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Like millions of other American parents, my husband and I received a warning letter from the BMI police last week. Our active, healthy 8th-grade daughter is "very lean," according to her school-administered "Fitnessgram." The national student body monitors think this is a public health problem. The obesity report card lectured that because our daughter's body-mass index is "very low," we "should make certain" that she "is eating a healthy diet that includes the appropriate number of calories." Thanks, geniuses. We had no idea such measurements were taking place, and we wondered whether we were alone in objecting to this unsolicited...

Tales from the Nanny State continue to the amazement of nobody, I’m sure. In a story coming from (where else…) New York City, the wise school officials, ever concerned about the health and future of their students, decided to check out what each of the kids weighs, matching the results against some Body Mass Index chart. Upon noting that many of the children failed to pass muster, they decided to inform the parents… by handing the kids notes to take home. What could possibly go wrong? A New York City mom was fit to be tied Wednesday after her...

Well that didn’t take long. Yesterday, in a post discussing a New York Times op-ed that called for heavy taxation on “unhealthy” foods, I asked, “How long before some starry-eyed but angry-faced Democrat proposes legislation to force ‘healthy food’ advertising?” Now The Daily Caller reports that food producers could face government regulations requiring “healthy” composition profiles for foods marketed to children two to seventeen years old.If enacted, new regulatory criteria will reclassify many foods which the FDA presently considers healthy as off limits for advertising to children. In the present formulations, eighty-eight of the top 100 most-consumed foods will be...

First, kill all the farm subsidies! That should have been President Obama's mantra if he truly wanted to curb the nation's child-obesity "epidemic." Instead, on Monday he signed into law the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. That law has plenty of problems. But it's certainly striking how it ignores such a flagrant contributor to flabby youth -- Uncle Sam's economically illiterate farm program. The US Department of Agriculture spends billions a year on farm subsidies that indirectly promote obesity. How? The subsidies maintain an oversupply of certain foods at commensurately cheap prices. Subsidies have proved a catalyst for agribusiness to produce...

Like adults, kids who are more spiritual or religious tend to be healthier. That’s the conclusion of Dr. Barry Nierenberg, Ph.D., ABPP, associate professor of psychology at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who has been studying the relationship between faith and health. He presented on the topic at the American Psychological Association’s Division of Rehabilitation Psychology national conference on February 27, in Jackson, Fla. “A number of studies have shown a positive relationship between participatory prayer and lower rates of heart disease, cirrhosis, emphysema and stroke in adults,” he says. “Prayer has been shown to correlate to lower...

Childhood obesity, rising for more than two decades, appears to have hit a plateau, a potentially significant milestone in the battle against excessive weight gain among children. But the finding, based on survey data gathered from 1999 to 2006 by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and published in Wednesday’s issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, was greeted with guarded optimism. It is not clear if the lull in childhood weight gain is permanent or even if it is the result of public anti-obesity efforts to limit junk food and increase physical activity in schools....

Couch Potato Kids By Julie Mosher With so much emphasis on looks in today's society (mainly in bulimic Hollywood), there is a growing problem we all know as obesity. Not only is this a serious problem in adults, but it is now a huge problem in our children as well. Why has this become such an out-of-control crisis when in the last 30 years it was seen very rarely, if at all? There are many factors that are in play here to answer that question. Perhaps the most important question to answer is, to whom does the responsibility fall for...