Joanna Blythman on obesity

THE unthinkable has happened. A boy has been taken into care in Lothian because he is obese. In Dundee, another family has been warned that its six children will face the same treatment unless they slim down.

This is a disturbing precedent. If it turns into a trend, then the implications are as enormous as the scale of the problem.

Start cracking down on families of fatties in this way, and all our care homes will be bulging at the seams. There are so many overweight and obese kids these days, it no more makes sense to take them into care than it does to incarcerate everyone who ever got a parking ticket.

As with prisons when they are overcrowded, we would have to keep children in police cells, or in temporary army camps. There would not be enough foster parents to go around. We would have to offer new ones incentives - dangling the promise of a fat kids attendance allowance or similar. Even then, most of the recruits would be on the fat side.

What a badly thought-out reaction. It's true that being fat can blight your life, that people who balloon as children tend to retain that burden throughout their lives. We are all familiar by now with the frightening litany of chronic disease precipitated by excess kilos, so there's no need to scare ourselves silly with that little lot again.

But to take children away from their parents solely on these grounds surely gives new meaning to the word "disproportionate".

What are the social work bosses thinking of? Breaking up families is a grave power of last resort. You can bet your bottom dollar that most kids would rather stay with their parents, however poor or inadequate, than be institutionalised or looked after by strangers.

Letting a child become too fat is a sin of indulgence, of passive neglect, perhaps. But up there in the bad parenting stakes, it hardly rates with forcing children to witness their mother being beaten up every other day.

It's all very well for the powers that be to come over all sanctimonious about rescuing children from a daily diet of doughnuts, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Irn-Bru, but have social work bosses studied the pantries of the care homes over which they preside? I'll wager that they are serving up the same old diet of junk that turns up in most institutional catering.

I don't expect that kids taken into care on obesity grounds will be snacking away on Bircher muesli, smoothies and brown rice. More like microwaved sausage rolls, beans, and a pile of reconstituted, thoroughly deep fried, potato products.

Let's face it, Britain can't even manage to feed people in hospital right, even when they are sick and vulnerable. If your illness or MRSA doesn't get you, then the hospital food is the next likely assassin. Why should care homes be any better?

Parents of fat kids can legitimately use the same excuse as the rest of us - it is so terribly easy to become fat in Britain. We live in an obesogenic culture. Healthy food is the exception, rather than the rule.

If you just eat what everyone else eats, and take advantage of the popular food options that are regularly presented to you, then there is a very strong chance that you'll be joining that growing band of compatriots mail-ordering joggers in XXXL-plus sizes, along with Mini-Me versions for the kids, because nothing else fits.

It's almost as if there is a national conspiracy to make the population fat. Bad food is woven into the structure of daily life. Going for a swim? Or a workout? That's good for your health, isn't it?

Well, yes - as long as you ignore the vending machine loaded with fizzy drinks and sweets. Want to read a newspaper and keep abreast of national and world events like a decent, participating citizen? Then you'll be walking into a shop with a wall of confectionery, crisps and garish liquids misleadingly called "juice". Step into a supermarket, and you enter super-sized Three-For-Two land.

It has never been so easy to overconsume, or required so little shopping and cooking effort to clock up the calories.

What can we do, short of taking 50% of the population into care for their own good? Before we apply swingeing sanctions to the most hapless of our fatties, we owe it to them to get the big structural conditions right.

If we had free school meals (as being piloted in Scotland); health-promoting, sustaining hospital and residential home food; prison grub that left inmates calmer, happier and less nutritionally challenged and if we could be sure that everyone in Scotland had a decent, affordable supply of fresh fruit and vegetables within walking distance, then we would be in a better moral position to get heavy with repeat offender fatties.

Without these measures being put in place, we are just penalising the most hapless for society's collective failure to create a climate that encourages good food. That leaves children crying themselves to sleep at night and achieves precisely nothing.