Why Dont You Blog?

From BBC Breakfast Time to the BBC website, child obesity is yet again a BBC theme of the day. The topic is whether child obesity is a form of neglect.

Related articles are one about Kacey’s weight went off the scale and Infants being treated for obesity.

Rather disappointingly, from a freak show point of view, four-year-old Kacey didn’t break the 20 stone barrier, or whatever the top mark on a set of bathroom scales is. She was only “off the scale” in terms of the percentile charts used to measure infants. (Just in case there aren’t enough normality hoops for parents and children to jump through, when they get to school….)

It turns out that the supposedly monstrously obese two-year-old Kacey is no longer obese but is in fact just tall now.

As a result of becoming obese when she was still a baby, Kacey has had a premature growth spurt and is now the height of an average 10-year-old and still weighs five stone (31.7kg).

So, was this even “obesity”? Don’t children put on weight before they grow tall. And if they are going to be very tall, they need something to grow new body from.

This got me wondering, is tallness a potential problem? Are people to have their children taken off them by social services for growing too tall at the wrong age?

Because that seems to be one implication of this compulsory normality madnes sthat is getting beamed at children and parents.

Her mum hopes that will continue and by the time Kacey is reaching her teenage years her height and weight will be much closer to the average child. By taking control of Kacey’s food her parents have transformed their daughter’s future.

Sentence One: WHY? Thor forbid that anyone should be on the outside edges of the human bell-shaped curve any more. Average is GOOD. Standard is GOOD. Diversity is BAD.

Sentence Two: Well, no, actually, it seems to me they have more likely set up a future teenage battle-ground that will end up with her becoming anorexic, bulimic or a compulsive eater. Food & control all tangled together, with subliminal Stepford-Wines style messages about how important it is to be like everybody else. Important enough to embarrass the future fiurteen-year-old Kacey (is that even a name or a set of initials?) with the existence of discussion and pictures of her as fat two year-old “problem child” in the national press. I can’t predict a good outcome.

I don’t blame this family for apparently turning a child’s weight into the centre of their lives. What else can they do? Thye have to show a willingness to change it. The other articles discuss the BBC’s apparently successful drive (no surprise there, resources flow to those who take the fashionable line) to find paediatricians who will agree that families with overfed children should be scrutinised by social services.

Now Social Services departments are well known for always improving the lives of kids who fall under their tender attentions …….
And there blatantly aren’t any enough children who are beaten or homeless or abused who could really do with some of this attention……

Doctors say they are now seeing children as young as six months old in their obesity clinics.

Come on. How on earth can a child under 6 months become “obese”? Small babies can’t even eat food. Even bottlefed babies are hard pushed to take in more than they can handle. Babies just stop feeding when they are full. And as soon as they start moving round, even chubby babies tend to burn up their stored energy.

Parents are allegedly to blame for feeding McDonald’s diets to their babies. Nonsense again, if we are talking about the poor* - because there is always an unspoken assumption in this that the poor are too stupid to feed their kids nutritious food - they can hardly afford to give babies a diet of BigMacs and Super-thick milkshakes, no matter how stupid they may be.

* At the children’s centre in the deprived Meadows area of Nottingham parents are offered support to improve their children’s diet.

Here is the one mysterious fact about the epidemic of obesity (and, yes, I do know that you can’t talk about an epidemic of something that isn’t a transferable disease, I was being ironic, ok?) As you can read in an old post here Everything about diets seems to be bull people actually eat LESS now than they did 15 years ago, according to the UK Office of National Statistics. I can’t repeat this too often. Even the BBC did in their quiz. It undercuts almost all of the food nonsense we get stuffed down our craws:

Men eat 6% fewer and women 3% fewer calories and both men and women eat less fat than they did in 1986.

Hmm, calories and fat. Aren’t we getting constantly told that it’s calories and fat that make us fat? This is obviously not completely untrue - there must be a relationship between how much we consume and how much bodyfat we store - but it can’t be wholly true either.

I can come up with a million crackpot theories involving additives and people not walking anywhere and residual estrogens in the water and so on. These remain personal opinion based on minimal or no evidence, so I’ll spare you them. Until we actually understand any of this, it is stretching credulity to assume that every chubby child is getting stuffed with KFCs and crisps and Big Macs and is doomed to a lifetime of Jerry-Springer-style immobility.

The one crackpot theory that I won’t spare you is the idea that the social meanings that we attach to food are demented.

We are so alienated from what we eat that we barely know it comes from farms (a/c to a spurious report on the BBC yesterday). We are obsessed with the weight of celebrities. Half the population is in a constant state of self-loathing beacuse they cant lose weight, but still despises other people for their fatness. And just in case adolescents aren’t disturbed enough about their bodyweight, we are now stretching the boundaries of concern down to babies.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Popularity: 28% [?]

