Dr. Matthew Capehorn: Fat Kids are Abused, Should Be Taken from Parents

I'm guessing he hasn't looked at the studies of adopted people whose weight is more likely to resemble that of their biological parents than their adoptive parents. Anyway you look at it, that is an irresponsible comment.

I find it fascinating that the last article you linked mentioned "Dr Capehorn, a Rotherham GP with a special interest in obesity"

... when another article mentioned "Dr Capehorn, a GP, runs an obesity clinic in Rotherham, South Yorkshire" (emphasis mine).

Well, naturally, he has a vested interest in obesity: it's what makes him oodles of cash.

I do really hate it when I see TV shows about people giving their kids whatever they want to eat...and they're like 200 pounds at age 4 or something, and the kid eats nothing but (huge amounts of) junk food. They're in for a world of medical problems later, and they're only 3, so you know it's the parents' fault.

How dare this doctor equate fat with child abuse! Please...he needs to go on a "shadowing tour" with a a children's protective service agency anywhere in the world where he can see what TRUE child abuse is. He needs to see the homes where kids are hit first, then asked questions later and then hit again! The homes where a child is afraid to speak up, run and play because the roof will cave in, or the kid has to do the grocery shopping, cleaning the house and answering phones and talking with screaming creditors because mom or dad are too stoned, too drunk or too self-absorbed to deal with it.

He should talk to children who have had their childhood stolen from them because of adults who don't respect sexual boundaries. Thing is: sometimes the child isn't removed from those violent or neglectful homes, or if they are, they're returned because the CPS rep says it's best to keep the family together and then you read of tragedies where children die shortly thereafter. People like Dr. Capehorn make me wonder if some doctors get their medical licenses by sending in cereal boxtops!

Yes...I'm sure that these cases are sensationalized, but I would seriously doubt they are due to medical issues, as the parents admitted to feeding the children junk food nonstop. I understand that a lot of people have to work too many hours to cook healthy food, but in the end regardless of the reasons, their kids will pay.

And I also know that there are lots of thin kids getting poor nutrition. I've seen firsthand what they are served in the cafeterias and hardly any of it in underfunded schools have any nutritional value. But at the very least, the thin kids are at least able to process the food fast enough...Their problems are nutritional only, while if you have a very, very fat child, they might also have joint problems in addition to that, not to mention heart problems stemming from them not being physically capable of getting much exercise.

I don't think just having a fat kid is child abuse...after all, there are lots of kids who are naturally chubby/fat. But overfeeding your kids bad foods (whether they end up fat or not) to the point they aren't getting proper nutrition...in that case why do people bother having kids at all if they aren't going to take good enough care of them? And if the kid is too young to be able to make their own choices, and the parents' actions lead to health problems later, then I might consider that abuse. But for me, it's more about the parental behavior than the weight of the child...Although as I said earlier, a 200lb 8 year old might have many more problems than a 80lb 8 year old who eats the same things, just because of the physics of the weight on their developing bodies. (And I think I read somewhere, though I might be wrong, that fat girls tend to start menstruation earlier, which is problematic for all kinds of reasons.)

(I know that people in this community are generally against labeling foods "good" or "bad," but I've been a foodie almost all my life, and have to strongly disagree with this. It is just a fact that there are foods that are good for you, bad for you, and neutral, and it has nothing to do with weight loss or fat content.

And just FYI, I've personally seen lots more news pieces about the poor nutrition in schools that don't mention childhood obesity (mostly criticizing the hand soda manufacturers have in public school funding) than I have sensationalist pieces about extremely fat kids.

So Bayareagal, you agree with having fat kids who eat what you think is an insufficiently "healthy" diet removed from their parents' homes? You agree with the "child abuse" charge? Just how many 200-pound 8-year-olds do you know personally, anyway? I would think it is exceedingly rare for a child this age to be this heavy, and rarer still for them to have such "monster" appetites that such weight would be caused solely by eating.

So if a kid is fat, then, how much "junk" is "too much"? What have you seen these kids eat (firsthand) on a daily basis that has convinced you they are being fattened up like geese before a foie gras harvest? Should they never be allowed soda, or pizza, or french fries if they are fat? Or would you cut them off after a tiny serving while their thin friends and siblings got to eat their fill? (And don't you think doing so would just make them fetishize such foods even more?)

