The couple’s lawyer says the kids were taken by UK officials because of her clients’ weight issues.

The authorities deny it, but early in September, when mum was still pregnant, the Times reported two of the kids were removed because they were feared to be leaning towards dangerous. One son, a 12- or 13-year-old boy (his exact age varies by account) who weighs around 102kg, was becoming a concern for the parents, who sought the help of local officials to get his weight under control.

But instead of helping them, the parents said social workers made a surprise visit and took two of the kids. Then they came back, eventually taking all seven, including the boy and a baby born just this week.

Extreme obesity is becoming a recognised form of child abuse, and scientists have found that overweight parents beget overweight kids — not just through genetics but because of the poor eating habits handed down to the next generation. Is it fair, however, to go after parents who were seeking help for their child?

I’m also curious to see how many consider 102kg on a teenage boy child abuse.  It’s overweight, definitely, but we’re not talking about that 252kg child in South Carolina that recently made news.

Image: Sky News

Dr Elsie Tavares of Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and Harvard Medical School found that the faster babies gained weight in the first six months of life, the more likely they are to face weight problems by the time they are three years old.

I know the two kids in my house go against those findings — both gained weight fast, nursed loads and were super pudgy babies, and now one is a skinny stringbean of a four-year-old and the other, who we seriously feared was headed for a sumo career because he was so chunky, is 19 months old and in the 25th percentile for weight. I know tonnes of other kids who followed the same pattern. One theory I have heard about this is that breastfed kids gain weight fast because of the high sugar content of the milk, and as they get older and don’t need to nurse as much and start eating solids, the milk becomes less calorific. Again, just a theory and I’m not remotely claiming it’s science, but it seems to explain the kids I know.

There’s more in the linked article, like a study that followed 96 mothers as they fed their babies formula. It found babies that ate eight times a day versus seven were much more likely to be overweight, and that mothers often missed the cue that the baby had had enough (pulling their head away from the bottle).

Personally, I think too much fear over childhood obesity is causing parents to do things that aren’t in the best interests of their babies, like discouraging a nine-month-old’s love of food, putting young kids on skim milk, or obsessing over every morsel. Po Bronson writes in NurtureShock about a really good study that correlated lack of sleep with obesity, for example. And I think that offering nutritious foods and laying off the sugar and processed crap, modelling good eating habits, not assigning values like “good” and “bad” to foods, and getting everybody outside for a walk or game of hide and seek on a regular basis is going to go a lot further towards making our kids healthy at any size than fixating on obesity as a horrible fate.

Z Recommends – who initially broke the story of how bogus Sigg’s BPA-free claims were – has a new story of water bottles gone bad that makes Sigg’s look like they’re candy coated.

The blog posting this week notes Gaiam – known as the go-to for yoga gear – “quietly added information to its retail website which admits to independent lab test results showing leaching levels at 23.8 parts per billion.”

That’s 20 TIMES the amount of BPA that was found in the Sigg bottles. And, yes, these were bottles being marketed as “BPA-free.”

Among those still being marked as BPA-free, the company has added this disclaimer: “We also took additional steps to help ensure your safety via independent laboratory tests that go well beyond FDA (US regulatory body, the Food and Drug Administration) requirements. An independent lab subjected our aluminium water bottles to continuous extreme heat — nearly 200 degrees Fahrenheit — in an environmental chamber for three days while the bottles were filled with water. Under these extreme conditions, a trace amount of BPA (23.8 parts per billion) was detected in the water inside the bottle.”

Trace amounts, huh? Does that sound like it’s BPA FREE?

Studies have linked BPA to everything from cancer and obesity to problems with brain function and mood disorders. And recently the stories of BPA issues have been mounting. The latest? Kids don’t need to even ingest it themselves – a pregnant woman (maybe one doing prenatal yoga – ahem) who intakes BPA may be creating aggression in her kids.

I gave birth just four years ago, and the amount of information on BPA has seemed to quadruple in that time. So too have the number of companies marketing “BPA-free” products . . . and those whose claims are falling flat.

Do you look for the BPA-free label? Do you trust it?

