"British girls have become the fattest in Europe" was this week's brutal headline. According to a global review published in the Lancet, 29.2% of UK females under 20 are overweight or obese. Males under 20 weighed in at 26.1% – not much better, but nine European countries were even worse, so our boys escaped the attention.

The most striking aspect of the research for me was that no country has recorded a significant fall in obesity levels since 1980. Why have we all been getting fatter since then?

To understand the obesity epidemic we need to know when it started. In 1972, 2.7% of men and women in the UK were obese and we barely needed to record obesity in children. By the start of the new millennium, 22.6% of men and 25.8% of women in the UK were obese. What went wrong?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/30/diets-fat-real-food-obesity

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Gus: What went wrong is several folds — all strongly related to the powerful business of consumerism. People who sell things to us want us to have more than what we need — so they can "fatten" up their profits. Simple. 

How do they make people consume more? Piece of cake. Advertising, advertorials, manipulation of science, addiction development, attractive pricing that reduce profit margins but increase profits by volume, developing and cultivating the psychology of "consumerism" and many more tricks. 

Do you think that commercial food manufacturers think about our health? and weight?... Well, they sport some crocodile tears as they could not escape to see what their products are doing to people — but as they rightly say, it's the fault of parents if the kids eat "wrong", it's the fault of fat people if they become obese.

But the business of consumerism knows we're a mob of idiots in search of lazy options — like pigs trained for the search of truffles, pigs that stay in the mud, scoffing kitchen scraps, eating non-stop at the swill as if today was the first day of their life and tomorrow was the day before the abbattoir... Food. Glorious food.. Crappy food. Anything goes through the pipe to the other end...

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Advertising:

If we see something once, we may not remember... Repeat the message often with some tweaks and we become brainwashed. We know the jingles but we may not be enticed to consume yet. But the attack on our brain-cells by the business of consumerism is relentless and multi-pronged.

Advertising for food stuff will be specially targeted to the young, the impressionable and the "believers". 

Parents often give up to the tug of kids, eager to go to the local fast-food outlet, because it's fun, it's colourful, it's fast, it smells like the day before... and it's an outing. And there are other kids there as well with which to do mischief...

This is where a clever mum (here I go, Gus has become sexist — okay say dads as well) could learn something:

Advertise your next meal with back-lit panels in your own kitchen with a brilliant choice of sauces... Make the portions 'reasonable"... that is to say NO SUPERSIZING, no second plate. All meals should be made of original natural ingredients FROM SCRATCH. No tins, no packets of dehydrated powders apart from a few spices. No EXTRA sugar, little salt. If you must when serving, mum or dad can wear a clown suit — to be varied each day with a different nose otherwise the kids might get weary and see through the subterfuge. Invite neighbour's kids from time to time. Overall you would end up making a MacDonald place look like a dreary place... That's advertising with bells and whistles.

The oldies in your family would not know the difference. Just in case, take them and the kids around the block a couple of times and they would not know where they are. 

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Pricing.

When pricing of fast food portions are cheaper than whatever you could produce at home, You need to spend some time analysing the VALUE.

Pay the kids to prepare the (FRESH) food with you at home and should you have the unfortunate experience of taking them to a fast food outlet, make sure the kids PAY with their own cash... and reinforce the fact that the food is definitely NOT AS GOOD/TASTY as the one they prepare at home...

In regard to advertising, most kids are hooked on watching the box and advertisers know they have a captive/immature audience... The industry of consumerism bombard these blank canvas like Pro-hart used to do with cannons on carpets to create his famous paintings... But this is where you can be clever...

Activity.

Get the kids to do their own kids shows, or build model planes from sticks, not from a box bought at Paddy's... (see picture at top for pitfalls).

Piece of cake. For kids to do their own TV show, you can buy full HD cameras for a couple of hundred dollars. Should you be a bit short of change after the Tony's dreadful deceitful dishonest budget, you can buy still/movie cameras for as little as $49.95... Send the kids on a nature expedition inside the house, with the dog the cat, the cockroaches and the spiders... Make sure they know which spiders are dangerous, though they're unlikely to see a red back or a funnel web, unless you live in a leafy property on the North Shore... Get the kids to set up a theatre and make a movie of the play. Most computers (especially Apple, bless these tax avoiders) have editing facilities with which you can construct a proper movie. Should you want to be more creative and should you live on the North Shore (with more cash to dispose of) you can fork out less than $399 on a fully professional editing programme that you and the kids can use together... Make your own advertising for your own meals. FUN!

You can create your own bright and colourful toys out of paint, papier maché and sticks of wood. Suddenly, you need some music to liven up the whole gamut of activities... You can listen to the radio ABC Classic, Dig or Jazz or better still, make your own as well. 

Buy an old keyboard synthesiser should you be strapped for cash by pawning your collection of bugs bunny figurines... And suddenly, a whole new world opens up...

One of the activity I would recommend is when the kids are at school and being proselytised by chaplains, they should use a small camera to record the speil and bring it back home to discuss and dismantle in detail. The kids can tell the god-geezer that the message might be recorded for quality and training purposes... The parents have the right to know what sort of flooffy crap is being crammed into their kids' brains...

See, already in a few strokes of ideas, we can create a new generation of PROPERLY-fed kids and of future thinkers with building abilities and artistic temperament... The future is bright... But let's say it now:

YOU ARE TOO POOR, TOO LAZY, TOO BUSY TO START ANYTHING LIKE THIS... It's easier to get fat and let your kids have diabetes type 2 by age twelve...

And I must admit here, that loosing customers, consumers and oversized-butted people, crap food manufacturer of the industry of consumerism would find new ways to entice you to their table of doom — like supersizing the supersized for the same price: "eat as much as you can", not as much as you need...

We need to fight the whole bastardry of pre-prepared consumerism... 

To the pitchforks! dig that garden... And start these cameras rolling...

Tony Abbott is an idiot...

Gus Leonisky

Your local soup kitchen stirrer...