And how can you be so sure they'd be thin and healthy if they ate exactly the way you think they should? Did you not follow the Anamarie Regino case at all? Those parents were basically told to starve their child on two Kindercal drinks a day, and they did so, and it didn't make her thin. They were then cross-examined by authorities like they'd committed a murder, over and over and over again, simply not believed when they insisted they were exhausting themselves trying to get her to be "normal" size. This is the kind of garbage, to one degree of another, that every parent of a fat kid has to deal with, the idea that if your kid is fat, you have to jump through flaming hoops to prove that you don't have them (in Buffpuff's deathless phrase) "hooked up to a Pepsi IV" 24/7.

Some parents actually do feed their children loads of junk food at the drop of a dime. Whether they are thin or fat: I don't think that's the best idea.
As for the kids that are predisposed to the build that don't eat oddles of junk food: Maybe they should analyze before they generalize all fat kids as being the same?
12.5 million children in America are overweight. As for the rest: They're all thin, and thusly they are all more fit, and better. Keep eating those subs Jared. I don't want to hear that stigmatization..
Parents should teach their kids about a healthy lifestyle including at least somewhat healthy eating and exercise. I think the common balance of a somewhat healthy dinner with vegetables and/or fruit included, which when eaten allows for a treat is one good way of doing things.
I agree with many points that have been brought up. One of the reasons i'm in the movement is assumptions like these:
Fat=Unhealthy
Thin=Healthy
Science knows better, but they don't want to even try. It's sad when doctors can't be caring to everyone: Including children.

I would seriously doubt they are due to medical issues

In at least a couple cases in the spotlight where the children were very heavy (AnaMarie and the boy in England recently in the news), there is *definitely* something medical going on, because the children aren't just fat, they're extremely tall for their ages as well. I can imagine that whatever in their bodies is forcing them to grow that fast could also leave them extremely hungry.

There are some stupid parents out there - parents who think it's perfectly all right to put Pepsi in their baby's bottle or send their kids to school with a bag of chips and a chocolate bare for lunch. This is a parenting issue, often born of ignorance, and it is a very real concern.

There are also negligent parents out there - they don't feed their kids, or if they do, don't care what they eat. They don't care about keeping them clothed, clean or safe, either. This is an abuse issue, and a very real concern.

I don't even get into the instances of physical and emotional abuse, drug addiction, etc.

Some of the kids who are living under these circumstances are large, some aren't. Some are well fed, but nutritionally deprived. Others are starving. These kids need help, and it's up the the adults around them to notice that there's a problem and step in where their parents can't, or won't, help.

While I suppose it's possible that unusually fat kids might be a sign of some sort of abuse in the home, it seems to me, based on knowing far more about such situations than I would like, highly unlikely. If anything, I'd be concerned about unusually thin kids, since starvation is more frequently an issue.

With so many very real problems of abuse and neglect, the idea of judging parents as abusive because their kids are fat (especially if judged by the dubious BMI) is ludicrous. The social service systems are already struggling to deal with real abuse. The system also has no shortage of abuse of power and inappropriate... incidents, shall we say. Children who are being truly abused and neglected end up going back to these dangerous households, while children from safe and loving families are being removed because Grandma didn't like how her son's wife is raising her grandkids and called in with false allegations. The last thing they (social services) need is to have this extra load thrown onto their case files. They can barely handle the burden they already have.

To respond to Meowzer's post--no, I don't think they should be taken away, if only because the foster care system is pretty horrible, but if someone can't take care of their children by providing the very basic and fundamental nutrition they need, I would consider that abuse. YES it is abuse if you are putting things into your child's body that will cause them health problems later on--are you kidding me? Whether or not they ultimately become fat is irrelevant, so as I said, I'm not only targeting the parents of fat children but the parents of all children who don't care enough to provide proper nutrition for their children. As I also said, it happens to thin kids and fat kids, but I do think the fat kids will end up suffering more b/c they have to deal with not only the nutritional deficiencies, but the fact that their little developing bodies can't handle all the extra weight. Some of the kids I saw even had *bowed legs* because the pressure was so great.

And, no, I can't prove all the things you demanded, and to me that is a non sequitor, because this site involves a lot of hypothetical discussion, and since I don't know these children and am not going to go barging into their homes, all I have to go on is by what I see on TV--which is that they are eating massive amounts of junk food a day and not much else.

