New York, Arkansas, and a host of other states are considering ridiculously invasive measures like weighing kids every day, and sending home “fitness” report cards that grade a kid’s weight, body fat, diet, and/or activity levels. They’re getting heaps of praise from the fat nannies for their “proactivity.”

They might want to keep this in mind:

Girls as young as five are unhappy with their bodies and want to be thinner, according to a study which blames peer pressure in a child’s early years at school.

Most girls thought that being slim would make them more popular, claimed the research in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology. They would also have no hesitation in dieting if they gained weight. The study was conducted among five- to eight-year-olds in South Australia, but experts said last night that British children felt “paranoid” about their weight – partly because of the Government’s anti-obesity message.

Dr Andrew Hill, of Leeds University Medical School, said research among more than 200 eight-year-olds showed a high awareness of the campaign against obesity. “Children have absorbed anti-fat messages loud and clear”, he said. “To get people to listen about a condition, you talk it up, and we have got obesity on the health agenda.

“We have upped the ante, adding to negativity about being fat, but we need to be careful now so people are not paranoid about being fat.

“We want people who are overweight to do something about it. We don’t want to terrorise youngsters.”

The UK Eating Disorders Association said it was known that children as young as eight had been diagnosed with eating disorders and there may have been instances in younger children.

This is why fitness, diet, and body fat aren’t any business of the government’s. Kids under 18 are more than 700 times more likely to have an eating disorder than Type II Diabetes. And the food scold want to ask them to step on a scale every day.

At the obesity summit last June, I asked the Arkansas secretary of state — who was beaing beattified by the press for the state’s weighing of its public school kids — about the eating disorder problem.

His solution? They’d have the kids “turn around” before stepping on the scale so they couldn’t see how much they weighed.

UPDATE: I should explain my numbers, here. The anorexia-bulimia figures come from the National Institute of Mental Health, which estimates between 1,600 and 7,900 eating disorders per 100,000 kids, though those ranges — 0.5 to 3.7 for anorexia and 1.1 to 4.4 percent for bulimia — sound conservative to me. The Type II numbers comes from the CDC, which estimates 7.2 cases per 100,000 kids.

Using NIMH’s range, we can then say that the average is kid is somewhere between 222 and 1,097 times more likely to have an eating disorder than Type II diabetes. So if we were to take an average, my 700 was probably a bit on the high side.

The point still stands. Just a hair less emphatically.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 8th, 2005 at 8:15 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.