Fat kids

OK, let's start with something uncontroversial: most fat kids are fat because they stick too much crap into their gobs. Why they do that is a lot more complicated but I was taken aback this week to read in the Guardian that 80% of all the bread we eat in this country is supermarket bread. That's bread that has had so much of its goodness taken out of it that manufacturers (I can't bring myself to call them bakers) are compelled by law to reintroduce vitamins to the bread before they can sell it. This kind of bread is just one of a huge number of processed foods that are making us fat and sick from an early age. So we can see that ending up with fat kids has a lot to do with how we grow and make our food and the links between farming and nutrition. If we don't farm sustainably, if we prioritise yield over taste and nutrition, we will simply continue with this epidemic of obesity that is costing the NHS billions.

I know I've said it before, but my mum brought up six kids on very little money – in fact we were skint – but not one of us was fat. Why? Because we ate home-cooked nutritious food. Even if as a kid I did sneak in the odd Mars bar.