You can't always go by what you see on TV. TV usually gives the most sensationalistic coverage, and it doesn't matter if what they show is true all of the time, part of the time, or is a one-time happening as far as what these kids are supposedly eating. When my son was in grade school, if we use your criteria, Bayareagal, they would have taken him away from me because he was very thin (at 6 years old he wore a 10 slim in jeans and I had to put darts in the waist to keep them from falling off him). Was that because I wasn't feeding him, or wasn't feeding him nutritious food? No. It was because he had been diagnosed as hyperactive and had been put on Ritalin. Two of the side-affects of Ritalin are a failure to gain weight and a failure to get taller. When he was 8, I finally decided that he was not hyperactive, he was bored in school (this was a kid who could sit for hours and read books, usually my science fiction/fantasy books). When he stopped taking the Ritalin, he got taller, and he gained weight so that he was finally in regular clothes, not slims that had to be altered to be smaller.
My point is that if they had looked just at his size, they would have sworn I was starving him, when that was far from the truth. He ate meat and veggies and fruits and crackers and cookies, and some junk food, but you sure couldn't tell it by looking at him.
The same can be said of fat kids. Just because they are fat does not mean they are sitting on their butts watching tv and stuffing their faces with nothing but junk food all the time. Even if they do get junk food, you don't know from a TV news spot if that is what they eat all the time. I don't think kids need to be taken from parents in situations like this, and I'm not sure what the solution should be, or if there even should be a solution. Maybe nutrition education, and making fresh fruits and vegetables more affordable is a good start, but adding more cases to already overworked and understaffed social service agencies isn't going to help anyone.

it's all right to be crazy, just don't let it drive ya nuts!

YES it is abuse if you are putting things into your child's body that will cause them health problems later on--are you kidding me?

Bayareagal, I don't think anybody is arguing that it is a good thing to feed your kids fast food and nothing (or little) else, but child abuse? For me, abuse has something intentional, you do something to somebody because you a) want to hurt them, b) don't care if they are hurt, possibly because it makes life easier for you. Otherwise I wonder where you would draw the line... For example, my parents probably played a part in me and my sisters developing eating disorders (and we had cases of both, anorexia, as well as binge-eating, and my formerly anorectic sister was actually the one who was urged to eat more as a kid because she was thin while my other sister and me where told to watch every bite because we were fat). My parents were and are good parents by all standards - they did what doctors told them and they tried very hard to act responsibly. To my mind they are the opposite of child abusers. I believe that people that raise their kids on junk food probably are not well educated, but they are not necessarily child abusers.

Also, if you say that "putting things into your child's body that will cause them health problems later on" is child abuse than a lot of other behaviors could be considered child abuse. Vesta 44 mentioned Ritalin - I am not arguing that Ritalin is never the right thing to give to a child but it is prescribed to far too many children – and those children experience all kinds of undesirable side effects. So are all the doctors involved in this child abusers? What about putting kids on antidepressants? Or weight-loss drugs for that matter?

And as for giving kids everything to eat that they want... I admit that I don't have children. I do have a god daughter though whom I watched growing up and I do remember what I myself liked as a child. And I believe that particularly very young kids know for the most part what is good for them – at least if they are offered a variety of foods. My dietician told me about the case of little boy who ate salt wherever he found it. His parents locked away salt and all salty foods; he still managed to get salt somehow. So he was put under supervision in a hospital where he could not possibly get any salt. He died after five days. His body did not process salt correctly - therefore he needed to take in large amounts. Also, all kids that I have ever seen and that have not yet been "conditioned" love fruits and many like vegetables. I certainly did - nobody had to make me eat them, they were tasty, so I ate them. I acknowledge that this might be different in older kids who have been exposed to lots of fake flavors/ oversweet foods/ etc. But kids’ bodies usually know what is good for them (there are of course a few kids with certain disorders where this is not the case).

I'll give the reporter credit for not only trying to get some balance in, but actually succeeding in getting three other sources to counter Capehorn's lunacy.

