Over the past year we have been telling Talk of the Sound readers about the “camel’s nose under the tent” approach to establishing requiring BMI data collection for every child in the United States. What began as a voluntary program may now soon become the law of the land with parents compelled to allow government officials to measure and weigh their children to “fight obesity”. How does measuring and weighing children “fight” obesity? It doesn’t. The first step in these sorts of “do goody/big brother” initiatives is to create voluntary programs and take measurements to establish baselines. The trick is having collected the data, the statistics gleaned from the data can then be manipulated to support claims of a “crisis” that must be addressed with new laws compelling Americans to abide by state and federal laws as to what you can eat — what restaurants can sell, what school cafeterias can serve.
While Talk of the Sound certainly supports the notion of kids eating healthy foods, we have to wonder whether New Rochelle residents are keen on the idea that some bureaucrat in Washington will decide what kind of sandwich their kid can eat at school tomorrow.
At this point we would just like to note for readers the stepwise process by which food zealots (mostly vegans) have migrated our society further and further down the road of mandating what sort of food kids can eat. Their purpose? Michelle Obama said the other day ““We want to marshal every resource…to ensure that we are providing each and every child the happy, healthy future they deserve.” In other words, the federal government wants to take control of what your kids eat.
Since when is it up to the government to make kids happy?
New Rochelle Board of Education Celebrates “Body-Mass Index Scam”
In 2006 the geniuses in Albany passed legislation requiring every school child in the state of New York to have their BMI (body mass index) calculated and reported to the state. The purpose of this data collection is unstated. The eventual use of this data is unknown.
Wonder Why the Government Likes BMI as a Measurement of Obesity?
The only way to deal with our “obesity epidemic” is to address the “poverty epidemic” — of course, as measured by yet another government psuedo-science statistic called the “poverty line”. And how do we deal with that? You guessed it, create more entitlement programs, programs to be run by the very same government that is funding the study, a study based on a statistical measure that is meaningless, where the statistics are unreliable and unverifiable but all point to the same convenient conclusion — the government needs more of your money.
Wisconsin Congressman Proposes the Healthy CHOICES Act, H.R. 5209; Michelle Obama’s Child Obesity Task Force:
A bill introduced this month in Congress would put the federal and state governments in the business of tracking how fat, or skinny, American children are. States receiving federal grants provided for in the bill would be required to annually track the Body Mass Index of all children ages 2 through 18. The grant-receiving states would be required to mandate that all health care providers in the state determine the Body Mass Index of all their patients in the 2-to-18 age bracket and then report that information to the state government. The state government, in turn, would be required to report the information to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for analysis.