Pasta and other carbohydrate-rich foods are nowhere near as bad as sugar for children. In the Nutella filled pastry, it is not the bread that’s the problem.

Sugar (particularly in beverages) and lack of exercise are the main contribution of child obesity increase worldwide.

Don’t blame the potato.

So the problem is not Pizza nor pasta nor potatoes nor bread nor protein but all the extra supper high calories, near zero nutrition things that go on top of them?

> He also worries restrictive diets could carry psychological risks for adolescents, whose relationship with food is still developing.

As opposed to a relationship with food that causes overconsumption?

Adolescents still form a relationship with food from a young age, hence why we're talking about young overweight people. I'd rather teach them about nutrition and potentially how to eat the same amount of food but that has much less calories.

If their current diet reflects an overconsumption of calories then they may need to learn how to restrict through eating better foods. Because without a level of restriction of overall calorie intake they will continue to gain weight.

Sometimes I feel we're reluctant to have a conversation around consuming less food when it comes to losing weight. In order to lose weight you need have some level of hunger and that's okay, we don't need to go and reach for something.

Article is good but with one puzzling flaw. They mention protein is one of the culprits, but nothing about why or how.

And meanwhile, the Italian food lobbies are blocking Nutri-Score adoption at the EU level

Fair, but category-relative scoring's kinda unavoidable—same problem plagues any front-of-pack label, including traffic lights. Point stands though: Nutri-Score's real value is nudging reformulation within a category, not telling you "cereal" beats "steak". Industry lobbying against even that weak signal says plenty.

Nutriscore is a meme because it only refers to products in the same product category. Some Nestle's ultra processed sugary cereal has scores of A-B, it does not mean it's healthy, it just means it's less bad than other sugary cereal slop. It's very misleading.

In 2004 I visited my family in Valencia, Spain. There was a local construction boom. There were family owned shops everywhere. Bakeries, fruit stands, etc. When I went back in 2014, it seems everything had changed. The shops were gone. The construction had slacked off. Instead there were now giant supermarkets and superstores. They were on the Euro now. My cousins blamed the EU for this. I'm assuming something similar happened in Italy, tho it is not mentioned in the article, which instead tends to blame the victims. When you replace the local food supply chain with prepared branded foods (Nutella, etc.), you get this. The EU has been great for European capitalists, but a detriment to the people in Europe.

PS This was one of the major complaints of the long forgotten yellow-vests protests in France.

I'm over 50. I played in the streets whole afternoons, full days during school vacations. They were dangerous years in Rome, terrorism, political violence, heroin everywhere.

Despite we are now living in safer years, no kids are playing in the streets anymore. Also in the nearby park, they struggle to reach a 5 vs 5 football (soccer) match when we had plenty more for a 11 vs 11.

A prominent psycologist just released an interview: why do italian parents love Sinner, the tennis player, praise his capabilities, his energy and willingness to train, but accept that their kids spend hours sitting on the couch playing games or browsing socials?

I also agree with you about local, family owned shops: in my area there were 2 supermarkets and they were far away. Now there are at least 6 and one is less than 300mt from my house. The family shops are still operating and thriving, but some have changed, adding locally pre-cooked food to the old offer.

So, less sport, more easily available junk food, more parents working late to keep supers open so more use of pre cooked food, more time spent on social media... a explosive mix

We ran a kids' rec league for a few years and saw this exact drop-off. Used to fill 8 teams no problem, now we scrape together 4 and half the parents want a ride to the door because nobody trusts a 9 year old walking 3 blocks alone anymore.

The hypermarket concept was more or less invented in France in 1963. Clearly joining the EU allowed greater trade options which suit large scale market leaders, but their growth would have happened anyway.

A lazy illustration, but there is not a single mention of the EU, the introduction of the Euro, or the single market on the extensive Wikipedia about the topic in the context of France, suggesting minimal impact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-scale_retail_in_France

Worked retail analytics in France early 2010s, hypermarché growth actually stalled well before that decade — Leclerc and Carrefour were already fighting over saturated square footage by the 90s. Loi Royer 1973 capped new store permits hard. EU/Euro barely factor, planning law did the real work.

Nobody is forced to eat (Italian!) Nutella instead of local made alternatives. As such many Germans do that.

I do look for regional food, though they are more expensive but also Aldi + Lidl are a bless.

