Children hate their bodies and yearn to be thin. Anxiety about eating can lead to eating disorders.

Children hate their bodies and yearn to be thin

Extract from the Sunday Telegraph:

"Young children associate being thin with being "popular" and being overweight with being "nasty", attitudes that experts say could lead to eating disorders later in life.

The stresses faced by young children are revealed in the eighth series of the BBC's Child of Our Time, which has followed 25 children since their births in 2000.

The influence of so-called "size zero" culture was revealed when the children, none of whom was overweight, were asked to choose their ideal figure from a series of drawings. All the girls aspired to be thinner and thought that the fuller figures would have fewer friends. One girl said, unprompted, that the largest figure would be "nasty because she is fat". One child, Rhianna, a healthy, normal-sized seven-year-old from Yorkshire, said in the first episode: "I just don't like my body shape. I think I look really fat. I don't like it."

John Oates, a psychologist with the Open University, which has co-produced the series, said: "For the girls, in particular, weight was linked to attractiveness. The media portrayal of attractiveness being about thinness is picked up by children at an early age. Anxiety about eating is definitely a problem that can lead towards eating disorders.""

If everyone was to be told the truth about how people become fat, then there would be very few people with eating disorders. The truth is that obesity has a number of possible causes. Fluid retention/water retention/salt sensitivity is a major and unrecognised route to child obesity because most children these days eat too much salt and salty food. There are other additional possible causes in adults.

Whatever has caused a person to be overweight/fat/obese, they will lose much of that excess weight if they avoid eating salt and salty food.

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better!

See my website http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/.html (The site does not sell anything and has no banners or sponsors or adverts - just helpful information.)

Read my Mensa article on Obesity and the Salt Connection

Children and Obesity

vulnerable groups

See Sodium in foods and

Associated health conditions and

See FAT RETENTION

http://www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk/socio.html - social and economic considerations