Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch and Richard Simmons rules the world!
Dangerously overweight children will have to be taken from their parents and put into care because of Britain’s worsening “obesity epidemic”, council leaders have warned.
One million children will be clinically obese within four years on current trends, storing up future problems from heart disease, strokes, high blood pressure and diabetes.
The Local Government Association (LGA), which represents 400 councils in England and Wales, predicted social services teams would have to take drastic action to improve the health of seriously overweight children.
Like residential schools, for fatties!
Finally, something useful for all those cameras to do: vector the fatty-snatcher squads in on their targets.
21 % by 2025, how do we know they arent using the hockey stick graph for fatties.
with the global warming ,they should be sweating out as oldies.
Shades of Ebeneezer Scrooge ….
“Are there not FAT houses for them?”
This story is a joke, right?
All that tax money spent on bigger furniture, larger crematoriums, and winches for ambulances.
Won’t someone please think of the children!
The irony is the governments themselves promote it through food pyramids that push breads and other carbs.
Of course it just gets made worse when you have governments that are willing, itching it seems, to remove children from their parents.
I supposed children taken into care will be forced to exercise on playground equipment, without helmets, at the fat re-education camps. PETA will insist on a vegetarian diet at the camps, and there will be no corn or sugar in the diet there, because all of that will be used to keep the generators running so that the surveillance cameras are powered 24×7.
For entertainment, the children will be allowed 1/2 hour per day playing their favorite first person shooter video game: Bloody Bureaucrats.
cal2, the local goverment association (LGA) intends to remedy global warning too.
“A new LGA opinion poll indicates clear support across the country for action to be taken at a local level to tackle climate change. It shows that candidates for elections ignore policies to combat climate change at their peril.”
http://www.lga.gov.uk/lga/core/page.do?pageId=1
So been fat is now a “crisis”. While I agree that being obese is unhealthy for the individual, it is not a crisis for society. The government granting themselves the authority to remove children based on BMI charts is much scarier. Definitely a case where the proposed cure is much worse than the disease.
Of course, the argument will follow that it increases costs in the public health system – because obviously one government intrusion is a good justification for even more intrusion. The natural answer would be to give people the incentive to be healthy by having health insurance premiums correlated to the health risk of the individual (weight wise and other self controlled factors), or other equally mean-spirited conservative reforms.
“Were you born a fat, slimy, scumbag puke piece o’ shit, Private Pyle, or did you have to work on it?”
Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, USMC
England + Wales
LGA: 466 municipalities : 50M population
Saskatchewan:
SARM+SUMA:800 municipalities : 1M population
Good grief! When did Britons become such spineless, pussy-whipped, wimps? They’ve gone from “the sun never sets” to needing a permit to buy a kitchen knife and if you dare to defend yourself you’ll find your self a guest of Her Majesty’s prisons for longer then your attacker! Shameful!
“A public health expert, David Hunter, of Durham University, this week warned that rising obesity levels posed as a grave a threat to Britain as terrorism and urged “bold action” by ministers.”
Ship them in boxcars to Gone-TON-A-Moooooo.
They should just build a big soap factory and melt those fat kids down.
If you have ever smelled the Body Odor riding the tube, you know they need more soap over there in “we give up land”.
Think about it, the former Great Britain … gives it up to the commies and the Muzzies,
turns it’s laws upside down,
their kids are blimps,
they smell bad.
half of them are homosexuals (which explains a lot of it)
They haven’t put out anything worthwhile since the Beatles,
Prince Charles has stated once that he wishes he were a Tampon, also, he hopes to be reincarnated as a killer virus to rid the planet of all the pesky people.
We are supposed to take them seriously?
Ha ha!
One question: where will they get the money?
Ha ha! Hilarious!
Maybe if the Muslims weren’t creating no go areas they would be in better shape. Or are we not allowed to point that out?
in best richard simmons shriek….
