Page 704 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 28 March 2006
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obsession that way. Children today have entirely different lives and it is often very easy for our generation to judge them.
We all know that obesity is one of the catchcries in conversations today about health of adults and children, and it always interests me when the media and public programs focus on one issue and pathologise it or turn it into a disease and obesity, for all that I acknowledge that it is a problem, is in danger of being treated thus.
I will admit that when I was a young person I was what you might call “plump”, but I was always told that it was puppy fat—this was the language of my day—and that I would grow out of it. And indeed I did, at the end of year 12, when I went and got a job in a roadhouse, which caused me to be more active than I had been until that point. So we do need to be aware that sometimes these things are part of a life cycle in children’s lives and we have to be very careful not to focus unduly upon it, because the other big epidemic is the epidemic of anorexia and bulimia.
This is a problem, as we have recognised for a long time, amongst girls and young women, and increasingly amongst boys and young men. I just recently heard a program about this, about how people do not have a true vision of the way their body is and they basically consume themselves through not eating or through throwing up when they do eat, and I do not think we can call that healthy either. So, if we are going to talk about obesity, let us also talk about the other side of food—eating disorders.
Nonetheless, I think the approach to both of these problems is to develop a healthy approach to eating and to physical activity. Members have touched upon this today and I am not going to repeat all the wonderful things that people have said; they are truisms. We are also aware that people who are healthy and develop good habits in their childhood are going to be less of an expense at the pointy edge of the health system. They are less likely to be hospitalised and are more likely to treat depressions and minor disorders without having to go to the doctor, and certainly without going to hospital. So it makes good economic sense to encourage healthy lifestyles.
In terms of healthy eating, I recently read that if we could just remove the consumption of sugary soft drinks from children’s diets we would make a significant impact on their health. But every parent knows what an uphill fight we have to push them towards the water and the fruit juice instead of towards the aerated soft drinks that the cool people on the ads drink—and we have all got kids that want to be cool.
Also, let us not forget that there are children who go to school hungry because they come from chaotic households where there is not food for breakfast; they have got to see what is in the cupboard and scratch something together themselves. A number of our schools have got breakfast programs, because they know that children do not learn when they are hungry and children’s behaviour can be very disruptive when their stomachs are empty.
Nonetheless, today it seems we are focusing on the issue of obesity, and I am very proud to say that the Greens in the Senate have taken this up as an issue and have called on the federal government to support the Greens proposal to ban junk food ads as a way of complementing the government’s positive TV advertising campaign to promote healthy eating and exercise. The Greens have proposed an amendment to the Broadcasting Legislation Amendment Bill to ban all junk food ads during children’s TV viewing hours
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