By Dr. Stacey Patton
Creator of Spare The Kids

There’s been much debate over two Harvard experts’ controversial recommendation that some say would help manage the nation’s childhood obesity crisis.  But I think it’s yet another means for an already overburdened foster care system to feed its inertia and further extend its bureaucratic reach to the lives of poor, black, and brown people who are disproportionately the victims of economic inequalities.

David Ludwig and Lindsey Murtagh, in a commentary published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, argue that the government should intervene to place extremely obese kids facing life-threatening complications in foster care.  Such measures have already transpired in a handful of U.S. cases.

“State intervention may serve the best interests of many children with life-threatening obesity, comprising the only realistic way to control harmful behaviors,” said Murtagh.

This sort of radical intervention, the authors assert, is intended as a temporary fix that might help prevent the development of severe health conditions like Type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea and liver problems in some of the 2 million or so very obese American children.

“No one is arguing we want government to swoop in and take kids away from their parents,” says Ludwig, adding that states should remove children from their parents’ home only in the most severe situations and should simultaneously educate parents about the perils of obesity.

It is true that measures must be taken to curb our nation’s childhood obesity crisis, which is being caused by numerous factors: lack of good eating habits (home-cooked meals have become a thing of the past for many families) and an overreliance on cheap and convenient fast food or pre-prepared heavily-processed foods very high in fat, calories and sodium.  Additionally, children spend too much time in front of the TV or computer and many don’t have access to playgrounds or other physical activities in their neighborhoods.  Schools have cut back or eliminated physical education classes while allowing vending machines filled with sodas, candies and chips to remain in hallways.  And some school cafeterias actually contract with fast food chains to feed our children.

While I agree with Ludwig and Murtagh that parents bear some of the responsibility, there are some troublesome things being left unsaid by the two researchers and their supporters. 

First, given the disproportionately high numbers of black and Hispanic children already lingering in the foster care system because of physical and sexual abuse and other forms of neglect, to add over-nutrition to this definition of abuse and neglect risks separating more children of color from their families without addressing much larger systemic realities that place these families and their children at risk.

Second, a plethora of studies have shown that there are significantly higher rates of black and Hispanic children suffering from obesity so obviously that makes them prime targets for doctors and others who are responsible for reporting abuse and neglect to social service agencies.  According to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, one out of every six children is obese in the U.S. and blacks and Hispanics are at the greatest risk.  Among Hispanics, boys are more likely to be obese than girls, while black girls are more likely to be obese than black boys.

Third, placing obese children in the foster care system is not likely to help them given that children currently in care suffer higher rates of obesity than the rest of U.S. children.  Dr. Jesse J. Helton from the University of Illinois Children and Family Research Center published a study showing how foster children have been curiously overlooked from childhood obesity studies, especially since physically and sexually abused children are more likely to suffer from obesity.  Her own study compared the Body Mass Indexes (BMI) of children in foster care to national averages.  She found that only 36% of children in foster care have a healthy BMI compared to 66% for all children in the U.S.  Further, 60% of children in foster care are overweight or obese – a rate that is almost twice the national rate of 31%.

Given these numbers, and the foster care system’s inattention to the problem among the current population, out-of-home placement for obese children now living with their parents is not a logical solution.

How about we stop demonizing parents, especially those who are poor and lack proper access to healthier food alternatives.  Why don’t researchers start shifting their focus on our damaging food culture and companies that market garbage to people?  Raise taxes on these purveyors of food smut.  Pass ordinance laws to limit the number of Chinese restaurants, fried chicken spots and corner bodegas that don’t sell fresh healthy food to their inner-city customers.  Build quality grocery stores that don’t sell fruits and veggies that look like they’ve been riddled with bullet holes.  Or, subsidize farmers markets in depressed urban neighborhoods.  Make healthy food affordable and the bad stuff more expensive.

Imposing a legal measure that would continue to destroy families and communities won’t solve the obesity crisis because the real culprit is our nation’s systemic program of infusing our foods with carcinogenic toxins, which results in sickness and disease, which in turn keeps the wheels of the pharmaceutical industry spinning kinetically.  As long as we keep trying to fix people without taking a more holistic approach to this growing epidemic we will never obstruct the profit machine that burdens us all.