THERE are massive differences between today and 100 years ago and there are massive differences between today and just a few decades ago.

One of these differences is the incredible level of obesity in our society: it has now become acceptable for children and young adults to be significantly above the recommended weight, as if the health issues that this brings only applies to others.

Of course, body shaming is not the answer, but people should take this a lot more seriously.

Take fast food, for example: so many people regularly choose not to cook their own meals, which often taste a lot better and are significantly healthier than fast food.

However, the issue is in the name itself – people choose fast food because of how quickly it is prepared.

This is fine in reasonable amounts and for people with extremely busy lives, but should not be picked every day due to sheer laziness, and can never replace cooking at home or even going out for a meal in a restaurant.

The increased levels of salt, sugar and saturated fats in ready-made food is also a huge problem, leading to a higher risk of heart disease as well as build up body fat.

But since so few young people regularly cook for themselves, they are more likely to consume a high amount of these incredibly unhealthy foods because they are cheap and do not take much time to prepare, just like fast food.

A lot of this stems from our education system.

An increasing workload for students is perfectly acceptable, as long as it is balanced by learning skills everyone will use, such as knowing how to cook several filling, nutritional meals with a few basic ingredients or understand how to analyse food labels on packaging and make decisions based on the information they find.

This has now been neglected, because schools are adapting to a more academic curriculum and use up any available lessons to support this, because more vocational skills are just not in high demand, especially considering the knowledge-based culture that we live in.

As I mentioned, body shaming is not the answer, as it mainly leads to people jumping to the other end of the spectrum and developing anorexia instead of obesity, but something in our culture has to change, no matter how small it seems at first.