In the UK, the government sponsors the “National Child Measurement Programme”, an attempt to combat childhood obesity by assessing the height and weight of children. The program does the measurements in the schools, and then sends letters home to parents.

Lucy, a five year old, was measured and the letter warned she “may have an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer as her body mass index (BMI) was outside recommended guidelines”.

The Daily Mail Onlline recounts the reaction of the parents. As the mother said:

I couldn’t believe what I was reading, Lucy is five-years-old and not fat in the slightest. She shouldn’t even be thinking about her weight at her age.

‘I want her to be running around playing and having fun, not worrying about what she looks like.

It would be easy to say mum is a bit sensitive about her daughter’s weight, and in denial about how she is setting her daughter up for medical problems by her poor parenting.

The problem with formulas to determine optimum weight for an individual is that they are often just plain wrong. A number doesn’t make you healthy. And in Lucy’s case, the number is obviously wrong, as anyone with any sense can see. But perhaps that’s more than we can ask from a government program. Here’s a picture of Lucy:

She looks like the picture of health, to me. Sounds like the bloated, overweight, tub-of-lard actor in this issue is not the kids in Britain, but the fat-ass government.

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