Obesity, Caloric Restrictions, and protecting children
Recent news stories report on a case in England where it was seriously proposed that an eight year old boy be taken away from his mother because she had let him get too fat; eventually the social workers and the mother reached an agreement by which she got to keep her son, apparently in exchange for some sort of promise to mend her ways. The argument for taking the boy away was his welfare, presumably based on evidence that being very much overweight reduces one's life expectancy. Googling around, I find that "Additional research has shown that people who are severely obese — with a BMI greater than 45 — live up to 20 years less than people who are not overweight."
One of the better supported results in the study of aging is that, for almost all species for which the experiment has been done—fruit flies are the exception—caloric restriction increases life expectancy. Keep mice or rats on a diet at the bottom edge of adequate, hungry but healthy, and they live considerably longer—almost twice as long in the first such experiment (with rats), a more modest 20-30% longer according to summaries I was able to find. While we do not know for certain that the same will hold for humans, it seems likely.
If so, then virtually every parent on the planet, including those who proposed taking Connor McCreaddie away from his mother, is guilty of child abuse by the same standard by which Connor's mother was. She provided him a diet which, arguably, reduced his life expectancy to 20-30% below what it would have been if she had followed the social workers' advice. We provide our children with a diet which, very probably, reduces their life expectancy by a similar amount below what it would be with a suitably calorie restricted diet.
This leaves us with only one question. After all of our children have been taken away to protect them from their parents, whom do we give them to?