Food Stamps and Sugary Drinks

Back in 2010, New York's Mayor Bloomberg (he of the new big-soda ban) and then-Governor Paterson proposed limiting the ability of food-stamp recipients to spend their aid-money on sugary sodas. They hoped to show that limiting spending on sugary drinks would reduce obesity. This was viewed as paternalistic intervention into the lives of the poor, and the federal government blocked the proposal. Now colleagues at Yale's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity have demonstrated that "[d]espite all the evidence on health risks linked to their consumption, sugar-sweetened beverages account for almost 60% of beverage purchases among SNAP [Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program] households and about one half of beverages purchased by WIC-only [Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children] households." In all, around $2 billion dollars of SNAP money is spent annually on refreshment beverages "with no nutritional value." Perhaps it's time to put additional limits--not all-out bans, but limits--on the freedom of nutrition-subsidy recipients to spend their aid dollars on sugar-water.

Obese Child Seized by State, UK Edition

I blogged last week about the 200-pound eight-year-old who was removed from his mom in Cleveland and sent into foster care. Seems that it's not only in the US that public health officials are removing children from families who let them become too overweight. Here's an article about a five-year-old from Tameside, Greater Manchester, UK, removed from home for similar reasons; this child appears to be the youngest, but is by no means the first, to be seized from parents by UK health officials by reason of obesity.

Art Caplan has of course commented, and I have to agree: "You don't take someone out of the house and away from their parents unless they have an immediate risk of death."

Is foster care really a less expensive and more effective option than offering counseling and assistance to the child's parents?

I'm Not Lovin' It

So, San Francisco last year prohibited the inclusion of free toys in kids' meals that fail to meet nutritional standards. The so-called "Happy Meal Ban" goes into effect on December 1. So what are San Francisco McDonald's restaurants doing? Charging ten cents for the toy.

Update: Burger King, too.

Obese Child Seized by State

Ohio officials have taken an eight-year-old child away from his mother and placed him into foster care because they believe his mother has been unable to help the child control his weight. (The boy weighs 200 pounds, while normal weight for an 8-year-old is 60.) State authorities had been working with the mother to reduce the boy's weight for 20 months. The boy has been diagnosed with sleep apnea. In this interview, Art Caplan offers several reasons why the state's move was wrong: the removal from his mother will cause emotional turmoil; there's no proof that foster care will help control the boy's weight; the foster-care system is already overwhelmed and there are too many morbidly obese kids to make this a viable policy; the boy will eventually return home, where bad habits and social conditions may not have changed during his absence; and, finally, while the boy's weight places him at high risk for future disease, his obesity does not put him in the kind of imminent danger normally needed to justify removal from the home. On this last point, bioethicist Norm Fost disagrees; he's quoted in the first article linked above as saying that the boy's sleep apnea could be placing him in imminent danger.

Removing the child from home can't be the right approach. It may be true that his mother is incapable of taking basic steps to control his weight. But even on that assumption, his obesity is likely to have social, emotional and physical origins that even very fine foster care will be ill-equipped to address. Perhaps he'll lose weight when he's away from his home--or perhaps the emotional turmoil will make it harder for him to lose weight. In any case, he'll eventually return home, and what will happen then? Meantime, his mother is surely learning the wrong lesson about the benevolence of state interventions on her son's behalf.