And Capehorn is completely wrong that a fat kid automatically equates to too much of the wrong kinds of food in the home. I read recently about a study of adoptees, that compared their weight to that of their biological parents and assessed their home life in the adopted parents' homes. Guess what? It didn't matter what they ate, how much they ate, or what kind of diet/exercise example was set by their adoptive parents. It. Did. Not. Matter. The subjects' weights were more in line with tht of their biological parents. I don't know how broad this study was, but I wish there were more awareness of it. Alas, it's referenced only in GIna Kolata's new book (I don't mean to keep harping on that, but the book has some very good info in it, despite a few shortcomings). It's ninnies like Capehorn who grab the headlines.

Capehorn's also wrong to suggest that a child who is overweight endangers his health more than an underweight child. That flies in the face of everything every dietitian and nutritionist I've ever spoken to has said.

Hey, sorry folks--I don't see the edit option available. I need to clarify that I almost always post a comment about the article or topic itself without reading anyone else's comments first. So, that is what my post is in response to--the article--and not anything that was written about it. I apologize to Viola, because now I see that her comment (the very first one!) referenced the same study. Oops.

..."if we use your criteria, Bayareagal, they would have taken him away from me because he was very thin"

Why are you intentionally twisting my words? I don't appreciate this. We both know this is not what I said AT ALL, so if you're not going to respond to what I actually said, but instead lie and pretend I said something else, don't bother responding to me.

How infuriating!

Sannanina--
Yes, we've all heard about the story of the child who constantly craved salt, but that is not relevant to what I am talking about, because I am talking about the specific cases I mentioned--and IMO negligence/neglect can be just as bad as abuse.

In my original post, you can see that I expressed exasperation with the parents of children I see on TV who have extremely fat children and feed them fast food in large amounts all the time. I *realize* these cases are sensationalized. How many times do I have to say that? I wasn't generalizing and saying this is what happens in all cases. I don't need lectures about whether or not what is seen on TV is real or not--the fact exists that a lot of children aren't getting proper nutrition, and probably a lot of them are becoming fat because of this and if they aren't becoming fat, they are still suffering, and it's not always because of medical issues.

Granting everything you've said, Bayareagal, I have to wonder how kids who are abused by being fed the wrong foods and don't happen to get fat aren't going to fall through the cracks if fat kids are the only ones targeted as having been abused in this fashion.

To me, the point here is that it's ridiculous to use size as a criterion for abuse since, as has been mentioned before, fat kids aren't necessarily being fed the wrong things and thin kids aren't necessarily being fed the right things.

Since I am not a regular TV viewer I haven't been privy to these stories about fat kids who eat fast food "all the time" (i.e. exclusively), but I'm curious: Exactly how is this depicted? Do they show the kids eating fries and then leave it to the viewer to assume that the kids eat nothing but fried food? Do the parents state that they have fast food for every single meal? Are the parents in question affluent enough to afford better-quality food and have the time and skill to prepare it (i.e. they aren't working three retail jobs just to stay off the streets), and is it readily available where they live? (Remember that healthism is often a pretty fair proxy for classism.)

Nowadays parents who have fat kids, thanks to media depictions like this, are in the midst of a witch hunt. They are assumed to be misfeeding their kids until they jump through flaming hoops to prove that they are innocent and even then, oftentimes they are not believed (e.g. the Regino case). What are we to do, follow every fat kid home to see if they eat anything that isn't lean 'n' healthy, and if they do, snatch them away and put them in foster care? Like others have said, the social service system in the U.S. is barely able to deal with emergent cases of child abuse, like kids getting molested or beaten to a pulp, as it is. How realistic is it to expect them to be the nutrition police also?

"To me, the point here is that it's ridiculous to use size as a criterion for abuse since, as has been mentioned before, fat kids aren't necessarily being fed the wrong things and thin kids aren't necessarily being fed the right things."

And I don't disagree with this!!! In fact, you're only restating exactly what I said...I'm not advocating the government taking fat children away. I said that it is my personal opinion that if parents are either feeding their kids horrible foods (or not feeding them good foods) to the point that they develop health problems, I would consider that abuse/neglect (I mean some of these kids already have high blood pressure--and *yes* I get that it's rare).

To answer your question, Meowzer, in the ones I've seen, they ask the parents what they are feeding the kids and they respond with a litany of pretty much the worst foods you can think off and in very large quantities. And with the sheer amount the kids are eating, I don't think the question of money is relevant, because they could easily buy smaller quantities of the most expensive health foods for the amount they're spending on the fast food.

