to think that this 'epidemic' of overweight children is bullshit

[EssenceOfJack]

For example, article here about a child who is 'overweight'
According to this children's BMI calculator my DD1 is on the 93rd percentile and is overweight when if you look on my profile you can clearly see that she is nothing of the sort.

Are they just measuring these small children when BMI means feck all (the calculator reckons it can tell you results for children from 2 to 20) and declaring them overweight based on arbitrary measurements and then the NHS using these figures to tell us all our children are fat?

I ask in all seriousness as at DD1's primary school I can genuinely say I haven't noticed one overweight child, and we live in a mildly deprived area so are supposed to be rife with 'fat kids'. yes, some have baby fat still, but they aren't fat

So AIBU?

I have just been on the M&S site looking at little girls clothes, and it brought to mind this thread again- I was thinking that one or two of the little girl models, in my mind, look overweight. Granted, it is hard to tell how old they are, but they look around 3 years or 4 years old. I am thinking that this is an example of how we have lost sight of what is an acceptable and healthy weight for kids. If the clothes are cut for children this chubby, it explains why clothes for my average weight for height child are always so baggy on her. (actualy the clothes do look quite tight on some of the models)

Look at and and this page

Using overweight kids as models, however cute, and however much better it makes parents of chubby kids feel, is surely helping to make it acceptable, and is almost as bad (but not quite) as using models which are too skinny.

onebadbaby, those models look a bit chubby to me. But I would say that her size is not unusual.

That was my point, I think we have come to accept kids this size as normal..(hmm)

Wrong type of bracket

I think the mother is doing this little girl a lot of harm.If she didn't agree that her DD was slightly overweight she could have just chucked the letter in the bin and forgotten about it and the kid would have been none the wiser.Instead courting such publicity for her DD and trying to go to such lengths to prove her DD isn't fat is bound to sow seeds of doubt in the child'd mind.
Also she was weighed in DEcember which is quite a few weeks ago.It is possible for kids to grow a lot in this time and thin out a bit.

Totaly agree with you yummyx3 [lazy]

Coming to this a bit late, so will probably end up killing the thread!!!!
My DD is 3.5yo and has been between 91st and 98th centile for weight since she was 6mo. I did the BMI test (in the OP) and she comes up as average. She is thinning out a lot now, as she has grown in height a lot recently, but I have always been totally confused as to whether to worry or not about her weight.

My Mum (who is a total weight obsessive) has commented in the past that I should give DD less to eat, the HV had said to keep to the status quo, and the nursery said it was great she had a healthy appetite and a bit of 'meat' on her!! I have hardly worried about it since she was about 2 (got a bit of a grip and decided as she was eating plenty of fruit and veg, and hardly any sweet stuff then it must be ok), but before that it was on my mind a lot.

There seems such a contradiction between those who say that a toddlers diet should not be restricted, and those who say that we must keep an eye on weight from a very early age and act accordingly to prevent obesity. If I ever did comment on what DD had eaten (e.g. when the nursery had told me she had had seconds - a regular thing for DD) I was treated as though I had her on a fast track to anorexia!

BTW, DD is now in preschool, and out of the 45 3-4yos I would say that there is only 1 who is noticeably overweight. However there seem to be a lot more in the 10/11yo year group.

onebadbaby, I agree, in that first link the kid's legs are huge

Those people saying 'she has a bit of a double chin' should see my ds1. He is the thinnest child I know - beanpole proportions. Easily the thinnest child in his school. Has to wear trousers taken in beyond the narrowest setting on adjustable waists, even in so called 'skinny fit' clothes.

But, at age 8, he still has adorable chubby cheeks. It's just the way his face is made. Doesn't mean there's an ounce of fat on him, and he is underweight on the 'charts'.

(Just read my post back, should have written 'thinnest child in his class at school' - have no idea about the whole school!!! oops)

But Lily you wouldn't be sticking hm into the Daily Mail and asking people if he was fat woudl you? I totally agree re. shapes and sizes varying, but I've always found for my dh and I that chubbiness under the chin was quite closely correlated to chubbiness in other more hidden areas.

