet, Damon consumed so much sugar that his weight increased by 10 kg, and his waist circumference by 10 cm.

tasters go"

Well, if we've exaggerated too much, relax with the wonderful and very witty BBC series Desperate Tasters Go. Starring London foodie, drinker, restaurant critic, writer Giles Coren and comedian Sue Perkins. And they go to the most different eras of Great Britain, live in the proposed style for a whole week and eat the way they ate then. Before the start of the week, they measure their weight and all indicators - and then find out what has changed during this time.

2 seasons of a wonderful show have come out. In the first season, Giles and Sue traveled to the Edwardian era, World War II, the Reformation, Victorian times, the Queen Elizabethan era, the seventies and the Regency era. In the second season, they are waiting for the eighties, the French Revolution, the Middle Ages, the twenties, the fifties and Ancient Rome. Also, the series is very funny!

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