The BBC website “science” pages have text on obesity and a quiz about it. I am always interested in trying to find any real science basis behind our current obsession with obesity and diet. I still remain to be convinced by more than a scraping of it. (See old post about child obesity/anorexia scares. )

While I was scoring poorly on the quiz- I failed the first question on how many years of life obesity can cost - I saw this,:

Obesity can shorten your life by 9 years. 18 million days of work are lost through sickness due to obesity, and it costs the NHS £500 million a year.

I always have a problem with health rants that discuss how much problem x or y costs the Health Service. We get used to seeing things that put arbitrary cost figures on health. Unfortunately, no source is quoted, so it’s hard to argue with the data. But, an absence of facts never stops me making an argument.

Is every illness suffered by an obese person to be blamed on their weight? Don’t they get the same range of health problems as everybody else? So, any extra cost calculation would surely have to deduct a baseline standard level of health costs.

Popularity: 34% [?]

Popularity: 34% [?]

There are items about kids’ weight on the BBC website and The Guardian (G2 bit) today. They combine to add another ton of guilt onto parents, especially as parents are atavistically afraid of starving their children.

The Guardian has pages about how to stop your kids becoming overweight and the BBC is fretting about anorexia. They are both pushing the age boundaries downwards for concern over children’s eating, to birth in the case of the Guardian article; and to 8-years old on the BBC site.

I really have problems with this obsessing over weight and pushing our obsessions onto children. Ironically the Guardian article continually intercuts pages of obsessing over weight with the message that you shouldn’t stress your kids about dieting and their weight. That seems incredibly contradictory advice to me and some of the advice seems quite demented. Only allow one hour of TV a day, as kids gain a stone a year for every hour of TV that they watch. Argh. What possible evidence supports this? The writer refers to the food traffic lighting scheme - eat as much as you like of green foods (basically veg) a third of your palm size portion of amber foods (potatoes, bread, rice, dairy) and eat red foods once or twice a week (treats). This sounds exactly like the sort of rules people get from Weightwatchers or Slimmers World. There are lots of other injunctions about mealtime rules and what to put in a packed lunch and so on.

Do I have to use the pseudoscience word repeatedly? I’ll just use it once and leave you to apply it with Tourette-style enthusiasm at random.

There are justified complaints about advertising “foods” aimed at children but noone seems to complain about dragging kids into our insanely weight-obsessed culture, where food takes on infinite bizarre meanings.

The BBC goes to the other extreme, following the well-worn path of :

• Identify an issue that can be seen as a pressing social problem
• Stir up concern by claiming that kids are at risk
• You may have to go a year younger every couple of months when you trawl for victims, because anorexic thirteen year-olds no longer cut it as shock-horror stories
• It’s always a good idea to have some medical element. People are interested in health. It holds the possibility of a cure

The common point in both these stories is the issue of control. Both the Guardian and BBC writers acknowledge that food is an area where children seek control. The proferred solutions seem to consist of imposing controls, whether in the home or in hospital Anorexics or Obesity Units. The anorexic kids are being subject to control by being force-fed the very foods that other kids are supposed to be deprived of.

She has to eat a daily diet of about 2,500 calories consisting of all the food she hates most - chocolate, chips, cream and cheese. It’s a prospect she dreads.

Common sense seems to suggest to me that food shouldn’t become a control issue. Adults’ anxieties over food and fatness and thinness are being transmitted to children. Who insist on learning from reality rather than words - picking up all the things about us that we don’t want them to acknowledge and treating our hypocritical words with contempt. Maybe generally negotiating controls could actually move the conflict into other areas of the relationship between adults and children and might serve some purpose.

Also, maybe we could stop fighting biology. Kids love sweet things - it’s a survival mechanism. They naturally eat when they are hungry and their bodies store excess to grow from. They naturally burst with life and enthusiasm for running and climbing and exploring - all the things that burn their food and build their bodies. As adults, we generally don’t live like this - being constantly active, eating when we are hungry - which is why we can’t regulate our own hunger. We bring up kids to live as we do then get confused when their body mechanisms respond. Or their minds respond to their own hunger for control and the social obsessions with weight by exerting control over their bodies through starving them.

As a society, we can’t bear to see our own attitudes to our bodies mirrored so mercilessly by our offspring. We get obsessed with forcing them to show us a pretty mirror and we distract ourselves from living like human beings by trying to make our kids look as if we do.

Popularity: 55% [?]

Popularity: 55% [?]