Pizza, pasta, potatoes, protein – how Italian children became so overweight

Pasta and other carbohydrate-rich foods are nowhere near as bad as sugar for children. In the Nutella filled pastry, it is not the bread that’s the problem.

Sugar (particularly in beverages) and lack of exercise are the main contribution of child obesity increase worldwide.

Don’t blame the potato.

Nobody yet mentioned young-learnt habits: school cafeterias & snack machines.

When I was young, in lunch breaks you'd head over to the school's cafeteria. And what they had there? "Gevulde koek", stroopwafel, snack-sized bags of crisps, various (sweetened) dairy products, and iirc bananas & apples too. No veggies or fibre-rich food in sight. So of course kids would go for the sugar-laden & salty snacks. For drinks, there were vending machines. My favorite was hot chocolate. Again: high in sugar (no "more or less sugar" option).

Sometimes there were longer breaks due to a teacher falling ill or whatever. Then we'd head over to a supermarket nearby, and buy similar junkfood.

Of course we'd bring sandwiches from home. But not everyone, and not always. Some kids would throw their sandwiches in a trash can, and proceed to buy the junkfood mentioned above.

That school was 6 years of us kids' lives. Plenty of time to pick up unhealthy habits & bring those into adulthood.

Wouldn't surprise me at all if most schools worldwide are still like that. Healthy diet choices for pupils is far from #1 priority for school management given all the other things they have to deal with.

The fix would be to make healthier options the easy pick, and remove all junkfood offerings from schools' cafeterias. But good luck doing that nationwide under the watchful eye of junkfood multi-nationals.

So the problem is not Pizza nor pasta nor potatoes nor bread nor protein but all the extra supper high calories, near zero nutrition things that go on top of them?

https://archive.ph/Shj4X

Surely writing 374 lbs is easier than 26st 10lb.

Article is good but with one puzzling flaw. They mention protein is one of the culprits, but nothing about why or how.

In 2004 I visited my family in Valencia, Spain. There was a local construction boom. There were family owned shops everywhere. Bakeries, fruit stands, etc. When I went back in 2014, it seems everything had changed. The shops were gone. The construction had slacked off. Instead there were now giant supermarkets and superstores. They were on the Euro now. My cousins blamed the EU for this. I'm assuming something similar happened in Italy, tho it is not mentioned in the article, which instead tends to blame the victims. When you replace the local food supply chain with prepared branded foods (Nutella, etc.), you get this. The EU has been great for European capitalists, but a detriment to the people in Europe.

PS This was one of the major complaints of the long forgotten yellow-vests protests in France.

...In the South.

It's a culture thing.