Childhood Obesity and State Intervention

I was reading an article that was published on 7/14/11 in the Huffington Post, which talked about obesity in children and whether or not state intervention should take place against the parents of these kids. Apparently the article had been written by someone named David Katz who happens to be a director of medical research at Yale. The article seemed to be written in almost a condescending tone as if it was a doctor who knew more than the patient and made sure we were aware of that. The tone was not my only concern with the article but some of the content was about an airplane flight the author was in and his neighbor on the flight happened to be an overweight woman who was traveling with her overweight sister and two year old child. The doctor brings up the question of if a mother starts overfeeding her child to the point where it leads to health issues, then what’s the difference between that and if a mother gave her children narcotic drugs.

The comparison although taken to a bit of an extreme is still a very interesting one. This country still does have a health problem concerning children so shouldn’t we do ALL that we can to fix it? Then there comes the question of where do we draw the line, we’ll take children out of abusive homes because it will lead to an unhealthy future for them as adults so doesn’t it make sense that childhood diabetes and obesity leads to an unhealthy future therefore should we take those children away from their parents as well following that particular logic. Although this article is written with some bias it does bring up some interesting topics for discussion.