KARACHI, Sept 12: Thanks to the advertising blitz where marketers work on children’s psyche and exploit their fondness for their favourite television and film characters, Pakistani parents are losing yet another battle in promoting a healthy lifestyle for their children. After all, how can an ordinary-looking meal of chapati, aalu-gosht and sabzi vie with advertisements trumpeting the joys of ‘happy’ meals that come with ‘hot wheels’ or children’s cinema heroes? The Pakistani child seems to be going though a palate change with a desire for food that is fast and processed: junk food.
Fruit and dry fruit have been set aside in favour of cookies, colas and candies. Stores are attractively packed with all sorts of processed foods and parents constantly indulge their children through instant rewards in the form of candies.
The trend is worrying paediatricians who say that if we do not immediately wage a war on fast food, we will lose a whole generation to obesity and related serious health problems.
Serious consequences
Dr Uzma Shah, who heads the paediatric gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition department at the Aga Khan University, blames advertising that promotes unhealthy eating habits, as well as the easy availability of processed foods that are high in fats and sugar and low on fibre. She has observed an alarming increase in child obesity in Pakistan, with a rising incidence of health issues such as gall stones, problems related to the liver, the heart, joints and breathing, in addition to psychological matters such as depression and poor self-esteem. “Not many realise that these problems are connected to their child’s weight,” she comments.
Experts also link fast food to the rising incidence of asthma and myriad allergies. We need to relearn our eating habits, they say, and emphasise on the need for children to develop a taste for fruit and vegetables.
Asthma, a common chronic childhood illness, is one of the world’s fastest growing ailments with cases increasing by up to 50 per cent every ten years. Worldwide, an estimated 150 million people suffer from the condition.
“Our population suffers from malnutrition, which can mean both under-nourishment in terms of children from poor families and over-nourishment for affluent children who consume foods high on fat and sugar,” says Shah.
Furthermore, in terms of obesity she points to the increasingly sedentary lifestyle led by children today. “They have become couch potatoes,” she accuses. “They sit in front of the computer or the television and hardly go outdoors to play. The situation is further aggravated by their snacking habits. They eat too much of the wrong food, drink juices with their meals instead of water and don’t eat enough fruit. There seems to be a constant need to eat as a substitute for anything better to do.”
Shah’s solution is simple: involve children in activities that take them away from food. “If they are distracted through sport, for example, it’ll take their mind off eating,” she says. “The west has now realised their mistake and is making amends. Our children are on the verge of being obese but serious and sustained effort can prevent us from making the same errors.”
War on junk food
For the new academic year that starts this week in the UK, there will be a ban on the sale of chocolate, flavoured biscuits, sweets, crisps and cereal bars in schools. Salt will no longer be provided at cafeteria tables, ketchup and mayonnaise will be limited and cakes will only be allowed at lunchtime.
An uphill task, admits Shah, saying that “there is a huge knowledge gap since many parents as well as physicians remain unaware of the gravity of the situation.”
The concept of mealtimes, once a social affair when families sat together over three meals and ate what was provided, has unceremoniously been discarded. Today, children are given the power to reject and control menus since in a fast-paced urban life where both parents are often at work or at a distance from home, lunch at home is often impossible. Even children have busy schedules, given the tuitions, swimming lessons, music lessons, birthday parties and more. As a result, less time is spent at home as a family and more spent on the road.
“It used to be a ritual for all of three of us to sit around my mother while she tirelessly cut fruit and we would declare war on the neatly cut and peeled pieces,” remembers a young mother. However, she admits that she can’t be bothered by such ceremony today. “I’d rather serve fresh seasonal juice squeezed from a kitchen machine. It saves a lot of time and the kids do get the same amount of vitamins.”
In response, Shah concedes that this is still better than packaged juices which contain “nothing but sugar, with absolutely no nutritional content.”
“Cooking means extra effort and a vegetable will never taste as good as, say, a cheese burger or chicken nuggets. Fast foods are faster, less of an effort and much more tantalising to the taste buds,” says Shah. “Little wonder, then, that the word ‘happy’ is attached to certain meals.”
