Ohio Child Taken from Parents for Obesity, But It’s Okay to Sell Trans Fats, Fructose & Aspartame

The nanny state, in which government presumes to be better able to determine what’s best for everyone, and cram those opinions down everyone’s throats, is advancing. Now, the state of Ohio has decided that they are acting in a child’s best interests by tearing him away from his family if he’s fatter than the state thinks he should be.

A Cleveland, Ohio boy was placed in foster care for the sole reason of his weight. Without question, weighing in at more than 200 pounds in the third grade is not good. It certainly can lead to diabetes. However, we need to step back and ask how doctors and social workers have assumed the power to define what is best for a child—and then to act on it by yanking them from their homes and families and handing them over to strangers.

The incident in question involves a boy who has no health problems other than sleep apnea. He is simply obese. He is apparently well-adjusted, is on the honor roll, and participates in school activities. His mother has clearly shown concern about his health. He wears a machine at night to monitor his breathing. She says:

They are trying to make it seem like I am unfit, like I don’t love my child. Of course I love him. Of course I want him to lose weight. It’s a lifestyle change, and they are trying to make it seem like I am not embracing that. It is very hard, but I am trying.

A juvenile public defender for decades, Sam Amata stated that this is the first time he’s seen this done. He questions taking a child from his parents when there is no imminent risk. He has seen children left in homes with parents who have severe drug problems or who beat their children.

There can be little question that his mother has tried. She has encouraged him to exercise and purchased a bicycle for him. She enrolled him in a hospital program called Healthy Kids, Healthy Weight. However, other people are also involved. His mother has found that other children have given him food. Though she’s tried to explain to the boy that he shouldn’t eat it, if she’s not there, she can’t stop it.

And who can be there 24 hours a day, especially in today’s world where mothers must work and send children to school? Why isn’t the school bearing some responsibility for the child’s weight? Come to think of it, does the school have soda pop available for children? Candy? Chips?

The child had lost weight last year, but had been regaining it when the state grabbed him. Of course, this demonstrates the nature of the problem for nearly all people who are overweight. When the emphasis is on losing weight, rather than on good diet and lifestyle, then the weight nearly always comes back. Ultimately, diets make people fatter by changing the metabolism. Therefore, the state is virtually guaranteeing that the child will face an unhealthy future by putting so much emphasis on his weight, rather than on his health.

As it turns out, the foster mother is unable to keep up with the child’s appointments—though no accusation has been made that the mother was unable to keep up with them. So, the county that took the boy into custody is considering giving her extra help. They’re even considering providing the boy with a personal trainer!

The mother wasn’t offered these options.

State Hypocrisy

Margo Wooten is the director of nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest. She has stated:

For parents right now, trying to feed their children a healthy diet is like swimming upstream. I don’t want to absolve parents, but they aren’t in this alone.

Wooten recently took her own teenaged daughter shopping for clothes, and what she found was shocking:

And at the front counter, they were selling movie-theater-sized boxes of candy, chocolate and gummy bears. I understand impulse buys at the counter, like earrings and nail tattoos. But giant boxes of candy?

Junk food is everywhere, and the situation is getting worse. Congress has recently protected agribusiness by letting them keep pizza and french fries in school lunches! As Wooten says:

Pizza should be served with a vegetable, not count as one.

The government is hypocritical. It allows agribusiness to run rampant. It allows fat-producing foods that destroy health in many ways. Trans fats, aspartame, and fructose are placed in most foods available in supermarkets. All are fat-producing, and all are health destroying in other ways. Yet these products continue to be produced, advertised, and placed in schools and locations where children are expected.

This country, which is unable to control itself enough to stop this devastating practice, sees fit to rip a child away from the home where is is loved simply because he’s fat. They choose to spend far more money paying someone else to care for the child, and then consider provide him with services that were not given to the mother. How is it possible to claim that the child’s best interests were the deciding factor, when they clearly weren’t interested in providing assistance to the mother? All they were willing to do was make demands of her, and now they accuse her of child abuse when she’s done everything she could to help her son.

Yet, the country makes no serious attempt to limit the real causes of that child’s obesity: food full of calories and lacking in nutrition, filled with chemicals and ingredients virtually designed to make people crave more of it. The insanity and mean-spiritedness of such duplicity and hypocrisy are mind-numbing.

Sources:

• Country places obese Cleveland Heights child in foster care
• It’s tough these days to maintain a healthy diet for children

Tagged agribusiness, conventional medicine, modern medicine, obese child foster care, obese child stolen from mother, obese child taken by state