Top doctor backs plan for school weigh-ins

A PROPOSAL to weigh children at school has been backed by Ireland’s leading obesity expert, Professor Donal O’Shea, as a means of tackling a growing obesity crisis.

But Fine Gael Senator Catherine Noone told the Irish Mail on Sunday that she was fearful a ‘mini Weight Watchers’ could be created, and has urged parents to take responsibility for their children’s weight. She said parents needed to be less sensitive on the issue when tackled by GPs.

In contrast, Prof. O’Shea told the MoS that some claims by dietitians that weighing children in a school setting could lead to eating disorders, body shaming, bullying and mental health issues was ‘scaremongering’.

They were both responding to a proposal by Fianna Fáil’s spokeswoman on Children and Youth Affairs, Anne Rabbitte, that children’s weight be monitored from an early age and recorded on a national database.

Prof. O’Shea, who leads the country’s first public weight management service at St Columcille’s Hospital in south Dublin, said it was essential that these trends be tracked.

He added: ‘It would not be a case of lining children up in their underwear in front of their classmates, placing them on an oldfashioned weighing scales and calling out their number. That is very much a historical, black-andwhite image. We used to do it in the Forties and Fifties to detect underweight children and now we will have to do it for the opposite reason.’

He said he was ‘less concerned about where it happens’ – whether at a school or a GP clinic – ‘but absolutely concerned that it has to happen’.