Fat Talk spurs kids' eating disorders

Fears about obesity are feeding so much "fat phobia" that experts worry of an increase in healthy kids obsessing about weight and more parents projecting irrational fears about fat on their children.
 
Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children has seen preteens and teens who have attended school-based obesity prevention programs, "who then decide they're going to be the best kid at not getting fat, who then end up losing so much weight that they put themselves medically at risk," says Dr. Leora Pinhas, psychiatric director of the hospital's eating disorders program.
 
"They're little kids. They don't have to lose a lot of weight to get sick."

"We have had kids who have been weighed in the gym and then had to deal with how they felt about their weight, and these may have been kids who never weighed themselves before and it hadn't been a concern before," Pinhas says.
 
Children are being taught in nutrition classes how to cut all fat from their diet.
 
Some are questioning whether the obesity "epidemic" is even real and whether schools have any business trying to fight obesity.
 
"It seems like whenever we decide there is an epidemic, people run around helter-skelter trying to solve the problem without really thinking about it in an organized fashion," says Pinhas. "I'm not convinced that telling kids that they're fat, or that they might get fat, is a way of solving the problem."
 
But, "who buys food, who makes the meals? It's not the eight-year-old," Pinhas says. "All we seem to do is keep placing more unreasonable expectations on children that can be confusing for them."  more....