The childhood obesity scare has gone too far - way too far. It is zapping the fun out of childhood, screwing up children's attitudes to food, and potentially giving rise to a new round of anti-fat kid persecution in the nation's playgrounds.
Earlier this week, the Food Standards Agency declared that two-year-olds should be eating fewer fatty foods - two-year-olds! "Even toddlers could reduce fats", screamed the headlines. Today, Jessica Mitchell reports on Cif that the Associate Parliamentary Food and Health Forum has concluded its year-long inquiry (pdf) into the influence of nutrition on mental health (public money well spent, I'm sure): it has recommended that artificial colours and non-essential preservatives be prohibited from food products and soft drinks because apparently they make children hyperactive. So, kids, if nice food doesn't make you fat, it might make you temporarily deranged.
Some schools have already outlawed sweets, crisps, chocolate, chips, salt and anything else that looks, tastes or smells tantalising to young people. Such is the strength of officialdom's jihad against junk food that, as I reported for the BBC in 2006, in some schools entrepreneurial students are smuggling in sweets in order to sell them in a new playground-based black market of contraband confectionery. In other schools, teachers and dinner ladies now rifle through kids' lunchboxes and send a stern letter home to mum and dad if they fail to provide government-approved (or at least Jamie Oliver-approved) healthy grub.
Ed Balls, secretary of state for children, schools and families, is introducing compulsory cookery lessons in September for those between 11 and 14 years old. They won't be like Home Economics lessons of old, where we made rubbish cakes, chucked dough at some pupils and flirted with others, and learnt a few social skills; instead compulsory cooking is being institutionalised because "teaching kids to cook healthy meals is an important way schools can help produce healthy adults". In short, children will be inculcated with the government's soulless message about food-as-morality.
Worst of all, the government has proposed weighing schoolchildren as young as four to determine whether they have an acceptable Body Mass Index. Where old racist regimes measured children's facial features to ensure they were properly Aryan, the health-obsessed New Labour regime wants to measure kids' height, weight and waistlines to make sure they are morally-upstanding citizens-to-be who have resisted the temptation to gorge on evil junk food.
Researchers at Loughborough University have expressed concern that such humiliating tests of pupils' BMI could lead to children being "misinformed about the state of their health and being bullied". Perfectly healthy and happy children who happen to have a bit of puppy fat or boyish chubbiness could fall foul of the authorities' tyrannical weight-monitoring regime. The Loughborough researchers are worried that we might end up with the degrading practice of "fat laps" in the UK: this is when overweight children are made to run off their excess weight, sometimes in full view of other, jeering children. They have already been reported in Australia, where there's a childhood obesity panic similar to ours.
The obesity panic is potentially doing far more damage to children - on physical, emotional and psychological levels - than eating the occasional turkey twizzler or swigging from a bottle of fizzy pop could ever do. It has turned eating sweets, that childhood pleasure which all of the killjoys in the anti-obesity industry enjoyed, into something shameful, a dirty, secretive practice to be carried out behind the bike sheds or in the school loo.
It is making children unnecessarily nervous about what they eat, and depressingly obsessed with getting a bit fat. Jeya Henry, Professor of Human Nutrition at Oxford Brookes University, worked on a study of food and health in a primary school and met a six-year-old boy who tearfully complained about having "fat thighs". "That is sad, isn't it? Terrible," says Professor Henry. "Childhood should be a time to enjoy and experiment with food." Not any more, it seems.
And the obesity panic is no doubt making those kids who are genuinely fat feel more isolated than ever before. In the past, bullied fat kids could turn to teachers, most of whom would say something sensible like: "There's nothing wrong with being fat, so leave Johnny alone." How could a teacher say that with a straight face today, when the school system - from the classroom to the lunch hall - is being reoriented around the message that obesity is disgusting and must be wiped out? Fat kids could become the victims of a renewed, virtually state-sponsored fat-bashing in the school's playground.
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, author of The Tyranny of Health and a contributor to spiked, my online magazine, says healthy eating has become "the highest form of ethical virtue recognised in contemporary society". What we eat has formed the basis of a new, pernicious moral divide. Those who eat microwave meals, cheap chicken from Tesco and crisps (and we know who they mean) are looked upon as vulgar and self-destructive; those who eat fresh organic produce, free-range chicken and handcooked Kettle chips (and we know who these people are, too) are seen as good, aware, caring, morally superior.
Recently, for an article I was writing, I had cause to venture on to some of those unsavoury pro-anorexia websites. The two most commonly expressed sentiments by the site's users is that food is somehow a poison and that "Fat is the Enemy". In an age when often unfounded food scares are rife - covering everything from additives to E numbers - and when obesity is considered to be public enemy number one, I wonder where these sad, lonely celebrators of anorexia got their ideas from? Perhaps it is not the skinny models in Vogue that are making young people screwed up about food, but the top-down state-sponsored war on anything that looks or feels like a bit of puppy fat.
