Why can’t we be honest about the raging epidemic of fat children?

Idon’t know about you, but I prefer to get my healthcare news from The Archers – so when research was published revealing concerns over children’s weight, I was already way ahead of The Archives of Disease in Childhood.

You see, in The Archers, not-so-little Rosie, daughter of Pip and Toby – who are co-parenting despite their unconscious uncoupling (do keep up) – was outed as being a bit too chubby by her uncle, Ben. He’s a student nurse at Borsetshire General which makes him Christiaan Barnard by Ambridge standards.

The outraged parents kicked off at Ben, before discovering that Rosie, who’s about to start school, didn’t fit any of her cousin’s hand-me-downs. She wept, while the adults were plunged into soul-searching anguish. Talk about a taboo-busting storyline.

Frankly, it’s the most on-the-nose plot since Tom Archer’s dream of a Home Farm goats’ milk kefir empire went sour. But there will, of course, be militants out there claiming that fictional Rosie’s weight is none of our body-shaming business. To them I say this: it takes a village to bring up a child. And, even more saliently, I think a vast swathe of the population could do with a few tips on how to keep themselves and their families healthy.

Because it’s pretty obvious that nature didn’t intend a generation of tiny chunky monkeys huffing and puffing their way round the play park. As far back as 2012, the WHO established that, globally, obesity is killing more of us than malnutrition. Yet witness the moral panic surrounding a survey revealing more than one in four children in England are dieting, “including some who are a healthy weight”.

It makes a great headline until you drill down to the granular detail. Yes, 13.6 per cent of those who were slim were actively trying to lose weight, which could be a sign of a more serious disorder. But the highest numbers were among overweight and obese children: 39.3 per cent and 62.6 per cent respectively. Poor souls. That can’t be easy. In a world of junk food and high calorie snacks, it’s really tough and admirable to take back control.

There has been some welcome progress in recent years. According to the National Child Measurement Programme, obesity rates have slightly fallen in primary school children: around 10 per cent of fourand five-year-olds in reception class are obese, down from 14 per cent. The figure for 10- and 11-yearolds in Year 6 is now 24 per cent, a drop of 2 per cent.

However, the fact that a quarter of children going into secondary school are obese – and another 15 per cent or so are overweight

– is nothing to be proud of. Quite the opposite. Not all children – not all people – are the same size and shape, but being clinically overweight at a young age is not a benign thing. Children who have obesity are at greater risk of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, asthma and other long-term conditions. And that’s without even touching upon the mental health impact of the stigma and prejudice they will inevitably encounter.

A friend of mine took her son to a private GP because she was worried he had a wasting disease. As the doctor surveyed his greyhound ribs and gangly arms she gravely gave her diagnosis: perfectly normal. Just so few children are “normal” these days that we fret unduly about the skinny few while dismissing the affliction of the many as just puppy fat.