Image: Amazon

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Her mother, Belly Bibi, tells the UK Telegraph:

“We can not feed ourselves or our other two children, let alone ourselves.  When she is not fed she cries, shouts, screams and has even thrown rocks at us. We give her four square meals a day and two small lunches, but this is never enough. She is our daughter and we have no choice but to feed her.”

Suman’s doctor — who’s seen Suman since she was three months old–  is convinced that the child suffers from a pituitary disorder, but doesn’t have the ability to diagnose the disease himself.  In the meantime, Suman eats up most of the family’s food budget — including two dozen eggs, 22 pounds of rice.  And when she doesn’t get her fill at home, she wanders around the neighbourhood, begging for food.

Here’s Suman in front of what, presumably, is a typical meal (possibly staged for dramatic effect).

Photo: Telegraph.co.uk

Well, if you’re a mum of boys or a dad of girls, you probably don’t have much to worry about, if a new study is an indication. A British study of more than 200 families showed that obese moms are 10 times more likely to have obese daughters and obese dads are six times more likely to have obese sons. The link is behavioural rather than genetic, researchers believe, possibly because kids are mimicking their same-sex parent’s attitudes about food.

I’m calling BS on this for a number of reasons. One, they didn’t do anything like, oh, observe eating behaviours at home, just basically said “You’re fat and your kid’s fat, it’s your eating habits.” Secondly, while big fat parents almost never have skinny kids and thin, active parents almost never have fat ones, those things can be attributed to lifestyle but maybe genes as well. The vast majority of people in the middle seem to have kids who are all over the map too.

Plus, I look at my own family. I am definitely overweight, and one look at my family of origin shows the apple didn’t fall far from the paternal tree. I am cursed with the body of my Polish barmaid ancestors, while my mum is trim as can be in her 60s. My brother, who takes after her side? There’s been some beer-related soft belly years, but his general build is skinny and he drops weight like nothing when he sets his mind to it. As far as my kids, my daughter is super tall and thin and built exactly like her dad’s side of the family, and my son is still full of toddler pudge so it’s hard to tell where he’ll end up.

I guess just get tired of the blame game when it comes to obesity. Yes, people eat way to much crap and don’t exercise and whatever – but I know just as many thin people that applies to as fat ones. As for me? I focus on offering my kids a variety of healthy foods, every meal includes a vegetable or fruit, and I make sure they see me eating and enjoying vegetables and whole grains as much as I do cookies – but we don’t make a big deal out of the occasional pizza or hot dog. I work out four days a week and take my kids to the creche at the gym when I do so, and make sure both my husband and I always frame it as something we do to stay healthy instead of as a way to lose weight. So far, it seems both my kids dodged the genetic bullet – but if they don’t, I’m not taking the blame.

Do you want the good news or the bad news? The good news is that, despite constant hysterical media, the rates of childhood obesity don’t seem to be rising. In fact, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare figures show the prevalence of overweight children attending general practice didn’t change in the decade to 2008.

The bad news? Twenty eight per cent of children presenting to GPs are still overweight or obese.

The AIHW report, General Practice in Australia, states that these figures are far too high.

“It is very important to recognise that based on all recent Australian data, the levels of overweight/obesity in children are unacceptably high, and present a major public health problem that needs to be tackled,” the report says.

The problem worsens the older children get. In research published in yesterday’s Medical Journal of Australia, West Australian researchers including Australian of the Year Fiona Stanley found nearly a third of the children in that study were unhealthy due to their weight, diet and lack of exercise.

They found 29 per cent of 14-year-olds and 25 per cent of eight-year-olds were in a “high-risk cluster” for future health problems such as heart disease, diabetes or stroke.

What all this means is that Healthy Harold and other public health initiatives are only just holding the balance, they’re not actively bringing rates down.

So what else do we need to try? Politicians have suggested bans on junk food advertising or taxing unhealthy food more highly. Other proposals include providing subsidised exercise equipment or gym memberships to families.

What would you do?

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Celebrity Mothers Who Lose Weight Quickly ‘Set Bad Example’
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Parents are as much to blame as teachers for the ‘cotton wool’ culture, says Philip Johnston. Telegraph

“I’m only giving him a taste,” she explained, cheeks flushed. “I almost never give him sugar.”

