Is childhood obesity abusive?

Obesity in Children has tripled in the past 30 years!

After reading about the 200-lbs. 8 year old boy who was taken from his parents home recently for neglect, I thought I would input my two cents …

Is childhood obesity abusive? This is a tough question to answer as there are a lot of perspectives to consider. The responsibility of feeding and caring the for a child falls onto the parent(s) as the primary care givers. This also includes protecting the child and keeping him/her out of harms way – and the numbers are as clear as day, obesity is a killer, and before it kills you it impacts your life in many very very negative ways. And children aren’t immune to it’s effects. So obesity, and all the associated ailments are putting them right into harms way. Childhood diabetes is now a very real threat in our modern world, and the number of children on heart mediation and high blood pressure medication is remarkably high. They now make a chewable version of Lipitor for children … Seriously. So by allowing your kids to consume enough unhealthy foods to make them obese, you are not ‘protecting them from harms way’, you are doing the exact opposite.

So, I am not sure if you have heard about the 200-lbs. 8 year old boy in Cleveland who was taken from his parents recently for neglect. If not you can read the full story here on Salon.com, and I would read the comments too, as there are some great points brought up both for and against this type of government intervention.

Here is one comment from “mattwa33186″ …

Should they take the kid away? No. A government that classifies french fries as a vegetable and requires that children drink milk loaded with added sugar every day is in no way qualified to make value judgements about what parents are feeding their children, and is unlikely to feed them any better.

Teach the mother how to cook. Teach her how to shop. The education system has failed to teach these vital skill to our children for 40 years. We can do it now, or pay a lot more later.

Our New 'Healthy' School Cafeteria Lunch

This highlights a bigger problem, the fact that the US government wants to step in and remove this child from his parents, but at the same time have decided – which is blatantly evident by their actions – to put corporate profit ahead of childhood nutrition; well, nutrition in general for that matter. Did you know they have recently protected the status of Pizza as as vegetable in schools? I have a blog post on the subject which you can read here. Pretty troubling if you ask me.

So to get back to my question above, I do believe it is abusive to let your children ‘be’ obese, but I don’t believe removing the child from the parents home is the answer. Obviously there are other issues at play here, mainly the fact that our food system is in shambles, because large corporations spend a lot of money convincing us their unhealthy products are healthy. And our governments aren’t helping. They pander to these corporations and allow them to market this way and also aid (and subsidize) them in getting their unhealthy processed ‘food-like-substances’ into our homes and school cafeterias around the world.

I would like to hear your comments.