Undercovamutha (neat name) I'd not worry about weight percentile alone for babies - my dd went off the scale fairly early on, but as she did it for length/height too it was obvious she was big in proportion. Chubbiness in pre- mobile children or those just entering toddlerhood is very normal too, it just shouldn't persist once they get active. So two-three years might well be quite rounded still, but four/five year olds should not.

Personally I think primary age children should be quite skinny, just because for most of them this will be the most active time in their lives (and they should be the least susceptible to temptation too I guess as at this age food should be the parent's choice, not the child), and if your not relatively thin when you are moving all the time, then you are always going to struggle.

On the other hand I am very very anti dieting, and really don't think that small children should be thinking about their appearance at all if possible. As parents we should try and lay the foundations for our children to think of healthy eating and exercise as just totally normal parts of their life, not some battle, as with good foundations you shouldn't then struggle with your weight when you are grown up.

nooka, absolutely I wouldn't! Nor would I if I thought he WAS chubby! Not sure what the mother is hoping to achieve tbh!

It's clear that some parents look at overweight children and think 'normal', because as a society we are all now tending to overweight and therefore overweight becomes the norm. I think these BMI thingies, blunt tool they may be, but are helpful in getting us all to recalibrate our eyesight.

I speak as one who's struggled a bit with weight since turning 40 and I have one rake-like child and one overweight child so not being holier-than-thou, honest.

I do also think there is an argument for people getting bigger as a rule though - in a healthy way, because of improved nutrition. Our generation was born to women who were either growing up in the war, or post-war, our generation has not had rationing or anything like that.

Teenagers are getting taller, babies are getting bigger, and that isn't necessarily unhealthy!

I don't think people who are now parents were nutritionally deprived though ... By and large.

And yes people are getting taller but the BMI does factor height in.

No, that's true, but I know that the consultant I saw about this baby (having had 3 big babies) seemed to think that improved nutrition in childhood (ie our childhood) led to people getting bigger generally.

BMI does factor in height, but not build.

I know my brother is a larger build than my dh for example, and probably has a higher BMI and takes a bigger trouser size/shirt size than him, even though dh is a bit overweight, my brother is phenomenally fit and lean. But his shoulders and pelvis are just bigger - he is a bigger person.

A bit confused EOJ, given your OP when you confidently say that your DD1 is 93rd percentile but as can be seen on the photo on your profile is not overweight. I agree she clearly isn't and neither is the child who was in the newspaper.

I'm not sure how you can agree to critisise the mother who raised this when you are doing the same. I think this analysing and picking over this child is really unpleasant. The mother raised an important issue and good for her to be confident in her own judgment. Reading things that suggest the child is in fact overweight because of the way her fingers look really does make my stomach turn.

The point is whether there is an obesity epidemic and whether the figures being used to say there is are reliable. Very sensible explanations have been given as to why BMI doesn't do the job.

Children are growing and carry more flesh at times because of that.

M&S have been using healthy sized children models for years. I modelled for them for a number of years in the sixties though for two years older than my actual age.

Looking at the link from the OP I think the answer is given on the second page of that link to be fair:

"Kids can also have a high BMI if they have a large frame or a lot of muscle, not excess fat. And a kid with a small frame may have a normal BMI but too much body fat

Kids who measure at the 85th to 94th percentiles are considered overweight, because of excess body fat or high lean body mass."

So interpreting the data is key.

Actually rationing is thought to have led to a generation that ate more healthily, especially for those on a lower income. There has been an increase of height generation to generation for many hundreds of years. But being tall does not mean you have a higher BMI, as the BMI is a height/weight ratio. Certainly fewer people are malnourished now, but actually some of the fatter children are also malnourished from their poor diets (lack of vitamins/minerals etc).

Being obese as mother is a risk factor for a low birth weight baby. However there is also some evidence that being at the higher end of BMI is possibly healthier than being at the lower end, because your resiliency for illness is higher (ie you have fat reserves to burn). Certainly I'd quite like my very thin and active son to have a little more to him, because when he crashes he really does crash, but as he eats like a horse I doubt he'll ever be very beefy (until he drinks lots of beer and sits around more like his dad!).

