Nutritionist Claire O’Meara is horrified at the prospect of children being offered gastric by-pass surgery to ‘cure’ their obesity.
And yet according to the head of the National Obesity Forum, Dr David Haslam, radical measures are needed to save lives, such is the scale of the national problem. He recently proposed that NICE guidelines advising against weight loss surgery for the under 16s should be relaxed.
“In some ways I can see where the experts are coming from,” says Claire, from Skelmanthorpe. “But in other ways every fibre of my being screams in absolute disbelief that this is the solution for overweight children.”
The 33-year-old, who is voluntary ambassador for the Jamie Oliver Food Revolution – at the moment the only one for West Yorkshire – would rather see an educational approach to obesity.
“If things have got to the stage where a child needs a major operation to survive, surely social intervention is in order. This could be better tackled with educating the parents,” she said.
One of Claire’s roles as an ambassador is to work within her community to help children understand where food comes from and how to make healthy food choices.
She is approaching the eight schools in the Shelley Pyramid to offer her services. She said: “Schools need kitchen gardens to show children how food is grown. One school in the area did have a garden but it failed because there was no-one to tend it.
“We need teachers to be engaged in the project. I have free packets of seeds, recipes and resources to hand out.”
She is also on a quest to find more food ambassadors for the area and says: “We need more people to help spread the word.
Claire, whose background is in sports marketing and sponsorship, has worked with a number of sports companies and rugby super league teams. She is married to former professional rugby player Brendan O’Meara, who played for Dewsbury, and retrained as a nutritionist after taking redundancy three years ago. She now works part-time for a food export company in Batley and runs her own nutritional health coaching business.
“Brendan retired from rugby and now has his own personal training business, Maximum Fitness, at the John Smith’s Stadium,” explained Claire. “He found that he didn’t have time to sit down with his clients and give them nutritional advice so I decided to train. It was something that I’d always been interested in.”
Claire studied with the Nutritional Healing Foundation and is still enrolled and studying with the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. As well as one-on-one coaching for adults she also runs an on-line course and is developing a programme for children that she calls Little Lifestylers.
She is passionate about her work for Jamie Oliver and is now planning events for the global Food Revolution Day, an awareness day launched by the chef and food campaigner. This year it will be on May 17.
“Anyone can support Food Revolution Day, even with something as simple as holding a dinner party with freshly-cooked ingredients,” she said.
Jamie Oliver has a number of initiatives designed to improve the health of the nation. His Better Food Foundation was launched in 2002 and began with a restaurant, Fifteen London, run by young people who would otherwise have been unemployed.
In 2005 his School Dinners programmes changed the foods that many schools serve to pupils and raised public awareness of poor diets among young people.
His Ministry of Food, created in 2008, still offers practical cookery sessions at centres around the country, including Bradford and Leeds. And in 2010 he launched the Food Revolution in the US, aimed at reducing the nation’s massive obesity problem. It was also the year in which pilot Little Garden projects began in UK schools.
The Food Revolution now has volunteer ambassadors all over the world, from Argentina to Vancouver, including nearly 100 in the UK.
If you would like to know more about being a food ambassador or celebrating Food Revolution Day (Claire promises more details soon) then contact her on claire@thelifestylekitchen.com, 07540 8068326, or check out www.foodrevolutionday.com
Up to 22% of children aged four and five are overweight. By the time they reach the age of 11 up to one third are overweight or obese, according to figures supplied by the National Child Measurement Programme, which assesses the height and weight of primary children in England.
Researchers from Oxford University have found that obese children have several risk factors for heart disease compared to normal weight children. They also discovered that 89% of children say their favourite after-school activity is watching television.
Paul Gately, a professor of exercise and obesity at Leeds Metropolitan University, says many parents underestimate just how fat their children actually are. A study conducted by the university found that this is because media images often show morbidly obese individuals when discussing weight problems. He says it only takes a few pounds to be overweight.
Two-thirds of adults in the UK are now overweight or obese and the NHS spends £5.1b a year treating illnesses associated with obesity, such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
BREAKFAST is both the most important meal of the day and the one most likely to be skipped.
Claire has come up with three easy ideas – an alternative to processed cereals – to give children a good start to the day.
She says: “The easiest thing for most on a morning is to grab a bowl of cereal and go, but many packaged breakfast cereals are highly processed and contain excessive amounts of sugar and salt.
“We really want to give our children the best start in life and one of the key things is to nourish them with the right foods.”
With a little forward planning the following recipes provide nourishing and fast meals.
Mini Fritatta:
These can be made in advance and last a couple of days in the fridge.
Use left-over cooked vegetables from an evening meal.
Mix grated vegetables (like courgette, carrot, sweet potato) with a few eggs (around 1 ½ eggs per child), a dash of milk and a little grated cheese. Pour the mix into a greased muffin tin and bake in a moderate oven until firm.
Simple to make and a great way to get fussy eaters to eat vegetables.
Porridge:
Porridge doesn’t have to be boring, you can add lots of different things to make it colourful and give it extra flavour.
I like to sometimes add in mixed berries with the oats and milk, whizz in a blender and then heat it up. You have a nice bright pink porridge full of goodness that will keep your child going for hours – fuel for the mind and body.
Banana Pancakes:
Mix half a cup of coconut flour, 1 egg, a dash of milk and 1 mashed banana; whisk everything together and then cook in a non stick frying pan. This mixture will make a couple of pancakes. Full of flavour they can be served with a squeeze of honey.