Highly processed fake food with shelf extenders added to the mix…

I like how the article points out that it's the small bits of overconsumption (e.g. Nutella) each day that amount to obesity. Add in less physical activity and eating less fibrous foods like vegetables and you're multiplying that issue further.

Overtime is a recipe for obesity.

When it comes to losing weight its important to remember, its easy to gain fat, its a task to maintain fat and its hard to lose fat. Therefore a little calorie deficit requiring a little hunger and restraint is how you reverse it.

Nobody yet mentioned young-learnt habits: school cafeterias & snack machines.

When I was young, in lunch breaks you'd head over to the school's cafeteria. And what they had there? "Gevulde koek", stroopwafel, snack-sized bags of crisps, various (sweetened) dairy products, and iirc bananas & apples too. No veggies or fibre-rich food in sight. So of course kids would go for the sugar-laden & salty snacks. For drinks, there were vending machines. My favorite was hot chocolate. Again: high in sugar (no "more or less sugar" option).

Sometimes there were longer breaks due to a teacher falling ill or whatever. Then we'd head over to a supermarket nearby, and buy similar junkfood.

Of course we'd bring sandwiches from home. But not everyone, and not always. Some kids would throw their sandwiches in a trash can, and proceed to buy the junkfood mentioned above.

That school was 6 years of us kids' lives. Plenty of time to pick up unhealthy habits & bring those into adulthood.

Wouldn't surprise me at all if most schools worldwide are still like that. Healthy diet choices for pupils is far from #1 priority for school management given all the other things they have to deal with.

The fix would be to make healthier options the easy pick, and remove all junkfood offerings from schools' cafeterias. But good luck doing that nationwide under the watchful eye of junkfood multi-nationals.

In primary school (in Europe), we had a cafeteria, that served decent, regular meals, with one modest dessert. There were no vending machines, no child carried cash, only coupons for the cafeteria, tied to your name, entitling you to exactly one meal per day. There was also a smaller brunch at 10.

Why give children the option to make the wrong choice? If they were wise and disciplined, they wouldn't be children.

In America, the school cafeteria used to prepare the meals for the kids those days are largely gone. Everything is prepackaged and processed. Who knew all the cooked meals were going the way of the dodo.

Surely writing 374 lbs is easier than 26st 10lb.

And 1.125lbs is easier to write than 1 pound 2 ounces, yet Americans will look at you with a blank stare if you don't use ounces.

When it comes to units, you can't please everybody. Especially if it's tangentially related to the old colonies.

What an Americentric point of view.

Not everybody measures weight in pounds, and to the primary readership of the BBC, stones and kilograms mean much more than weighing pounds.

Source: Canadian who understands neither kg or stones.

The 2nd number immediately means something to me. While I have to consider the first. From my perspective it isn’t easier to comprehend.

An unrelated point. I’ve noticed more people in the UK measuring their weight in KG. I think I may be in a dwindling minority of people who think in stones and pounds.

Isn’t stones/pounds just like feet/inches? Do you support dropping feet and only using inches? If not, why not?

I have no clue, give me kg thanks.

We've been doing variations of "educate the general public about healthy dietary choices" for roughly as long as the obesity epidemic has been around. Shouldn't it have worked by now, if it were going to? As purportedly modern, scientific, data-driven societies, why do we keep engaging in this impotent self-flagellation?

Just imagine how bad it would be if we hadn't.

This explains how sugars and fast carbs can be healthy https://youtu.be/n28W4AmvMDE?si=xEx29eVFgDEy2ktW

Tldr; highly processed food looses vitamins(micro nutrient starvation) and starch/fiber are needed to slow absorption until it gets to bacteria producing drugs(barbiturate and precursors to neuromediators including), and give signals over vagus nerve to head. May be summary of few books from me too. Do not recall. Add on top chewing fibery food takes time, feeling full starts earlier of being full, and saliva ferments help to digest either.

...In the South.

It's a culture thing.

Could it be explained by the local population density - basically the walkability for each resident?

Culture didn't exist before McDonald's got there.

Went through this with my kid's school lunches. Protein point is real but nobody talks about portion creep — Italian nonna-sized servings from the 90s don't match how sedentary kids are now. Cut portions 20%, kept the pasta, weight normalized in a few months. Didn't need to demonize any food group.