Well, to play Devil's Advocate, if parents are guilty of neglect because they do not provide a decent nutritious diet to their kids, because they're plying their kids with edible toxins and the like, do we also label parents abusive who live in environments with poor air quality, or parents who live in old pooly maintained buildings full of lead or asbestos? I mean really, the whole industrialized world is one big cesspool of toxins, whether you live at the core of an aging, city metropolis or out in the country, whether you're poor or rich, and thus how can we hold food up as the paragon of keeping kids 'healthy' and 'toxin' free?

Whenever people get into the merits of processed foods, HFCS, and the like, I wonder if, over the lifetime of an individual in the industrialized world, is the consumption of a less-than perfect diet less harmful to one's body compared to the chemicals we breathe in every day, as well as the exposure to microwaves, radiation, and so on? I guess I wonder at what point do we concede that health is never as controlable as we think it is, since there are so many things in our environment we can't as effectively regulate like food. And if I'm more likely to be adversely affected by the chemicals in car exhaust, for example, than the contents of a Big Mac, I'll continue to eat the occasional Big Mac if I want, since in the end none of us are exempt from death.

Not being a parent myself I wouldn't know, but if any of you here are, how much success have you had with getting your children to eat things they don't like? Some children simply don't like vegetables and fruit, and many dislike the taste of whole grains, and I know the "old school" method is to force them to sit at the table until they finish whatever is served and/or blackmail them into doing it by whatever means is necessary. But it's my impression that the buildup of eat-your-vegetables-or-else horror stories over the years has finished that method off for good. (I once read about a woman who as a child was forced to eat broccoli, which she loathed to the point where it made her throw up, and then forced to eat the broccoli vomit. Yum, so healthy.) Nobody likes the idea of kids eating only mac 'n' cheese and Oreos for the first 18 years of their lives, but just how far is the battle of the wills supposed to go if you have a super-picky eater on your hands?

Since "vegetables and fruits" are an extremely HUGE category, if a child couldn't find anything in those categories that he/she liked, that would be extremely odd, don't you think? I know that broccoli has a lot of vitamin C and fiber, but it isn't the only vegetable out there. That's like being worried that a kid doesn't like protein...I think children will eat anything if they are truly hungry. If they don't eat the healthy meal a parent provides for them, I feel that it would be better to make them wait until they are hungry instead of stuffing them with junk food.

I can't vouch for other kids, but when I was a kid, my mother made things I didn't like, and I had to sit at the table til I ate it. If I didn't eat it for whatever meal, it was put in the fridge and I had it for the next meal. I refused to eat it, no matter how hungry I was, and I hoarded food, that I liked, to eat when my mother wasn't around.
To this day, there are foods that I absolutely refuse to touch because of being forced to eat them or go hungry. I'm stubborn, always have been, and telling me I had to eat something I didn't like just made me dig in my heels and determine that no way in hell was I going to eat it, ever.
Food, for me, has always been something to battle over. My mother fixed my plate, she determined what portions I got, and I had to clean my plate, whether I was hungry for it all or not. Add to that being forced to eat things I didn't like just because she fixed them for my dad and he liked them, and being told I would eat them or else, is it any wonder I have problems with food?
I also battled with my mother about what my son ate and the fact that he was so thin for a couple of years, so it's really a major trigger for me when people, in general, think they know what is right and proper for all kids to be fed (my mother thought I wasn't feeding him enough when he was skinny, and then when he got to a normal weight, she said I was feeding him too much, and most of it had to be junk. I just couldn't win, no matter what I did).
When my son was young, there were things he wouldn't eat, so I kept a variety of foods in the house, and tried different things until I figured out what he would eat that was fairly healthy (and for most of his years from birth until about 12, we were on welfare and food stamps, but I still managed to keep decent food in the house). I think parents need to have the time to figure these things out, but if they are working more than one job just to make ends meet and put a roof over their kids' heads, clothes on their backs, and food on the table, then they are going to be short on time to figure out what is healthy and have the time to fix it.
I do know that there are no easy answers, but penalizing all fat kids (or extremely thin ones) because a few are fed a nutritionally poor diet is not something I want to see happening.

it's all right to be crazy, just don't let it drive ya nuts!

