Combating obesity in the UK through gardening

Last year many newspapers reported that half of UK men could be obese by 2030 if food and health trends continue the way they are. If you compare this interesting statistic to another one that states 25% of males and 33% of females aged between 2 and 19 are obese then it doesn’t look good for both sexes and the UK population as a whole. What is interesting about these figures is that it has been calculated that an additional 1.02 billion pounds will be needed each year to pay for obesity related medical costs.

Many people struggle with the gym and although I personally am a gym freak I will admit that running for 40 minutes on a treadmill can be tedious. So how can we educate the UK population and what with or even better how can we get the nation active? In my opinion it is not about going to the gym five nights a week as this isn’t good for most people and is a little extreme but one activity I believe could work is gardening. Gardening and growing your own is a great way of educating all generations about the food they are eating and what goes in to the food they are growing and eating. Not only this making a trip to an allotment or creating a growing area in your garden where you have to turn the soil and dig is a great way of gaining regular exercise.

The benefits of gardening and growing your own:

Whether you garden with a friend or chat to your friends about what you have been growing with a friend or joining a community of growers at an allotment is a great way to increase your social life and increase your mental health. Having something of interest that keeps you occupied with others to communicate with is only beneficial for health and it may actually give you the get up and go to do other activities. It can actually change the person you are and transform you from a couch slob and have a get up and go attitude to try new things and converse with people you would usually not encounter.

People do not realise the extent of the physical benefits that gardening offers but why would they make tools that are designed to take the strain off your back if gardening wasn’t a physical activity. For people who do not take part in regular exercise simply watering the garden can be a great start and turning the soil is a strenuous exercise for anyone. What I think is great about gardening is that its continuous so the exercise you obtain will be regular but it also provides people with rewards and an outcome which at the gym can be hard to see or notice. In this instance it may be the success of a seed which you can add to a meal but this is likely to encourage people to grow more.

One of the main reasons people are obese is because of the lack of understanding of certain foods. What better way to educate yourself by growing these foods yourself. I recently started growing chilli’s and was unaware there was a Scoville scale which marks how hot each chilli is. Ok so this isn’t information on whether the product is healthy for you but it is educational.

Most people take a keen interest in what they take part in so the likelihood is that if you are growing chilli’s you will look at the benefits of growing these yourself and the health concerns with other seeds. This involvement allows people to research the information themselves rather than be told information they don’t want to hear. They can also see the growth, progress and end product and see for themselves the benefits or faults.

Whether you are 2 or 102 everyone can take part in gardening and having such a large age group involved is a great way of increasing the education of the population. School projects are becoming increasingly popular which is great for the younger generation but also older generations as most parents are keen to take an interest in what their children are learning at school and may learn something from them. Children are more likely to ask for their own grow your own patch at home also which is ideal for involving their parents and grandparents. Even for parents who do not take such an interest in their children’s schooling by educating the children they are hopefully able to take that knowledge with them in the future.