Short-sighted policies are making the world myopic, obese and rickety

May's nutrition news suggest that the kids are not alright

Children are the canaries in the coal mines, giving us advance warning of what to expect in the near future. Staying with animal metaphors, they are also the unwitting guinea pigs in a live experiment where we watch and note what happens when humans spend their formative years eating mainly junk, processed foods.

The first results of this real-time experiment have been made public: children are more obese, more depressed and sicker than previous generations who were brought up on real food.

Conditions that were rare in childhood are now common: type 2 diabetes, obesity, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and gallstones. To that list, we can now add myopia (short-sightedness). It was recently announced that by 2050 half the global population will be myopic.

Normally when an experiment in progress yields such harmful results it is stopped immediately. Not so this one: the global marketing and application of a junk food diet to children is expected to be enforced even more vigorously.

Obesity is more prevalent in poorer areas and usually accompanied by a host of other disorders. A ‘disproportionate’ number of children referred to weight clinics in England come from areas of high deprivation, are neurodivergent or have other health conditions. Some of these children are severely obese, with a body mass index score of over 50.

Data from more than 3,000 children attending these clinics also revealed that:

• 24% had autism

• 23% had a learning disability

• 30% had liver disease

• a significant proportion had another health complication.

Obesity was once rare in children. But the rise of carbohydrate-based, highly palatable snack foods that replace protein-based meals that were once the norm at family mealtimes has changed all that.

A high carbohydrate diet favours fat storage, especially fat around the middle. It also increases levels of trigyclerides – blood fats – and these are a risk factor for liver disease and cardiovascular disease.

To make matters worse, we also learned in May that boys who are overweight in their early teens may pass on genetic problems associated with obesity to their children, including asthma and poor lung function.

According to one of the researchers from the University of Bergen in Norway, Professor Cecilie Svanes, "The new findings have significant implications for public health and may be a game-changer in public health intervention strategies….They suggest that a failure to address obesity in young teenagers today could damage the health of future generations, further entrenching health inequalities for decades to come."

Something that nobody expected to make another appearance in the well-fed world is rickets. Once the scourge of impoverished children in Victorian Britain, rickets is still rare but rates are slowly rising in many developed nations.

Rickets is a skeletal disease caused by vitamin D and/or calcium deficiency. It is characterised by poor bone growth and deformity.

One study into the prevalence of rickets in children in an area of Minnesota concluded that ‘Nutritional rickets remains rare, but the incidence has dramatically increased after 2000’. It’s a similar story in the UK.

I remember when the first few cases of diabetes type 2 in children was so rare that it made the headlines. That was about twenty years ago. Now it’s so common that it’s been normalised, and it may not be long before rickets follows suit.

Low dietary vitamin D and little outdoor activity makes deficiency of this vitamin a virtual given. What little time children spend in the great outdoors now requires sunscreen on every square inch of exposed skin. Then it’s back indoors to resume front-of-screen exposure.

I can’t imagine that children are regular consumers of vitamin D supplements. There are few dietary sources of vitamin D, but eggs is one of them, especially if from free-range hens.

Research published last September suggested that if we could get the nation’s youth to eat one egg a day – just one – it would make a meaningful contribution to their nutritional status. Importantly, it would give them some vitamin D.

It would also be helpful if certain quarters of nutrition policy-making would stop demonising eggs and admit that this high protein food is a natural, nutrient-dense food that is cheap (usually), easy to cook and readily available (for the time being).

One major problem is that government policy makers are fixated on promoting a plant-based diet, thus potentially expediting the rise in rickets.

This was recently illustrated by the case of a three-year-old girl fed a strict vegan diet who developed rickets, failure to thrive and kidney stones.

The child was admitted to hospital for possible seizure. Test results indicated low vitamin D and calcium alongside deficiencies in vitamin B12 and iron.

Her parents adhered to a strict vegan diet. They probably felt confident doing so: the American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and the Canadian Pediatric Society both assert that a ‘carefully supplemented’ vegan diet can be appropriate for children. Perhaps her parents didn’t have sufficient knowledge of what careful supplementation entails; perhaps they didn’t read the scientific literature. Presumably they thought they were doing the right thing, feeding their daughter an appropriate diet.

In its latest position statement published early this year, the US Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics continues to beat the drum that ‘appropriately planned’ vegetarian and vegan dietary patterns are the healthiest choices. It also states its intention to advocate for more plant-based foods in schools.

Children need protein for growth and they won’t get this protein from their plant and carbohydrate based diets.

In the meantime, the experiment on the short-sighted canaries and the overweight guinea-pigs continues unimpeded.