You know every person who feeds their kids a good amount of junk doesn't mean they are uneducated about "healthy food". I'm kind of tired of that point. I know a lot of poor people who don't have a bunch of degrees but know that a apple is better than a bag of chips, however one apple can cost a dollar and a $1 bag of chips on sale can serve three kids with a cheap store brand hot dog and $1 pack of store brand buns. You can feed the three kids a full meal than it would have cost for 3 apples.

We have to be careful to think just because someone didn't go to college that they are "uneducted" about everything. They watch the news and hear the same things about fruits, vegetables, blah, blah as the rest of us and wish they could shop at Whole Foods and fill their carts with all the wonder organic, and healthy foods for their families, but they have to feed their families and most times it's cheap, processed foods they can afford.

I don't believe people should have their kid taken away and I don't believe feeding your kid what you can afford to buy is child abuse. Who sits around stuffing their kid? I've only seen this nonsense on Maury and shows like that and those kids all look like they have a medical problem (imho) and that's what I think the doctors should be focusing on. It's funny because when they took that girl from her parents and was in the custody of the state she still didn't lose any weight.

Think about it, it is not easy for a child to gain that much weight (200 pound 8 year old). I believe kids who are constantly put of a diet and told that they are worthless because they are fat are being abused.

Since "vegetables and fruits" are an extremely HUGE category, if a child couldn't find anything in those categories that he/she liked, that would be extremely odd, don't you think?

My mom was/is a bit of a health nut and always fed us lot of fruits and veggies, or tried to. I loved them (but didn't like meat), but when my brother was a kid, the only vegetables he'd eat were carrot sticks and V-8 juice. Many times, mom and I would eat a normal meal and she'd have to fix rice and ground beef with ginger and garlic for my brother. He was always thin (like Mom), and I was always fat (like Dad). Go figure.

When we were kids, trying to get me to eat meat or my brother to eat veggies was close to impossible. Now that we're adults, we both enjoy a variety of foods, but I still tend to go semi-vegetarian when left to my own devices. I've always liked the foods that most people consider healthy, and they've always been the foundation of my diet. I was raised by a thin, health conscious mom. It hasn't changed the fact that I look like my dad's side of the family, and have their body type.

Assuming that fat kids are not being fed properly is absurd. Dr Capehorn seems to think that parents should have their children taken away for having the poor judgement to pass on their genes and produce children who look like them. Oh yeah. That's logical.

"I've only seen this nonsense on Maury and shows like that and those kids all look like they have a medical problem (imho)"

What medical problem would that be (in your opinion) when a kid gets fed a ton of junk food and then gains weight? I think anyone would experience serious weight gain if they ate what those kids did.

I think anyone would experience serious weight gain if they ate what those kids did.

That's the thing. There are kids (and, for that matter, adults) who eat just as badly who are as thin as rails. My friend Angela never met a vegetable or fruit that she liked or a meat or cheese that she didn't. She can (and frequently does) eat three to four times what I do in a sitting. She also eats four or five times a day. She's 5'6" and a size 00.

The medical problem could be "Prader-Willi Syndrome" - it involves a malfunction in the "stop eating" part of the brain, so a person has a voracious appetite. Or the medical problem could be "Cushings disease", a tumor on the pituitary.

Dr. Ancel Keys work with soldier-volunteers after WWII shows very clearly that different people gain only a little weight and some gain a lot on a high-calorie regimen. So some people would indeed experience serious weight gain eating lots of high-calorie-foods, but NOT everyone. NOT EVERYONE.

I am a parent and I remember very clearly - I could not get my kids to eat, if they were not hungry. Of course, I learned to stop trying to encourage them to eat when I thought they "should" be hungry. I tried very hard to give them nutritious, healthy meals. Sometimes they would only eat the meat, sometimes only the vegetable or the fruit, sometimes only pasta. It drove me wild. But they are both healthy adults now, but not because I was a super parent or anything.

Bayareagal, I don't understand at all - you seem intent on defending this show. Why?

Yes, there probably are some parents who feed their children too much fast food. But surely most fat kids have parents who are just trying their best to take care of them. And we can't tell much from one show. And people DO lie on these shows about what they are doing, just to make a bigger splash.

And by the way, the research with adoptees was by Dr. Albert Stunkard, in the 1980s. He did research with adoptees (weight most resembles birth mother; no resemblance to adopted parents) and he did research with identical twins raised apart (weights were within an average of 3 pounds of each other). This is powerful evidence for the genetic component of weight control, regardless of whether a person eats junk or the "healthiest" diet around.