“GET OFF THAT CHESTERFIELD !!!!!”
Good grief! When did Britons become such spineless, pussy-whipped, wimps? They’ve gone from “the sun never sets” to needing a permit to buy a kitchen knife and if you dare to defend yourself you’ll find your self a guest of Her Majesty’s prisons for longer then your attacker! Shameful!
Posted by: Edward Teach
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It truly is a shame. Maggie had that country turned around nicely in the 80s, broke the unions that were crushing the economy, and had national pride on the upswing. All that work for naught as it was completely undone in the 90s and oughts.
The comments are as scary as the government running fat kid gulags:
Kevin, a willing kapo, writes:The obese are a greater threat than anything else now we are approaching times of food shortages – they must learn to be lean like everyone else.
I don’t think I like the tone in Kevin’s “learn”. Hands up if you think Kevin is your basic GW Nazi.
please sir can i have more ?
The proposed cure IS the disease. The more the government tries to do for a certain part of the population, the less they’ll do for themselves. Require people to pay the costs of their own behaviours and they’ll adopt less costly alternatives. If the morbidly obese have to pay more for their health care (which they should) then they’ll have to start taking ownership of it. Require them to pay for the extra airline seats they occupy. Let them suffer the consequences of their own fat. They brought it on themselves. As for the obese children, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that a disproportionate number are the products of government funded, single-parent dole-blodgers and deadbeats. I doubt that juvenile obesity was a major problem during the depression
The rise in obesity has coincided with government programs to eradicate it.
Read Gary Taubes’, Good Calories Bad Calories and you will see again an issue where policy makers dont follow the science and that scientific dissent is being squealched by those with a political/ideological agenda.
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Science/dp/1400033462/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219084147&sr=8-2
You’ll be amazed how much it looks like other political/scientific controversies….
We used to eat properly, then we were told to eat different to our genetic heritage, by government and industry. Anyway, this is the major, not sole cause, of obesity, increases in diabetes etc.
I know there is skepticism about the NYT here but this article is the exception that proves the rule
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04E2D61F3EF934A35754C0A9649C8B63
This caused a sh*tstorm of controversey. Its a good read and once again highlights the shutting down of dissent.
“Require them to pay for the extra airline seats they occupy.”
If they flew as freight, they’d have to pay more…
“The more the government tries to do for a certain part of the population, the less they’ll do for themselves.”
Probably one of the simplest, yet most profound statements that I’ve come across in recent times.
See what happens when a country bans tobacco? heh.
fat kids will never be able to fight the jihadis.
I’ll bet dollars to donuts that a disproportionate number are the products of government funded, single-parent dole-blodgers and deadbeats.
That’s what I’m seeing in my grocery store check-out and neighborhood Walmart. The correlation between food stamps and obesity is astounding. My neighborhood has pockets of public housing nearby. I see grocery carts that have nothing but junk food in them and have watched mindless fat moms feeding fat toddlers Cheetos and such while waiting in line. What’s next an army of social workers and nutritionists at the checkout?
Obesity with the Native Americans began with government surplus food. Dairy products and refined sugar was not in their inigenous diet. Now, there is a group that has been decimated healthwise by gov’t gratuity. The Navahos have the largest number of New Mexicans on dialysis thank to Type I diabetes. Juvenile diabetes is linked to milk intolerance.
Today kids aren’t allowed to play tag on playgrounds any more because God forbid they’ll scrape a knee. When I was a kid my sister and I were gone all day on our bikes, playing kick ball in the street, finding monkey vines to swing on, etc. Bruises, stitches and occassional fractures were a right of passage in my neighborhood. The media would have you believe society is more dangerous but when you drill down into the statistics it really isn’t. 99.9% of those milk cartoon pictures are custody abductions and not stranger abductions. Convicted pedophiles are systematically listed on state websites with their address today. Helmut safety wasn’t an option when I was a kid.
