Children in the UK are getting shorter and more obese in a “national embarrassment” fuelled by lack of nutrition and growing poverty, charities and campaigners have said.
The average height of children aged 5 has been declining from 2013 to 2020, and experts believe that the cost-of-living crisis over the past three years will have made the situation worse.
Meanwhile, data from the Office for National Statistics shows that babies born in 2022 will enjoy a year less of good health than babies born a decade ago.
Food campaigners, public health experts and politicians have backed a new report from charity The Food Foundation that calls for urgent intervention to stop declining health among UK children.
Baroness Anne Jenkin, a Conservative peer, said the nation’s health, especially children’s, “has never been worse and almost no one is talking about it.”
She added: “This is a time bomb waiting to explode if action isn’t taken”.
Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver said: “Decades of government neglect has meant kids are suffering from more obesity-related illnesses, leading to average heights shrinking and living shorter lives – they’re not being given the chance to be happy, healthy people. And they deserve so much more than that.”
Anna Taylor, executive director at The Food Foundation, called the situation a “national embarrassment” that is “entirely preventable”.
Declining children’s consumption of key micronutrients in food has been causing the decrease in average height, the charity said. In the decade up to 2019, UK children have been eating four per cent less calcium, three per cent less zinc, 18 per cent less vitamin A, 12 per cent less folate and six per cent less Iron, according to data from Public Health England.
Obesity among 10-11-year-olds has also been increasing, jumping 30 per cent since 2006. The average height of five-year-old boys went from 112.8cm in 2013 to 112.5cm in 2019, and girls have shrunk from 111.9cm to 111.7cm.
The charity said that problems with children’s growth have been exacerbated in the past three years due to increasing poverty levels, with other indicators also showing that children’s health is in decline.
Over one in five children are obese by the time they leave primary school, the report added. Approximately 80 per cent of teenagers with obesity go on to have obesity as adults, meaning bad eating habits that are starting in childhood now will have a big impact on NHS services in years to come.
Michael Marmot, director of the UCL institute of health equity and professor of epidemiology and public health, explained: “We used to think of the combination of undernutrition and obesity as a feature of low and middle-income countries. We are now seeing it in Britain in 2024, a devastating effect of poverty.
“Over a century of history has led us to expect continuous improvements in health. Over the last dozen years that has changed. Healthy life expectancy has declined. Quite simply, people’s fundamental human needs are not being met.”
Poor diet is being driven by rising poverty in the UK, experts said. The number of children living in poverty – 4.3 million – is at its highest level since records began over 20 years ago. This surpassed the previous high of 4.28 million in the year to March 2020.
A rise in childhood obesity has also led to a subsequent increase in type 2 diabetes in English teenagers in the past decade, NHS data shows.
Former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown said: “When the height of 5-year-olds has been falling since 2013, and we’re learning babies born today will enjoy a year less good health than babies born a decade ago, every mother and father in the land will be concerned and shocked at what is happening to children through lack of nutrition living through the hungry 2020s in food bank Britain.”
Conservative peer Lord James Bethell added: “The health of the nation is going backwards and food plays a central role in this decline. It’s costing us a fortune, in money and happiness, so it’s time to act. Any new government should take the lessons to heart and immediately swing into action.”
Former government food tsar Henry Dimbleby also called on the next government to “stem the constant flow of junk food and to realise that investing in children’s health is an investment in the future of the country.”
The government was approached for comment.
