KATIE BULMER-COOKE: It's time we improved our health

It is very positive, in my opinion, to see that more and more people, including the government, are starting to get wise to the fact that sugar is a massive factor in the obesity crisis in the UK.

I caught the interview on Good Morning Britain last week with Olympic medal winner James Cracknell, who has written a report on the subject and is heading up the campaign.

I was really excited to hear what he had to say.

Surely he’d be talking about a need for better education on the foods we eat and promoting physical activity? Sadly, this was not the case.

Instead he was suggesting that our children are weighed more regularly at school and have their BMI reported on much more frequently too, as opposed to them currently having it done at age four and 11.

While I appreciate that in some cases there may be an argument to use the scales, on the whole I’m dead against it. I don’t want my little girl growing up being labelled by what she weighs, and have this define her level of health success.

Instead, I want her to understand what it means to be fit and healthy and the lifestyle factors that help you get there, such as better food choices, avoiding sugar and exercising, to name a few.

For me, James Cracknell can keep his weigh-ins and instead, here are a couple of things I’d like to see happen across Sunderland to make our next generation healthier.

The first is daily exercise. Our kids do one hour of PE per week at most, and by the time you’ve got thirty five-year-olds changed and organised in and out of their kit, you can probably take 20 minutes off that initial 60 minutes.

They don’t have to get changed to walk a mile around the school yard every morning led by their teacher, or to put some of their favourite music on in the classroom and have a good old dance to Rhianna or 1D. But both of these activities and many more like them, done on a daily basis, would make them fitter and healthier.

The second is to help parents understand more about what is really in their food. It’s crazy which foods contain sugar these days that never used to.

When did you last check the label on brown bread, ham or yoghurt?

All things considered to be fairly OK to most people, and all of which contain sugar. If you are going to buy packaged foods over single ingredient foods then you HAVE to read the label, it’s that simple.

When you do have a read, if there is sugar in there, ingredients you can’t pronounce or have never seen before, or if there is a huge long list of ingredients, then it’s certainly time to consider choosing something else.

Of course I’d like to see a sugar tax, but I think we are a long way off that yet.

So, in the meantime, these suggestions are easy and free to implement and could make such a huge impact to everyone in the family, from the youngest to the oldest.

My challenge to everyone in our city is, what can YOU do to improve the health of yourself and those around you?