Oh and if the public health professions world wide find BMI a useful screening tool, and research shows it correlates to long term obesity and related health problems then I think dismissing it is a bit foolish.

If your child comes out in the top 10% then all it's saying is that they are heavier than 90% of their contemporaries (taking 1990 as a base). Of course there could be good reasons for that, but you'd have to think is my child more active than 90% of their peers (to have so much more muscle weight), is their build somehow exceptional, for growth spurts I think that's just a matter of monitoring, but you'd have to be able to say that they are currently fatter (to be crude) than usual and then to check in a month or so that they have leaned out (which of course many kids do). Or perhaps are they carrying a few more pounds more than they should, as many of us do.

nooka, I do agree with a lot of what you say. Where I think things are wrong is in the way the perceived problem is being tackled.

For example, in the 'packed lunches'. So far my kids' school have really resisted the 'banning things containing sugar', but there are now a few mutterings about not allowing 'non-healthy' foods. This poses a problem for ds1 who is both underweight, and food-phobic. I just about manage to get enough calories into his lunch box, by giving him largely healthy food (cheese sandwich, fruit smoothie drink etc) but I bump up the energy content with a coco pops cereal bar and a jammy dodger.

Clearly, if he had a problem with weight, these would be what would go. But in order to address a perceived problem with other children, he will find it hard to ingest enough calories. School dinners aren't an option for him (tried them for a term, he ate nothing, weight plummeted).

So it is this generalisation that bothers me. Along with letters sent out to basically healthy children with parents who probably know and do all the healthy eating /exercise stuff anyway. I'm sure the staff at school would be able to pin point the kids who needed a bit of guidance on diet, rather than some computer number-crunching automatic letters out.

According to the BMI charts, ds is 'at risk of obesity'. Codswallop. He is just a very strong and muscular child. Who eats a healthy diet, leaves stuff on his plate if he's full, walks to school every day and does gymnastics as a hobby. Although it's true kids today do play out less than we did, so I may well have done more exercise as a 6yo just running around with my mates climbing trees. (Not dh, he had asthma, although ds does get his strong muscle-filled build from dh and FIL.)

Btw, I do wish public health specialists would stop peddling this myth that people were 'healthy' under rationing and start talking to some of the people who actually lived through WWII.

My godmother did. And through her personal and professional life has quite a lot of perspective on this. She points out that people were starving. We had been dependent on food imports before the war and a key German tactic was to destroy the North Atlantic convoys and other ships bringing food over.

If you were working class and joined up or worked in a factory with a 'British Canteen' you probably were better fed than you had been before, given mass unemployment in the 30s. But people who couldn't work - mothers of very young children and the elderly or disabled, especially in towns ? were very short of food indeed.

Apart from that, as you were...

liking your post edam

I second Lily, children are definitely getting bigger (not nec fatter).

I recently bought 13-14 yr old jeans which are actually a bit big on me. I am pretty slim, but I am not the size I was at 13/14. Also I am average height for a UK woman (5 ft 4)

Just to chime in, I do think we've lost sight of what normal is. I was the fattest child in my class in school (born in 1977) - no idea what I weighed when, but I was always big compared to the others in my class and unfit. But looking at the pictures in the family albums, I look completely normal - slim even. It's only that I remember being the fat one that makes me conscious of how my perceptions have changed. I was definitely overweight; there's no question about it. But I find it hard to recognise that in the pictures, if you see what I mean.

I do think that we value roundness in children because it makes them look cute until they are about seven or eight - adorable little rolypoly girls and boys that you just want to cuddle. But actually, we are supposed to grow out of that phase as toddlers and slim down until we get to the next big growth spurt at eight, and then hit puberty (which hit me like a truck, BTW). I looked at the pictures in the M&S link and didn't see anything wrong with them, but they are definitely bigger than I was at that stage. Weird that we have fatter model children and ever-skinnier adult models - no wonder we're all confused.