Face it... obesity is a form of child abuse

Should you be minded to harm your children, you're probably best advised to feed them rubbish. As a way of inflicting damage on a minor this has its drawbacks, of course. It isn't a quick-fix solution, as with many other forms of cruelty and neglect. Indeed you may have to wait for years to see any kind of payoff. Sure, they call it early onset diabetes, but remember, these things are always relative. Against those downsides though, you can set one large advantage, which is that you're extremely unlikely to be prevented from destroying your child's health in this way.

The nanny state, so intrusive when it comes to assault and battery, so fussy and censorious when it comes to sexual abuse, is - to put it mildly - in two minds about nutrition. Should you set out to starve your child you are likely to find that state agencies take a dim view of your parenting skills. They may even take your children into care to prevent completion of the project. Malnourish them by excess, on the other hand, and you will almost certainly be left undisturbed.

In fact if anyone tries to thwart your nutritional assault you may even find you have political backing. Remember how Boris Johnson spoke up for those disgruntled mothers in Yorkshire who had been pushing burgers through the school gates to children brutally deprived of saturated fat? So, load up the baby's bottle with Coca Cola (not the diet stuff, it makes her cry) and get started early.

The consequences of this loophole for neglect were unmissable this week - with the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence apparently considering stomach-stapling for excessively obese teenagers and Ofcom recommending a ban on the advertising of junk food to children. The Advertising Standards Authority was also reported to be finalising regulations designed to restrict junk food advertising in teenage magazines. In both cases the implied villain was the food industry - with its wicked, moustache-twirling plot to brainwash the nation's children into eating colon-clogging garbage.

This isn't entirely wide of the mark, of course. Anyone who's seen the advert for Kellogg's Coco-Pops Straws - a chocolate-lined biscuit tube marketed, astonishingly, as a nutritional aid - will have encountered corporate cynicism at its most shameless. But most such advertising depends upon a parent to close the loop between childish desire and fulfilment. McDonald's itself is notoriously resistant to pester power. You can stand at the counter for hours, whining for a Happy Meal, and they just won't cave.

Parents do, of course. And the truth about the current obesity epidemic is that it has its origins in parental abdication. Children don't have a set of fixed tastes to which they cleave in defiance of adult instruction, so much as a panoply of distastes, which any healthy food culture will slowly erase. And absence of choice plays a crucial role in this process. In some societies scarcity will supply this without resort to parental resolve. I imagine the occasional Aborigine child kicks up rough about the taste of wichetty grub, but soon discovers that the alternative is nothing at all and that they don't taste that bad after all. Here there is always something sweeter, fattier or saltier - and only parental denial will lead the palate on to better things. In all but a tiny number of cases, having a dangerously obese child should be regarded as non-accidental harm. But don't worry if you do ... you're unlikely to be called on it.

Thomas Sutcliffe
21 November 2006

http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_m_z/thomas_sutcliffe/article2001529.ece

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