Oh dear.
Grossly overweight children may be taken from their families and put into care if Britain’s obesity epidemic continues to escalate, council chiefs said yesterday.
The Local Government Association argued that parents who allowed their children to eat too much could be as guilty of neglect as those who did not feed their children at all.
[...]
There have been some reported cases where children under 10 have weighed up to 14st (89kg) and a three-year-old has weighed 10st – putting them at a high risk of diabetes and heart disease. Only last week a 15-year-old girl in Wales was told by doctors that she could “drop dead at any moment” after tipping the scales at 33st.
At first, I didn't know what to make of these alien numbers. But then I hearkened back to my public school education, and remembered that a gram of cocaine was "quite a lot" according to breathless crime-beat reporters, but "not a lot" according to the older kids in the school yard. Aha! Thus begins a bit of reference! I later learned in chemistry class that one gram of water has a volume of one milliliter and a thousand grams (or one liter) weighs one kilogram. I also remembered a
very helpful commercial from the early nineties explaining how the average menstruating woman retains "up to 2.2 pounds" of water (while the spokesmodel held up a visual aid that looked exactly like a one liter bottle) and suddenly I realized I had all the tools to decipher this article.
I crunched these numbers through complex and arcane formulas I call "common sense" and "love of freedom" and came to the shocking conclusion that British officials want to take fat kids away from their parents. Their reasoning apparently has something to do with magic "stones."
(Via:
JG)
UPDATE: Via Annie, check out
Junkfood Science, a blog of "critical examinations of studies and news on weight, health ... for readers not afraid to question and think critically to get to the truth."
Or, you could just move to Britain and wait for the government to sort your life out for you.
