We can't afford childhood obesity any more.
Kid Faticide! Fat Kidicide! Until You Decide!
Fat kids need our help. We tend to ignore this Fat epidemic. We pretend that they will grow out of it. It’s just baby Fat.
Some do. Most don’t.
Childhood obesity is so much more polite and politically correct. It softens the magnitude of what we have been avoiding for decades. It is an epidemic that we can do something about. My vote is YES! It is time to do something about childhood Fat and obesity in our society! It is time to prevent Kid Faticide!
We owe it to them, to ourselves and to each other. We can’t afford Fat, any longer!
Some kids are Fat for reasons beyond their control. Their genetics or metabolisms are out of whack and they need specialized medical intervention.
Most are victims of improper eating habits, benignly enabled through neglectful or ignorant caretakers; i.e. parents and grandparents, school lunch room personnel and others who see and ignore the truth of what our kids are eating. These are not vicious people with a plan to get our kids Fat or to keep them Fat. They are part of a larger system that has no plan to attack childhood obesity at its roots. So we and they watch, ignore and enable them as we shake our heads, from pity to ridicule, continuing to do nothing about it.
For others, the plot is much more insidious. These people carefully craft schemes to influence the young and vulnerable to become lifelong clients. Their purpose is to sell to the young without consideration of the consequences. These marketeers are experts: Masters of Influence. They help unscrupulous pushers of food ignore the problems that unbridled consumption can cause.
Selling sugared cereal to a Fat or obese child is morally wrong. So is feeding it to that child and/or watching idly as that child gorges his or herself on inappropriate eating and drinking.
Sugared cereal is not the problem. Who eats it, how much and how often is. So is not having a wellness plan to eat nutritious and healthy food. Over time these inappropriate choices and behaviors become lifestyle that is difficult and in many cases impossible to change.
Our task is to get to them when they are young and to use the same brilliant techniques that these Masters of Influence use, this time to promote Wellness instead of downright victimization of the vulnerable. Let’s have Madison Avenue sell Wellness they way they sell: SELL!
Let’s face it, most of our kids are the fed rather than the feeders of our world. We feed. They eat, not the other way around.
This article focuses on those otherwise normal kids who are being groomed by the adults in their world to become the Fat or obese, unhealthy and ridiculed adults and parents of tomorrow.
This article is the first in a series. It is my hope that now that I got your attention about the problem, we can begin a discussion about what we can do to create positive, achievable permanent solutions to preventable lifestyle problems for present and future generations.
