National Obesity Forum chairman calls for children to lose ‘lockdown weight’
Due to the Covid-19 crisis thousands of schools were closed across the UK resulting in millions of children not exercising during scheduled physical education (PE) lessons. At the start of lockdown Joe Wicks hosted PE lessons to try and keep UK schoolchildren healthy.
Fry told the Evening Standard: “Schools have to do something about it. We have to measure them in September and again in spring to see if what has been creeping up during this enforced period of inactivity has been countered by being back at school.”
The National Obesity Forum aims to reverse the high levels of obesity present in the UK.
Food for Life’s State of the Nation report, published in January 2020, found that nine out of ten pre-school children eat too much sugar and as many as four in ten children leaving primary school are predicted to be overweight or obese by 2024. The report also revealed that UK families eat the most ultra-processed foods in Europe.