I'm rambling and I'm sorry for that. But central to size acceptance is the idea that we do not have as much control over our size as society thinks. Junk food or not, the amount of food a person eats does not determine their size. I think we have to come back to that fact when discussing this show and the idea that a fat child is abused by a parent who "let" them eat too much.

bayareagul are you really on the right board/blog? I mean no disrespect but as I read your post you seem very much in favor of a lot of stuff that seems to punish fat people and their families. How do you think a child would feel to be removed from his or her home because the government feels she is being overfed? Ok, l read that's not really what you want. But is it cool with you if the parents the government says are abusing their kids start forcing the kids on diets and telling them what a blob they are while they shove vegetables down their throat?

That is punishment for being fat and it wouldn't happen to the thin children because the look "about right". Do they just punish one child (the fat one) or all the children in the family? Are the parents labeled child abusers and can never adobt or be mentors? Child abuse is a serious charge and a label for life.

It took me years and years to get to 200 pounds. I am not saying every one is like me. However do really believe it's easy for a 8 year child to get that big (200 pounds) that fast without maybe it being something medical? I mean the parents must sit with the children and feed them constantly. BTW I don't have to name medical conditions to have a humble opinion. I never said I knew for a fact or that I was a doctor. However, I do have common sense and if I was a doctor I would look for something medical.

There is serious child abuse in this world and I just don't believe going on how fat a kid is a viable gauge of abuse. I feel sorry for parents of really fat kids for this way of thinking must make their every day lives a living hell.

Carolyn,
I'm not sure what you mean that I'm defending the show. I mean, I do think it's sensationalized, but I don't think the parents are blatantly lying about what they're feeding the kids. I think they really do feed the kids huge amounts of junk food and this is why the kids are fat. I don't think the kids have Prader-Willi (I know what that is and they don't have it). But, on the flip side, why are you adamant in insisting that there must be a medical problem? You and I don't know for sure, but if a small child is eating such large amounts of junk food and gets fat, it makes a lot more sense to assume that he/she is fat because of their diet than to assume they have Prader-Willi, which is rare. In fact, I *know* those kids didn't have Prader-Willi because they had been going to doctors.

I'm not a radical. I believe that if someone eats an incredibly high fat/high calorie diet and gets fat, that's most likely why they're fat. That's not to say that thin people can't eat such a diet, or that there is never any other explanation or that simply cutting calories always leads to weight loss, or that the human body is very simple, or anything else like that, but just that I do believe those kids are being fed horrible diets by their parents, and I would consider that abuse. And I *Never* said they should be taken away!

You have to understand, Carolyn, that I was not trying to imply (nor did I ever state) that ALL fat kids are like the kids you see on those types of TV shows. I was expressing my disgust at situations where that *does* happen-which for all I know, could be quite rare (though I doubt it--I think millions of kids probably aren't eating a good diet) although very few are as extreme as the Maury cases.

PCKim, I'm not even going to respond to you, because I don't believe you're really read or tried to understand anything I've said. You're putting words into my mouth and I'm not going to dignify that kind of deception.

"I mean no disrespect but as I read your post you seem very much in favor of a lot of stuff that seems to punish fat people and their families."
What a crock of s***!!! You clearly didn't read ANYTHING I said. Maybe this blog isn't for you if you choose to make such unfounded accusations?

Meowzer, I have two young sons and I know how futile it is to try to force either of them to eat anything they don't want. My younger son will refuse things he usually likes if he's "not in the mood" even when he says he's hungry. If he doesn't want what I have given him, it's usually because he has something else in mind. Since I don't keep anything on hand that I don't want them to eat regularly, I pretty much give him whatever he asks for. It's usually something like strawberries instead of a banana, or a different type of cereal. We actually took him to a pediatric endocrinologist when he was a toddler because he wasn't growing and he refused to eat so often. We were advised to find something he did like, then serve it on a regular schedule and not try to force him to eat anything. The only thing we were told not to give him was fruit juice or any beverages other than whole milk and water. I for one don't believe anything I see on the tabloid TV shows. All that crap is staged and faked - it's no more real than professional wrestling is real.

