We have a culture of chips, rolls and sausage, fizzy drinks and cakes but, worse, we’re teaching kids it’s okay to be fat and inactive. Today’s slob kid is tomorrow’s budget buster for the NHS. And that’s hard to swallow
The chip shop near the school gate is killing us.
A report last week said Scotland is bottom of the global league for activity.
We spend more hours than anyone else slobbing out in front of screens, eating badly and growing fat.
It’s no wonder we can’t put together a decent football team when so many of us are the shape of a ball.
The Government should do something about it? No, because they already have.
Scotland comes second top in the global league for health policies.
Our politicians stay fit by endlessly passing new legislation and ideas to get us off the couch and into the fresh air, while we grow fat ignoring them.
The reason we are a slob nation is because we like it that way.
Most countries, when they get richer, get better food on the table – not Scotland. We take pride in poverty food like Lorne sausage, made from the bits of an animal usually only seen by a prostate test.
Our baking amounts to inventive ways of adding lots of sugar to simple cakes.
We drink fizzy drinks designed for children because they also happen to ease a hangover. We eat chips, chips with everything. What other nation thinks the nice food is just for tourists?
We comfort eat, rewarding ourselves with fat and grease to get over some unexplained hurt that ha s been caused.
It is deal ing a deadly blow to our health service and life expectancy. The NHS can’t cope with our obesity – next t i me a n A& E closes near you, don’t blame the politicians, blame the culture of not caring about our health but always wanting someone to fix it.
We die young, in part because of the way we eat and feel sorry for ourselves – pity poor me, and get me a poke of chips on the way home.
In 2015 a Holyrood report estimated that obesity costs Scotland more than £ 4billion a year.
Two-thirds of adults are overweight and 27 per cent are obese.
This is not just a lifestyle or personal matter – by choosing to disrespect ourselves, we disrespect our society.
If you raise your child to think being overweight and inactive is OK, then you are making the future of the NHS uncertain.
Today’s slob child is tomorrow’s budget buster for the health service.
What’s at fault is not just a diet which has weirdly become stuck on the cheapest bits of meat and sugary dough but a culture of indulgence.
Somehow, in the last 30 years, children have gone from being a lovely part of life’s cycle to a precious cargo – anyone would think this was the first time the human race has had kids by the way we coddle and protect them.
We don’t let them walk to school in some crazy belief that the streets are populated by paedophiles or inevitable road accidents.
We don’t let them play outside in case the rain somehow penetrates their bones and they melt away.
We act like bruises are mortal injuries. Worse, we give our children a sense of specialness which adult life will only rob away.
The joy of being human is to take risks, to get bruised, to lose and start again. If the only experience kids have of losing is on a computer game, then God help Scotland.
We live in one of the most beautiful countries in the world – a place famous for its glens and rivers, where you can find all the colours in the universe trapped in a bunch of heather.
Yet we don’t go there. We’d rather stare at a screen, watching epic fails and stupid games.
Scots are more likely to see our glorious landscape on an episode of Outlander than by going outside.
That poke of chips might as well be a bag of mini-coffins, that tablet screen a gravestone – the comforts we give our children when young are the very things doing them most damage.
The answer lies in us as a society. We must stop coddling our children – love them to bits, yes, but allow them to run outside.
We must set an example to them – get involved in sport in whatever cack-handed, amateurish, no-good way we can manage.
Actually, just a brisk walk once a day will do.
The Happy Meal is a rare treat, the plate of chips once a week.
The chip shop at the school gate should become as unacceptable as a crack dealer in the playground.
We drink fizzy drinks designed for kids because they also happen to ease a hangover