Fat-shaming children is not the answer to Britain’s obesity crisis
Should children be weighed at primary school to combat escalating rates of obesity? Is it reasonable for Ofsted inspectors to measure children’s BMI as a way of calibrating educational success?
Speaking as someone who feels passionate about tackling this urgent public health issue, I’m frankly horrified by the suggestion, which is the very definition of fat-shaming.
What in the name of Jamie Oliver would that achieve? Other than humiliation, distress and emotional eating?
Apparently, ministers and officials have visited a ground-breaking project in Amsterdam, where obesity in children was dramatically reduced by 12per cent between 2012 and 2015 – and by 18per cent among those from the most socio-economically deprived backgrounds. We need concerted action, but what works in Amsterdam will not necessarily be effective here.
A Children’s Society report has shown that we have some of the unhappiest children in the world – depression levels are higher in England than in Ethiopia, Algeria and Romania – as well as the worst obesity rates in the western world.
That’s more than a coincidence, I would moot. Kids are overweight – and any
fool can tell the difference between chubbiness and obesity – because their parents have fed them too much, served the wrong food, given them access to pocket money for cheap, fat and sugar-laden snacks and allowed them to spend weekends inside and online.
If anyone is to be fatshamed, it should be the adults. But scolding doesn’t work; the reasons for overeating are all tied up with stress, with poverty, with the pressures of time-poor, cash-rich lifestyles.
Let schools carve out more time for PE and promote good habits. But health education, education, education begins at home.
It resides in Jamie O’s admirable crusade against junk food advertising to little children, the five-a-day (or 10, as some experts now advise) message, and early years intervention. It can be done.
Everyone knows that cigarettes are harmful; the transformation of attitudes since my mother chainsmoked through pregnancy is astonishing.
We need wholesale change, but the answer doesn’t lie in making already ill-served, overweight children into whipping boys.