I STILL Find That Offensive!' by Claire Fox

Author:Claire Fox [Claire Fox]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785904219
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2018-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Culprits: public health scares

Invoking children’s safety has become a go-to tactic for any organisation lobbying for urgent ‘something-must-be-done’ interventions. It has become such a cliché that one suspects that every organisation has a preprepared ‘think of the children’ press release on hand for all occasions, nowhere more so than in the arena of health protection. No public health panic, from ‘binge drinking’ to ‘unfit couch potatoes’, is complete without emphasising the dangers to young people.

If obsessively worrying about our health has become so pervasive for adults that GPs complain about surgeries clogged up with the ‘worried well’, focusing on children has inevitably also been anxiety-inducing. They too have become over-preoccupied with threats to their physical well-being.

One particularly pernicious example of how this has happened is the increasing hysteria about an obesity ‘epidemic’. There is so little restraint on fearmongering on this issue that the Chief Medical Officer for England Professor Dame Sally Davies used her annual report in December 2015 to call on the government to treat obesity as a ‘national threat’ on a par with terrorism. Of course, we should expect medical experts to care about children’s health. However, we should be wary of frightening the young when we bluntly declare that this generation of children may not live as long as their parents because of an ‘obesity timebomb’. With a bit of perspective, we might remember that today’s young have unprecedented chances of living long, healthy lives, with one third of babies born in 2013 expected to live to be 100 according to the UK Office for National Statistics. Indeed, we seem to have two apparently contradictory timebombs facing us: one where millions die sooner because of obesity alongside one where people live much longer due to improving healthcare, leading to fears that the cost of pensions and social care will bankrupt the state.

This is not to say there is no problem when it comes to children’s weight, diet or fitness. But simplistic moralising to children and their parents about food underestimates the complexities of the issue on which even the experts disagree. Various authors have recently done a real service in unpicking obesity myths and should give us ample evidence for scepticism (for example, see Rob Lyons’s book Panic on a Plate and Christopher Snowdon’s The Fat Lie). But, whether urban myth or fact, the metaphorical epidemic of obesity has made young people into objects of professional condescension and established fear as a factor of their everyday eating habits.

Generation Snowflake were those children first subjected to the government’s controversial ‘fat charts’, involving the mass weighing and measuring of school pupils from the age of four. A whole swathe of antiobesity initiatives in turn tell the young to become preoccupied with their body shape and food intake. It hardly helps when Labour MP Keith Vaz hysterically declares a ‘war on sugar’ in Parliament, or the lobby group Action on Sugar proclaims sugar is ‘the new tobacco’ and ‘the alcohol of childhood’. Children are taught they are continually at risk from fizzy drinks, fatty chips and chocolate.

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