Should Obese Kids Be Put In Foster Care?

"Should morbidly obese kids be put in foster care?" Neil Katz poses this jarring question on CBS News's health blog, exploring the logic behind the increasingly prevalent recommendation among health care specialists. The logic is incredibly simple, although it potentially conflates the complex factors affecting obesity with an oversimplified explanation based on environment:

If children can be removed from a home because of health risks like physical and mental abuse or failure to care for health problems like asthma or epilepsy, why not a long term health risk like obesity which can create a life long struggle with diabetes and heart problems.

"Childhood obesity can be seen as a failure to adequately care for your children by failing to provide a healthy diet and sufficient activity, whether through direct neglect or more subtly through an inability to deny children the pleasures of energy dense fast food and television viewing," wrote the study's lead author Russell Vine in a paper published in the British Medical Journal.