Thanks to the hysterical media which is dumber than a rock and the lefty busybodies which just can’t leave human beings alone the pathology of the Nanny State is taking a toll on kids.
Penny,
You hit it, but sugar isnt required for anyones diet, nor are carbohydrates of any type “required”
Inuit did just fine without any rice, grain, bread or sugar. They lived on protein and fat without the issues we associate with those.
There is increasing evidence that obesity is linked to an fundamentally an excess intake of carbs that becomes deadly when combined with an excess intake of calories.
It isnt that carbs are bad, just we eat way too much of them. And the poor eat way too much because carb based foods are inexpensive by volume.
You hit the nail on the head Penny. I’ve noticed the shopping habits of the welfare mothers in my community and it appalls me. These kids are raised on junk food and pre-packaged dinners. The cart is loaded with junk mostly carbs, but in their defense fresh veggies and meat are to expensive for most poor people and the working poor. Out of interest I priced a roll of balogna and I nearly feel over in a dead faint, nine dollars for a hunk of fake meat. Wowza.
I was raised on homemade food, nothing from a can package or frozen dinners. It’s not just the caloric/fat count that adds to obesity it’s sodium also. If it comes pre-packaged it’s loaded with sodium and other chemicals, I howl in laughter at my girl friends who eat those low fat frozen meals because what they lack in calories and fat they make up for in sodium.
I’ve also noticed that our youth have been getting heavier since Home Ec. was removed from public education. Personally I hated taking that class for four years, but it did teach mutrition and how to prepare food etc. On topic the government needs to be told to fark off, the obesidy epedemic is just another myth propagated by the leftards. If in doubt ask your family doctor he/she will roll their eyes and snort.
Rose, Michael Phelps, bless his heart, ought to put to rest that it’s only a calorie problem with our kids. The guy eats 12,000 calories a day, he eats what he needs and not one calorie more than that obviously. The Nanny State weenies prefer our kids to be couch potatoes, it’s “safer” for them! There has to be a correlation to the sorry state of males in our feminized mommy education system too. They act like boys and the solution is Ritalin.
I remember years ago a teacher commenting to me that the boys couldn’t sit still as well as the girls. I responded, hey, you’ve got a track right outside the door so why not let them run it a few times during the school day. She thought I was a nut. She also was aghast that at recess the girl and boys formed gender exclusive play groups, basic Child Developement 101 says that’s what they do.
I’m not noticing fatties in the military, I guess when real men do real men things that require mind/body fitness they like Michael Phelps don’t go ever the calories that they need. No wonder the left despises the military.
Next we will have a TV show about social workers scurrying about looking for racial haters, obesity malefactors, & the worst of the lot, cigarette smokers.
Taking children away one at a time to save them threw the States tender mercies by abducting them for re-education. While the parents are left with multiple bills from performing secular atonement rituals (sensitivity training), legal fee’s & other sundry persecutions put upon them as you would any slave who acted in a contrary manner.To there social elites.
LOL I loved your story, it reminded me of the time I told a Shelter (domestic abuse) Directer that we’d do more to aide abused women if she’d let me teach them how to defend (beat the crap out of) themselves against violent spouses. Needless to say she was horrified, reality isn’t part of the liberal/leftard mindset.
LOL astute abservation about our military, the Army makes their members retain a fitness level as does the Air Force, the Navy not so much much. The Brits and coming soon to Canada don’t raise their children the “STATE” tells them how to administer to them. I found a wonderful article over at Binks (Free Mark Styen) pertaining to this issue. The link will be dead just copy and paste it into the google bar.
Link: http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_3_otbie-british_children.html
Snippet: The British government thus pursues social welfare policies that encourage the creation of households like the Matthews’, and then seeks, via yet more welfare spending, to reduce the harm done to children in them. But was the Matthews household poor, in any but an artificial sense? At the time of Shannon’s current stepfather’s arrest, the household income was $72,000; it lived free of rent and local taxes, and it boasted three computers and a large plasma-screen television. Would another $5,000 or $10,000 or $20,000 have made any difference?
