UK Pediatricians Seeing Kids As Young As Six Months Showing Up In Obesity Clinics - BBC

[hatrack]

Doctors say they are now seeing children as young as six months old in their obesity clinics.

They are concerned some parents are supersizing meal portions for very young children and have lost sight of what "normal" weight looks like. They told the BBC that in extreme cases overfeeding a young child should be seen as a form of abuse or neglect.

A BBC investigation has learned obesity has been a factor in at least 20 child protection cases in the last year. The BBC contacted almost 50 consultant paediatricians around the UK to ask if they believe childhood obesity can ever be a child protection issue.

Dr Tabitha Randell, a consultant paediatrician from Nottingham, is one doctor who believes some parents are killing their children with kindness. In one extreme case Dr Randell saw a child aged two-and-a-half who weighed more than four stone (25.4 kg). Children of this age should weigh around two stone.

EDIT

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6751991.stm

[SheilaT]

1. Around twenty years ago

I read that we instinctively associate plumpness with health. This stems from our evolutionary past, and the fact that humans almost always until quite recently lived with food scarcity, or alternating scarcity and abundance, and since many diseases are associated with wasting away, and since someone who is already thin/underweight/nutritionally compromised is going to do less well at resisting disease, we tend to (correctly, I must add) assume that a plump person is healthier and more resistant to disease. Obviously, there's plump and there's obese, and while I can distinguish between the two, it's possible that at a primitive brain level not all of us can.

My two sons, especially my older one, were both naturally quite thin. My mother was always convinced I never fed him enough and she thought his skinny little legs were a sign of rickets. In reality, he was and is (he's 24 now) phenomenally healthy. Just naturally thin. But he did not have that plump look she thought was better, and so I was on the receiving end of a lot of criticism from her. I was able to ignore it because he was healthy.