But obesity appears to be the primary reason South Carolina mom Jerri Gray lost custody of her 14-year-old, 555-lb. son in May. She was arrested after missing a court date to examine whether she should retain custody after doctors had expressed concern about her son’s weight to social services. The boy is currently living with his aunt, and his mother is facing criminal child-neglect charges. [...]“It’s happening more than the public is aware of, but because these cases are usually kept quiet [as a result of child-privacy laws], we have no record,” says Dr. Matt Capehorn, who sits on the board of the U.K.’s National Obesity Forum.

Source: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1930772,00.html

Parents have an obligation to care for their little children. Parents face legal sanctions or loss of paternal rights if they do not provide basic care for their children, for example if children are

• undernourished
• unkept and dirty
• truant missing school education.

It actually makes a lot of sense, to add this list

• morbid obesity, obviously.
  • Unless if  proven it is not the parent’s fault andit persists after
    • medical
    • nutritional
    • and physical education interventions.

The epidemic of obesity that kills more people then all wars together, needs more serious attention. Actually, any lack of movement, any overweight should be considered abuse. The child has no recourse against it, and when it is a fat overweight diabetic adult it is too late.
Of course, this suggestion to require responsible parenting contradicts all  the

Faulty government policy regarding obesity & other health hazards (alcohol, …)

• Promote interest of big beef farmers.
• Let Coca Cola and McDonalds reign and advertise to children without health warnings.
• it is totally insane that the government does not have EMERGENCY plans against all these health epidemics.`Rather, government should be engaged in
  • promotion of healthy nutrition
    • natural,
    • low salt,
    • high in vitamins, l
    • low in sugar,
    • little additives
    • people should NEVER imbibe enough alcohol to get drunk or even tipsy. Alcohol should be taken like in mediterranean countries (Italy, France) who have a tradition of taking one glass of wine with meals.  Society should shun people who drink excessively and get drunk.
  • promotion of healthy exercise

  there should be government emergency programs to promote exercise for children and adults.

While the article does not give clear good answers, nevertheless it gives some funny and interesting suggestions.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8019357.stm

By David Spiegelhalter
Professor of risk understanding, University of Cambridge

[...]

The threat from bacon sandwiches gave the opportunity for The Sun to produce the classic headline “Careless pork costs lives”, while the Daily Telegraph was true to form and frothed on about the nanny-state denying us our bacon birthright.

But all these health warnings tend to have little influence on behaviour, just as scientific derision for homeopathy appears to have no effect on many people’s enthusiasm.

So who is being unreasonable – the epidemiologists who give us health advice, or the public that duly ignores it?

Bacon sarnies

The curious fact is that both might be right.

[...]

‘Nudging’

These issues are tricky, and reflect a basic tension between individuals and society’s points of view.

If everyone improved their lifestyle just a bit, then the benefits to the overall health of the nation would be large but each individual would not notice the difference.

An inspired epidemiologist, Geoffrey Rose, called this the Prevention Paradox and we see it being played out again and again.

That is why it is understandable that attempts to create these shifts in behaviour by exhorting people to change tend to fail – and make them anxious and guilty.

There is a lot more to say:

• evolutionary explanations why we love sugar and fat (when our mind was formed, sugar and fat were scarce and hard to find,not available in a supermarket without limits. One had to hunt lean wild animals and collect fruits or risk one’s life to get honey away from the bees)

and psychological issues like:

• why should we believe in cold impersonal statistics? how do we know they are true? Did evolution prepare us to respect scientific research we cannot personally verify?
• do we really care about getting cancer in 35 years? We follow our instincts now and eat plenty to prepare for the day we don’t succeed to hunt down and eat another pig.
• now if we had a religion that tells us not to eat pork, that would be a different issue.  Then we would respect, and no science is needed for that. Just faith!
• of course, in evolutionary time, 100 000 years ago we probably would not live enough to get bowel cancer
• and if we did get bowel cancer, we would not slowly die in a hospital with all kind of artificial life support.  There would be no problem about “right to die” issues. Starvation, infection, or wild animals would help us to end our suffering quickly.