A system of perverse incentives in a culture of undiscriminating materialism, where the main freedom is freedom from legal, financial, ethical, or social consequences, makes childhood in Britain a torment both for many of those who live it and those who observe it. Yet the British government will do anything but address the problem, or that part of the problem that is its duty to address: the state-encouraged breakdown of the family. If one were a Marxist, one might see in this refusal the self-interest of the state-employee class: social problems, after all, are their raison d’être.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
“but in their defense fresh veggies and meat are to expensive for most poor people and the working poor. ”
Nonsense! I go to a produce store or farmer’s market and have a hard time spending an entire $20 on a week’s worth!
Penny,
Well Michael Phels is a 6’7 early 20’s male who swims 5 hours a day. 10,000 calories, no matter what they are get burned.
Mere mortals have to watch sugars and carbs since they wont be using them like he does. The fact that his body mass is high and is probably 96% muscle means that almost anything he eats will be burned for fuel.
Back to us mere mortals. The lack of exercise doesnt help, but its the cheetos, chips, bread on the chicken, sugar in the juice that are at levels way beyond what they ever were.
Anyway, the point is more that the government tries to engineer a result, gets it wrong and through unintended consequences causes a problem they didnt count on. The target was cholesteral and heart attacks in the 50’s. mistakenly this meant low fat, which meant higher carb…look at the food pyramid….this in turn has led to higher rates of obesity and diabetes.
It is a common tale of misengineering, denial by scientists with positions and grants to lose, pushing a prognosis that is causing other problems and political fighting to keep the whole thing quiet…
The poor get caught on the side becaus ethey buy what is cheapest and easiest to get…and any government info tells them to eat low fat.
Read the Taubes book or the article if Kates spam filter releases it eventually….or google Gary taubes New York Times article…its a pretty interesting story. We evolved to be infrequent eaters of protein not placid apes grazing all day on berries on leaves.
I see a connection between the reduction of phys.ed, sports funding and the zero enfaces on winning in the school system, and all of the fat-ass kids today. John Gormely has been saying that the next major activist movement will be a war on fat people. Is it just me, or is it the same people that argue so adamantly about combating obesity are the same people who have had a hand in the aforementioned changes to the school curriculum? Is it also the same people who didn’t listen to the concerns of doctors, coaches, parents and phys.ed teachers when these cuts were being made? Why are they so concerned now?
That’s my conspiracy theory for the week.
I think most posters here have a better grasp on the problem than the so-called experts.
No doubt a one-two punch of abundant processed foods and general lack of activity is ‘fattening’ our current obesity trend.
I say bring back ‘Participaction”.I’m curious how elderly Swedes are doing these days.
Like Rose, I ‘ve read the fine, but depressing article by the incomparable Theodore Dalrymple at City Journal. (I’m now on their email list.)
I was going to highly recommensd this article, “Childhood’s End” as well. (If one Googles Childhood’s End, Theodore Dalrymple, the article will be there.)
Brave New World. Fire. Them. All.
Interesting article last week in Macleans on a black/hispanic area of LA. There were no supermarkets left because of crime and the fact that the people only ate junk food. One monsterious fat woman in the article picked out the tomato slice from her hamburger saying she doesn’t eat that stuff. One store that had carried vegetables gave it up as people did not buy them!
As Theodore Dalrymple pointed out in an earlier column people that live in these areas never cook anything they just buy prepared meals of empty calories.
Eating nothing but this crap makes them lazy and lethargic according to the article.
Stephen – you don’t shop enough, the poor aren’t buying what’s cheapest or low calorie, trust me on this. Rice and beans, basic unadulterated veggies are cheaper than the garbage they buy. Tap water is cheaper than swilling down sugared sodas. The poor make poor choices as the food stamp program doesn’t care what you buy. Potato chips, frozen pizzas, soda and processed junk get covered under food stamps here is the US.
