Kid stuff: Toddlersize, confiscating kids and deceitful ads
Brits hoping to work off some of that baby fat
How worried are they in Britain about the soaring obesity rates among children? This worried: some municipalities are ginning up “movercise” exercise programs for young kids, and by “young,” they mean as early as one year old.
The actual age range for the program is from one to five, which UK health officials evidently consider a kind of chronological line in the sand in the overweight wars. Fact: only 20 percent of four- and five-year-olds are obese or overweight, but by age 11, the figure has risen to almost 33 percent.
The goal is not just to derail the tendency of British youth to run to excess flab, but to establish exercise as something enjoyable and positive that will keep them working out on a lifelong basis. The “movercise” classes will involve “dancing, jogging, balancing and jumping.” In other words, what in my youth was known as recess.
Nanny stateism run amok, or life-saving intervention?
But if they’re worried about their childrens’ weight in Britain, they may be approaching a state of panic in Australia, where health professionals are proposing that child protection authorities simply take morbidly obese kids away from parents who permit or enable their condition, the reasoning being that the hazard to the child’s health amounts to endangerment.
This has been done in a few isolated instances already, but the idea of removing kids from their families and subjecting them to enforced dietary and exercise programs as a matter of ongoing policy threatens to open a sizable can of worms.
On the one hand, the usurping of parental rights by the state is an ethical minefield, morally debatable to say the least, and puts the child, and the family, at emotional and psychological risk. On the other hand, we are talking about obesity so severe as to virtually condemn the child to a short and unhealthy lifespan, and in some cases, situations where the family merely lacks the skill or the ability but not the desire to control the child’s behavior and weight.
It’s an incredibly thorny issue, and in our best interest to pay attention to how Australia handles it, because it may be only a matter of time before it crops up here at home.
You can’t spell “travesty” without “tv”
And lastly, speaking of here at home, University of Minnesota researchers have found that high school kids who watch more than five hours of television per day wind up, five years later, to have lousy eating habits, meaning ingesting fewer than average fruits, veggies, whole grains and high-calcium foods and more than average fried food, fast food, snack food, soft drinks and trans fat.
This is hardly surprising, in that the more time spent watching the tube means the more time subjected to polished and beguiling commercials for exactly the second type of food, and virtually nil for the former category.
But an extremely significant comment was made by one of the authors of the Minnesota study, Daheia Barr-Anderson: “Although young people may be aware that many foods advertised on television are not healthy, they may chose to ignore or do not fully realize the consequences, because the actors they see advertising and eating the foods in the commercials are usually not overweight.”
The italics are mine, along with the observation that if at least half of the people shown partaking of the Bad Foods are not visibly overweight, these ads are way out of line with the statistical reality in America today.
This may be the most unsavory aspect of Bad Food commercials: they not only promote products that are associated with childhood obesity, they implicitly deny that the association exists. Self-indulgence: perfectly harmless, dig right in.
Reason no. 6,704 to cut down on the chips, colas, and drive-through dining.
(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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