Nanny knows best

"Fat reports on children to be sent to parents", claims the Telegraph's website.

Not a promising headline, is it?

The subtitle offers little further encouragement:

Parents are to get school "fat reports" detailing their children's weight as part of the fight against childhood obesity.

Actually consider that term: "fat reports". When I went to school - and yes, that hasn't happened for over ten years - we used to get school reports, broken down into subsections for recording one's prowess (or otherwise) in maths, English, history, PE and so on. Nowhere did mine contain a box for my long-suffering teachers to comment upon my tubbiness. Which would have been redundant anyway - when I was at school we had this revolutionary approach to staying in shape by not eating too much and doing some exercise. Amazing, eh? And it worked! Perhaps I should make my fortune marketing this as the latest fad diet to gullible women in the Daily Mail's FeMail section?

On with the article:

Rules to be introduced at the start of the academic year in September will see the parents of all children aged between four and five, and 10 and 11 receive the reports, after Government-commissioned research suggested the weight problem among Britain's children is worse than originally thought.

The most recent figures available show that one in 10 children aged between four and five are obese and 13 per cent are overweight, with the figures rising to 17.5 per cent and 14.2 per cent by age 11.

Children are getting fatter. Now, this is not good. There are plenty of reasons why children shouldn't be fat. This evidently vexes the Government; much more than teaching them to read or write seems to. The difference being that state education is there to impart literacy and numeracy, not engage in this creepy monitoring of pre-pubescent porkiness. Fascinating prioritisation.

The research for the Department of Health reported that despite a well-publicised campaign to tackle childhood obesity and produce a comprehensive picture of the problem, the results "may underestimate the true population prevalence of obesity and overweight at national, regional and local level".

A Department of Health spokesman last night (SUN) said: "If you do not opt out and your child is measured at school you will automatically get feedback."

I am instantly suspicious whenever some bright spark pipes up with "yes, but you can opt out". The presumption should be that you already are opted out, unless you actively choose to opt in. Not the other way around. I am not surprised to hear that the Government is totally oblivious to this.

The British Medical Association is already warning that a quarter of all children in the UK will be obese by 2020, resulting in them having a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

Then perhaps those parents should, I dunno, stop feeding them so many chips and send them off to the park more often? It's called parental responsibility.

Paul Sacher, a paediatric dietician at the Childhood Nutrition Research Centre in London, said many parents needed help in identifying that their children were overweight in the first place.

"If I was a parent I would want to know if my child was overweight or obese, then I could do something about it," he said.

What?! Seriously - what? You'd want to know if your child was overweight or obese? Have you tried using your fucking eyes?

What kind of total moron cannot see that their OWN CHILDREN are overweight? What type of utter blithering idiot is incapable of assessing their own flesh and blood to see if there's a bit too much of the former flopping around? Words (nearly) fail me.

"There is a major problem with parents' perception of their children's weight. As all children are getting bigger, it is becoming more difficult for parents to work out whether their children are overweight by just looking at them and comparing them to other kids. The only way we can work out whether children are getting bigger is to weigh them all."

No it isn't. Being overweight is an absolute condition, not a relative one. If you cannot spot it by the simple process of looking for a few seconds, it's a wonder you ever had children in the first place. I, for instance, can work out that Mr Sacher is a total idiot by looking at what he says. If I placed him alongside lots of other imbeciles this wouldn't somehow cancel out his own stupidity.

The Conservatives have opposed the plan, saying it should be left to parents to regulate the weight of their children.

Quite.