My point is that active children and adults modulate calories and work, that used to be the human condition. Kids used to walk to school and play outside. The hysterical shills in the media and the weenies on the left in education have designated childhood as a danger zone and worse work from the position that it’s pathological in nature.
Native Americans are too often fat and unhealthy with appalling diabetes thanks to the largess of government. Poor people, and lefties can choke on this reality, are poor because they make poor choices in all realms of their lives. They make very bad nutritional choices. The real question is, are we going to babysit them from cradle to grave like the Brit Nanny State. I don’t want to do that.
Sugar is not the only problem. Salt is a staple in many poor diets. I lived with a native woman and her two children for three years and bought more salt over those years than I had in the previous twenty. It did not matter what delicacy I cooked,the salt shaker was shaking.I plugged up half the holes in the shaker,and they shook it twice as much.The kids would go to fast food restaurants and fill their pockets with the packets so they could put it on their food once I remaved the shaker from the table. Mom wasn’t too crazy about my ideas either.
I have a slightly different take on the obesity thing. There’s more fat people now by far than there were in the 1970’s and 1980’s, or even the 1990’s when we started noticing the trend.
The number of cars, the number of poor, the cheapness of food hasn’t changed remarkably since then, so what happened?
Rose mentioned it above, and it bears repeating. In the 1960’s and 1970’s kids and young adults in Ontario where I grew up ran out the door in the morning and were never seen again until it was time to eat. My dad could be heard 3 blocks away, that’s how I knew when it was dinner.
In the 1980’s parents started keeping kids around the house more, culminating in today where kids literally don’t cross the street to play with the neighbor kids. Each kid stays at their own house all day every day, interaction occurs at school and soccer practice ONLY.
Because Mummy and Daddy are absolutely convinced somebody will kill that kid if given a chance. People are terrified something horrific will happen to their kids Out There.
That’s what changed. There is no community of trust among urban Canadians. People are generally wary and suspicious. What do you think is driving all this Human Rights Commission crap? “The world is full of secret racists, we’ve gotta dig them out!” Gun control? “Trust THAT guy with a gun, are you mental? He could go postal any second!”
We have been divided by fear. Now we are being conquered by unscrupulous a-holes offering to make it all better.
What’s all this got to do with obesity? Constant anxiety triggers a “famine” response in many people. Their body switches from burning food to storing food. Stress makes you fatter even if you do exercise.
Joke is, this is manufactured stress. All we see on TV and movies or read in the papers is how bad we all are, and how many evil and stupid people lurk in the shadows waiting to get us.
I managed to conquer the fear (and the fat) at a young age through martial arts and a generally bloody minded attitude. “Today is a good day to die, so bring it on a–holes!”
No takers so far. Amazing, eh? I begin to doubt there actually are any lurkers in the shadows. Not even Muslim terrorist ones. Its all bullsh1t.
So let your kids play next door and shut off the TV. Gotta be worth an easy 20 lbs off your gut.
You may want to change that to “Labour’s Britain” because Tony Blair hasn’t been in power for some time. You can’t really blame him for the current stuff.
Like May said – Gordon Brown ain’t Tony Blair.
For that matter, can you really blame the PM for a decision of a group of councils?
Wally: Salt isn’t a problem. The science on its harms, for anyone that isn’t already hypertensive, is at worst equivocal and at best suggests no harm at all, while a diet too low in salt is harmful.
The “conventional wisdom” on salt is completely bogus, and fueled by decades-old hypotheses that didn’t stand up to scientific investigation – but too many people have too much invested in Salt As The Enemy to give up now or bother to report boring findings like “salt is basically harmless”.
(In hypertensives, the data more strongly support a marginal benefit in reducing salt intake if it’s high, but it’s still minor compared to medication, in terms of actually reducing blood pressure.)