Bryony Gordon
Doctors are wrong to call our children fat
Efforts to improve children’s health have been ignored since Brexit
Last week, parents of four- and fiveyear-olds across the London borough
I live in received letters from the local authority informing them whether or not their children were fat. How fortunate that these little humans are incapable of reading words more complicated than their own names; the poor things might have developed complexes if they had seen the way their life chances were being coolly appraised by the team leader of the local Public Health School Nursing Services. “[Insert name of child]’s height and weight was measured… the measurements tell us how children are growing and allow parents, school nurses and GPS to identify if a child is at risk of being overweight or developing chronic diseases as an adult…” the letters read.
My daughter, who has just turned five, was deemed a healthy weight, which was a relief given her childish love of chocolate buttons and sugar-laden Petits Filous, and her parents’ childish love of Haribo and Ben & Jerry’s. But I have a dear friend who received a letter informing her that her child’s weight was “higher than expected for their age and height”.
“While it is normal for children to have growth spurts, research shows that if a child doesn’t grow into their weight over time then this extra weight is likely to stay with them through to adulthood. Encouraging your child to eat well, be more active and sit less will reduce that risk. It’s easier for your child to make healthy changes if the whole family does, too…”
The National Child Measurement Programme gives you these results so that you can take action to reduce the risk to [your child’s] health by encouraging an active lifestyle and healthy eating habits… It is also useful to keep in mind that very young children tend to copy their parents’ behaviours.”
My friend knows this, because she is a well-informed nutritionist. She is also a parent who keeps an extra protective eye on the health of her children, given that her eldest has special needs and the child in question was gravely ill for the first year of their life. This means that said child is a little shorter than normal for their age – though, it should be said, a whole 2cm taller than stated in the letter from the School Nursing Services (they had one job). You would think that the local authorities might have consulted some central database and seen the complex medical history of the child before firing off such a patronising letter – then again, perhaps we should be grateful to be receiving any missives at all from governing health bodies, given the frankly shocking revelations this week about NHS breast cancer failures.
I wish I could show you a picture of this child so that you would see how ridiculous it is for anyone to suggest they are overweight and at risk. This is a gorgeous, energetic, beaming little thing who eats spinach raw and does swimming, football and ballet. I am well aware that childhood obesity is a public health crisis, but it is a public health crisis that is currently being tackled in entirely the wrong way – if at all.
As Jamie Oliver pointed out this week, efforts to improve the health of our children have largely been ignored by the Government since the whole business of Brexit came along. “I worked with Mr Cameron within his group to formulate chapter one [of the childhood obesity plan], which of course with Brexit… got kind of blown up. Mrs May took over, they pushed it out.”
It’s all well and good the likes of Jeremy Corbyn, Nicola Sturgeon and Vince Cable “uniting” to write to the Prime Minister calling on her to take steps to tackle the crisis, but when they then suggest measures that already seem to be in place – such as weighing kids at school – you wonder who, if anyone, in Parliament really has a grip on this issue.
I admire Oliver a great deal, but even he must be sick and tired of having to rock up to select committees to inform the people in charge of what most people already know – that junk food advertising is about as responsible as cigarette advertising, and that sugar is potentially as dangerous as nicotine. For whatever reason – and I am sure there are plenty of people who could suggest many financial ones – this seems to get ignored. A sugar tax has been introduced but it is not enough.
Meanwhile, children with a bit of puppy fat are being shamed by local councils. The Government takes the easiest path – it blames the parents. With such a lazy approach to public health coming right from the very top, it’s no wonder we’re the fattest country in western Europe.