Across the table, the mother of the birthday boy was feeding him the slimmest sliver of carrot cake.

“It is his birthday,” she apologised. “This is practically his first sugar. We haven’t even given him meat yet.”

Standing in the kitchen doorway where I was letting Leo demolish an entire adult-sized piece of cake, I — as per usual when then conversation turns to baby diets — kept my mouth shut.

Because if I opened it, I’d have to admit that the first food Leo ever tasted was ice cream, straight from the plastic spoon at Molly Moon’s ice cream parlor after a trip to the zoo. Then I’d have to admit that on his first birthday he didn’t get some paper-thin slice but a full-sized piece of banana cake with plenty of frosting, and he downed every last crumb. That not only has he eaten meat of pretty much every persuasion, he’s also delved into pizza, fish sticks, and enough homemade cookies and cake to win me the Martha Stewart award.

As someone who’s tired of getting the evil eye from people who seem to think feeding your child a donut is the equivalent to feeding him crack. I’m just going to come clean and say it.

I wasn’t always the junk food cheerleader. My kid eats junk.

Part of it is practicality — or maybe just laziness. As a working single parent, I learned early on that I can’t keep every last ball in the air, not matter how ostensibly good it is for my child. Already, there have been plenty of nights when the home-cooked well-balanced meal of my intentions morphed into french toast.

But there’s a value system at play here too. I want eating — and life — to be fun for Leo, not something full of rules and shoulds. And let’s face it, junk food is fun. I don’t want to raise a child who’s a Puritan, who can’t kick loose and enjoy life’s pleasures. Maybe I’m waltzing him down the road towards obesity and heavy recreational drug use, but I’m willing to take that chance.

For me, this love affair with junk food is also personal. As a teenager I struggled with food. I had eating disorders and played pretty heavily into the shoulds and won’ts and endless rules. I feel lucky I have a boy, who won’t have to face the same kind of love/hate relationship with his size and shape. But if I came away from all that having learned anything, it’s that denial is a dangerous tool and that too little of anything can be as damaging as too much.

I wasn’t always the junk food cheerleader. While Leo was still breastfeeding, I had visions of being one of those mums who raised her kid the Super Baby Food way. I planned to reform both our eating habits to be full of whole grains and leafy greens and sugar only on birthdays and special occasions. It sounded like the right thing to do.

I got my first inkling this wasn’t going to work out when I took Leo to a party when he was about 3 months old. I watched a father try to steer his two kids away from the chocolate chip cookies and towards a plate of shrimp. Could I pull a lie like that over on my son? That shrimp is a viable choice over a chocolate chip cookie? Surely my kid is going to be smarter than that.

Then there was the friend who told me she never fed her three kids sugar, but that she and her husband pulled the ice cream tub from the freezer every night the second they went to bed. And another friend whose mother raised them on applesauce-sweetened date bars and told them they were cookies. And the mum I met at the park who proudly informed me that she’d baked her daughter a tofu-carob birthday cake for her second birthday and swore up and down this was celebrating. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that building a junk food-free life for Leo would involve a lot of lying — and that’s one dynamic I don’t want unfolding between us.

I can’t say I get any support in the popular press with this one. Every time I turn around there’s another parenting magazine or newspaper headline warning me my child’s going to be an obese and angry underachiever if I offer him any snacks besides apple slices and baby carrots.

Of course, those articles never mention the other side of things. But those of us who grew up around health nut families know the truth. There’s something wrong with kids who don’t ever get a taste of the darker side.

Children who are never exposed to junk flip out when they enter an environment that might potentially contain an M&M. I remember how, the second my mother left us alone in the kitchen, my friend Sarah would leap to the countertop like Cat Woman and begin scouring our cupboards for stale marshmallows and open bags of chocolate chips, anything that might smack of a sugar high. Kids like Sarah never learn the art of moderation. When they go off to university, instead of binge drinking, they’re likely to hole up at McDonalds and inhale five Big Macs at a time.

When it comes down to it, I don’t want to deprive my child of the experience of indulging in wanton pleasure. Sure, technically junk food is not good for him. But do we really have to do every last thing that’s good for our kids? Does that honestly make them better people or just uptight, inflexible, and holier than thou?

