A 5-Year-Old in Britain Was Taken Into Protective Custody for Being Too Fat

A 5-year-old girl in the UK was taken into custody due to weighing 145 pounds, three times as much as a normal girl her age. According to a story from The Sunday Times, the girl was seized in Newport, South Wales, in August last year after breaking the record for fattest 5-year-old previously set in 2008.

Childhood obesity has been an increasingly prevalent issue in the UK, particularly since the National Child Measurement Programme began investigating the subject in 2006, showing about 22% of children age 4-12 in the UK qualify as overweight or obese.

"Since that child was one year old, she would have been putting on weight, year after year after year. She must have been visible at nursery. Who didn't raise their hand and say, 'Look, something is going tragically wrong here'," says Tam Fry, Honorary Chairman of the Child Growth Foundation and spokesperson for National Obesity Forum, who spoke to the Times.

Identifying blame in the case of childhood obesity often falls squarely on the parents. After all, she’s a five-year-old, not exactly capable of making independent nutritional choices, but Fry tells the BBC that parents are only part of the problem. "When trained health workers find it hard to pick out an average-weight child then you have to start to think we've got a problem and it's bigger than just what parents do."

Wales reports 57% of adults as overweight or obese, second only to the United States (USA! USA! USA!), and it’s not much better in neighboring England, where according to government statistics, over half of the population and 30% of children between ages 2 and 15 are also reported as overweight.

So when you have a prevalence of obesity among adults, it’s easy to see lifestyle and nutritional habits transferring to children, as well as a growing acceptance for bodies with excessive weight. It’s not surprising to see the extreme examples of obese children from the same NCMP study, revealing an 11-year-old boy weighing 322 pounds and an 11-year-old girl at 308 pounds.

The most recent study once again draws a connection between obesity and deprivation, indicating that a huge factor in obesity is simply not having access to healthier choices.

Dr. Mark Temple, co-chair of the British Medical Association’s public health medicine committee and public health consultant in Cardiff, impressed the severity of the issue when talking to Wales Online.

“Obesity is a major health threat and we ought to be doing something about it,” he said. “We all know what ‘junk’ food means. It’s a great tragedy that the food standards in the UK are worse now than they were during the rationing during the war. That’s a strong indictment of the food industry.”

The health consequences for such unhealthy bodies are obvious. In 2009, nearly 4,000 young people needed hospital treatment for problems complicated by being overweight and another recent study found that 400,000 deaths each year are directly related to excessive weight.

Professor Mitch Blair, of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health, warned Express of the repercussions. “Being severely overweight at such a young age has clear physical health implications including a higher risk of diabetes, heart disease and joint problems," he said. "In addition, there can be serious psychological repercussions – teenage years are tough enough without the extra burden of being obese.”

The government sponsored Change4Life program has been working to improve nutritional awareness in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. And activists like Jamie Oliver and his Food Program seek to educate school children on food awareness and its impact on their health and energy.

As for the record-breaking fattest 5-year-old in the UK, she has since been weighed again, about a year since being taken in. While the girl's weight had dropped to below 115 pounds, her body mass index remains about double the normal level for a child her age.

Thankfully obesity is only a considered a “problem” in the UK, whereas in the US it’s called “part of the development process for TLC.”

@grantpa