Today's Journal of the American Medical Association contains an editorial opinion by Dr. David Ludwig, whose work focuses on childhood obesity at Harvard's reknowned Boston Children's Hospital. In other words, a very knowledgeable, concerned, and influential physician in the realm of obesity, particularly pertaining to children and young adults.
Dr. Ludwig suggests that obese children be removed from their families and placed in foster care.
I can understand Dr. Ludwig's frustration, but since his days are spent looking at obese kids rather than the bigger picture of food marketing, consumption and health in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world, I can see how he might reach the point he expresses in this editorial. From where I sit, I can't help but be horrified. My hope is that the editorial may spark widespread dialogue, about food, about families, and about the role of government intervention in regards to both.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (that regulates food labeling and food additives and develops nutritional education information in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Agriculture), Federal Communications Commission (that regulates broadcast advertising and children's television programming), Federal Trade Commission (that regulates product advertising), along with our state's attorney generals, education curriculum and school lunch programs committees, and local, state and federal surgeons general and health departments, have been utterly ineffectual at communicating the basic foundations of good nutrition and food choices. The poor USDA nutritionists and a few school nurses have been running around out there saying, Eat More Vegetables! and having about as much impact as holding back a hurricane with an umbrella.
Actually, 'ineffectual' is an understatement. The regulating agencies which we have created and engaged to try to protect us from unscrupulous business practices have not only allowed but subsidized and encouraged the production and marketing of substances extremely detrimental to our health.
They have allowed High Fructose Corn Syrup, clearly demonstrated by Princeton University researchers to lead to fat and weight gain as well as serum triglyceride increases even when consumed in modest amounts, to pervade every food product on the shelf.
They've approved the use of sythentic fat substitutes, now sold in 'fat-free' everything, but that interfere with the absorption of necessary nutrients and actually wind up making consumers fatter. This threatens to create malnutrition and increased obesity in precisely those kids whose parents think they are doing the best thing by buying them fat-free cookies.
They have allowed sugar alcohols to be included as ingredients in 'sugar-free' foods, even though they not only cause gastric distress in many people but can spike the serum cholesterol in diabetics.
This is not a matter of saying, "Well parents should exercise responsibility and read food labels." You can read the label of a product that says it's natural, fat-free and sugar-free, and still feed your child something that damages his or her health and leads to obesity. And now that these agencies have failed to protect ordinary families from the harmful products they were directed to regulate, we arrive at the suggestion that parents who don't somehow figure this all out should have their kids taken away from them.
What, I'm left wondering, would the qualification requirements be for foster families for such children? Would foster parent volunteers be screened for BMI? What about households that follow vegetarian, or various religious or ethnic food practices?
And what would the social service agency plans for family reintegration look like? Would the parents have to lose X amount of pounds and attend cooking classes before the child could be returned to the household? Would Child Protective Services now hire a team of nutritionists to evaluate the shopping list of parents before parental visitations could be initiated?
Instead of pointing fingers--fingers that will inevitably get pointed along socio-economic lines--we need to all insist that the federal and state agencies that we send our tax dollars to actually look out for our health and welfare, since that is what we've hired them to do. Then we need to help one another -- all of us, young and old, employed and unemployed, urban and rural -- to establish healthy food traditions that include links of family and community, like holding pot-luck suppers in your neighborhood or town-wide, and volunteering to give cooking and canning classes at the local food shelf.
And mainly, we--ALL of us--need to just say "no" to buying this processed crap at the supermarket. In my public speaking classes at the Community College of Vermont I always have students do an impromptu persuasive presentation trying to convince the other students to try their favorite cookie. Of the hundreds and hundreds of students I've had do this over the years, about 85% state their favorite cookie as a homemade chocolate chip--often made by someone in particular like their mom or grandmother. Kids are not going to become obese on homemade chocolate chip cookies despite the sugar, butter and real chocolate in them--but they probably WILL on the fat-free, sugar-free packaged varieties that they didn't really want in the first place.
So fight childhood obesity by baking some chocolate chip cookies with your kid -- and let's bury the talk of taking obese children away from their parents.
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