For now, I’m trying to model reasonably healthy behaviour on my end and pretty much letting Leo eat what he wants. If he starts angling for ice cream and lollies morning, noon and night, that may have to change. Until then, I cast my vote for raucous over restraint. When it comes down to it, I’d rather be raising a fun, inventive, original, sugar-hyped little boy than a kale-and-brown-rice-eating , mind-your-manners bore.

Dear Mrs. McGinty,

Sure, babies are “supposed to be” plump and squishy. In fact, many parents worry considerably if their baby isn’t round with big cheeks and chubby little toes. We’ve all heard the expression “a big, healthy baby.” Acknowledging the bigness and chubbiness of a baby could be seen as an affirmation of vitality. If you were in sub-Saharan Africa, you’d be accused of bragging.

But in our culture, we have complicated feelings about being “chubby.” Especially when it comes to girls. You might say your relative has a chip on her shoulder, but it’s a pretty common chip in a world where fat is a liability. We can imagine why a mother calling her daughter chubby might send a shiver. And if Chubby’s loaded, Greedy Guts is downright hardcore. Now you’re bringing in appetite as an undesirable trait. (Guts doesn’t have particularly nice connotations, either.)

Many parents — even if they try their hardest not to — project a future appearance based on early impressions. People predict baldness, double chins, acne, ass shape, torso length, and upper body strength all from the shape of their squirmy, gummy infant. In this context, you can imagine how Chubby might be perceived as a projection of future fatness, rather than a term of baby endearment. Nicknames can also sometimes endure inadvertently, turning nasty later. The names behind your relative’s aforementioned shoulder chip may have emerged from similarly benign beginnings.

You may really mean this all in playful adoration of your daughter’s abundance. But it’s worth taking this opportunity to think about whether there might be something else going on. Are you afraid she will be fat? Do you have anxiety about your own weight? Most women do. We live in a very thin-obsessed and incredibly unhealthy culture when it comes to body image. It’s understandable that you’d want to protect your daughter from potential angst. Perhaps using those names somehow makes you feel like you’re fighting back against all that pressure. If that’s the case, we applaud your intention, but as she grows, you might consider something less easily misinterpreted. It’s true that she’s young now, but she’s learning every day. Why not start early with more positive messages?

Have a question? Email parentaladvisory@babble.com.au

Parents care more about keeping their daughters skinny than letting their sons get fat.

That actually came as no surprise to me and probably not you either. We’ve all witnessed something like this: people admiring a “growing boy” as he shovels it in at Sizzler, but eating in silence (or looking away) as the family’s teen girl heads back for another round of desserts.

From eScienceNews:

“Our findings mirror those of other studies that have found that parents are much less likely to recognise or be concerned about the overweight status of sons compared to daughters,” says [lead author Kyung E. Rhee, MD, MSc, a researcher with the Weight Control and Diabetes Research Center at The Miriam Hospital]. “These behaviours may represent a sensitivity to societal values that girls should be slim while boys have a physical or social advantage in being larger.”

Anyway, the study, which appears in the journal Obesity, is good news for parents who never really bought into the idea that kids can exercise portion control when facing an open bag of cookies.

Instead, researchers learned that controlling what and how much your kids eat between the ages of 4 and 7 leads to a healthier BMI between 7 and 9 years old. (No word on whether these restrictions lead to eating disorders, but, hey! At least the kids aren’t fat!)

Here’s a summary of the study from the LA Times:

Researchers studied 789 boys and girls in nearly equal numbers, calculating changes in their body mass index between the ages of 4 and 7, and7 and 9, to determine how their mothers’ restrictive feeding
affected how much weight they gained — or didn’t gain. The data were from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development’s study of early child care and youth development.

Mothers were also asked, “Do you let your child eat what he/she feels like eating?” Answers were scored on a four-point scale, from “definitely no” to “mostly no,” “mostly yes,” and “definitely yes.”

They found no correlation between a rise in mothers controlling their kids’ eating in the early age range and weight gain in the later range. So it’s OK to say, “no dessert tonight!” But spank yourself if you’re telling your girl one thing and your boy another.

Photo: agooddietforteens.com