Comment removed. Stop it. Be nice. - Paul

Ok, after calming down a bit, and having a fascinating conversation with my husband about all the theoretical things that children should be labeled abused for, I'm ready to post.

First of all, I don't think that Paul's post about chilling with the personal attacks was directed at any individual person, although I do understand that when looking at a message board format that it sometimes looks like responses are directed solely at the person directly above. Obviously if I'm wrong I invite Paul to please correct me, but that's JMHO.

Now back to the subject at hand. While I understand the troubles with feeding your child solely "junk" food, I think that there is something that needs to be kept in mind. For instance, there is a strong possibility (although we don't have a formal diagnosis yet) that my son is PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified) which is on the Autism spectrum. One of the things that is a huge problem for him is change, including a change in his diet. He will gladly eat the same thing, 3 meals a day, if I let him. That same thing? Chicken Nuggets. He's comfortable with them, and especially when we are in a new food situation it is the first thing he turns to. If I were to throw a monkey wrench into this and insist that he eat something new, he has a fit and gets very scared. Is this because I give him poor nutrition at home? Nope, not it at all, in fact his favorite "home food" is apples. It is simply because he needs consistency.

The reason I bring this up is because with the odds of 1 in 1,000 children being on the Autism spectrum we need to keep in mind that some of these parents are not feeding their children unhealthy food because they are trying to harm them, they are doing it because they are trying to help that child cope with a very confusing world. Are all these children autistic? Heck no, and I wouldn't presume to say that they are, but it's just one more piece to the "obesity puzzle" that we need to put in place. Comfort foods may in fact be more than just something we eat when we're sad, scared or the like, but may be more strongly linked to our need for "normal" than we realize.

Now, on the other side of the spectrum...Junkfood Science recently had a post about a family whose kids were basically being starved to death on a low-fat, low-calorie vegan diet. Two of them actually died, and all of them had seizures. The kids had never been seen by doctors because the parents didn't believe in "allopathic" medicine. The remaining kids were taken away and put in foster care and fed more conventional diets for kids their age, and all of them grew up and filled out and stopped having seizures.

I'm not going to state, as Sandy did in her post, that all children must be fed animal products, because I don't necessarily agree with that. I do think you need to do a lot more planning and research than you would if you did feed the kids animal products, but human children are not "true carnivores" any more than human adults are. But certainly they were deliberately underfed in terms of calories and fat and woefully undernourished in crucial ways that led to dangerous vitamin and protein deficiencies. (The family had no financial problems that would have prevented the children from getting adequate nutrition otherwise.)

More to the point, though, the parents had given into obesity hysteria. They were so freaked out by the idea of having fat kids and by "bad" food and by Nasty Bad Chemicals that they wouldn't even take their kids' temperatures because thermometers have mercury in them. This is an extreme case, but this is the kind of climate we're creating in Western society -- better dead than fat. Should parents have the "right" to feed kids this way if this is how they see fit? Maybe we wouldn't even have to ask that question if people weren't so hysterical about weight.

Yeah, and I would consider starving kids to death just as abusive as overfeeding them to death and/or health problems...Why can it only go one way?

No, obviously, I'm talking about what I've been talking about--feeding your kids pretty much junk all the time and not much else.

Thank you, Paul.

I simply cannot accept that even in a worse case scenario that feeding your kids a lot of take away(out) or whatever, can be compared to leaving them to forage in the bin for scraps, ignoring their hungry eyes.

I do not understand how people can compare us to child abusers (the real kind that always put their needs before those of children) and expect us to be level headed about it. Of course we are outraged when we are carelessly accused of hurting, indeed killing our own flesh and blood.

This abuse thing is not useful, it is merely self-indulgent on the part of the accusers, who are more interested in establishing pointless social mores, than in the health of our children, they are proving this by being so ready to remove them from people they love and that love them.
Does a routinely underfed child feel the same way when fed, to a fat child put on a semi-starvation diet?

Also, recommending pills, starvation diets and mutilating surgery for children /teens, does not give society or docs any high ground on this. The interest is in accusing rather than understanding,our mistrust is well founded. It would be remiss of us to just allow this to slide, as these people deal too much in hate. Is that who we should trust to improve the health of children, they routinely degrade and describe as monstrous?

If they care so much, let's see them put the feelings and needs of children before their own.