MI Gov Rick Snyder To Stamp Fat Kids With Scarlet "F", Rip Them From Families, Stuff Them Into Trains And Haul Them Off To Fat Farms

Good grief. Government-run schools will now apparently be weighing your kids on the way in and/or out, branding them as fat or not, and sending the data to the nanny bureaucrats. You can see what's coming down the road, right? The government confiscating your children because they literally do not fit in a bureaucratic cookie cutter. Think that's a bit unhinged? Try this on, err...for size: British Social Workers Confiscate Children

I wonder how motivated Britons would have been to bravely defend their homeland from the Nazis if they knew that only two generations later it would degenerate into a country so far from free that the government seizes children from their parents for not meeting bureaucrat-mandated body mass index requirements:

Four obese children are on the brink of being permanently removed from their family by social workers after their parents failed to bring their weight under control.

In the first case of its kind, their mother and father now face what they call the ‘unbearable’ likelihood of never seeing them again.

Their three daughters, aged 11, seven and one, and five-year-old son, will either be ‘fostered without contact’ or adopted.

Either way, the family’s only hope of being reunited will be if the children attempt to track down their parents when they become adults.

The couple, who have been married for nearly 20 years and are not being named to protect their children’s identities, were given a ‘draconian’ ultimatum three years ago…

Warned that the children must slim or be placed in care, the family spent two years living in a council-funded ‘Big Brother’ house in which they were constantly supervised and the food they ate monitored.

But despite subjecting them to intense scrutiny … there was apparently little or no improvement.

So the children will be confiscated, and the parents will probably never see them again, despite not having committed any crime.

This intolerable tyranny is justified by official statistics claiming that people who are overweight are a burden on the socialized healthcare system.

That is just plain evil. And this is how it begins on this side of the pond: Michigan to Track Kids' BMI

In an attempt to combat Michigan's childhood obesity epidemic, Gov. Rick Snyder announced Wednesday that the state would begin tracking kids' body mass index through the Michigan Care Improvement Registry. Although the policy would be one of the most extensive government anti-childhood obesity efforts, pediatricians were divided over whether it would have the desired impact.

The tracking system would require pediatricians to calculate patients' BMI using height and weight measurements, and report these numbers to the state through the existing immunization tracking system, the Michigan Care Improvement Registry. The numbers would be reported anonymously, meaning that the child's identity would not be connected to his or her BMI in state records.

The hope is that having doctors track height and weight in this way would encourage more discussion among parents, kids and doctors about the dangers of being overweight, says Geralyn Lasher, director of communications at the Executive Office of the Governor.

A video report:

Never mind that using the BMI in the first place is STUPID! The problem with BMI is that it is a standard measure of obesity but a very poor one indeed. Other research has linked waist size, not BMI, to dementia, heart disease, asthma and breast cancer (It's your waist size, not your BMI, that is an indicator of obesity). I have to think that measuring waist size is even easier for the bureaucrat (and the doctor) than measuring BMI. I would also think that waist size would be indexed to height (a 40 inch waist for someone 5 foot 5 inches would be worse than for someone 6 feet 5 inches). This is reason #151 not to use the BMI to gauge obesity and thus health. Professor Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit points to this article over at NPR a while ago: Top 10 Reasons Why The BMI Is Bogus. Here's the short of it: 

1. The person who dreamed up the BMI said explicitly that it could not and should not be used to indicate the level of fatness in an individual.

2. It is scientifically nonsensical. (why square the height? And ignore waist circumference?)

3. It is physiologically wrong. (bodybuilders and athletes are screwed)

4. It gets the logic wrong. (if you are obese, your BMI is high. If you have a high BMI, you may not be obese at all!)

5. It's bad statistics. (assumes little muscle mass)

7. It suggests there are distinct categories of underweight, ideal, overweight and obese, with sharp boundaries that hinge on a decimal place. (nonsense!)

8. It makes the more cynical members of society suspect that the medical insurance industry lobbies for the continued use of the BMI to keep their profits high. (Some insurance companies charge higher premiums for people with a high BMI! Bingo!)

9. Continued reliance on the BMI means doctors don't feel the need to use one of the more scientifically sound methods that are available to measure obesity levels. (body calipers anyone?)

10. It embarrasses the U.S. ("It is embarrassing for one of the most scientifically, technologically and medicinally advanced nations in the world to base advice on how to prevent one of the leading causes of poor health and premature death (obesity) on a 200-year-old numerical hack developed by a mathematician who was not even an expert in what little was known about the human body back then." - yup!)

In short, the BMI is utter garbage.

UPDATE: "Governor says he'll be a role-model for Michigan residents."

UPDATE #2: The libs over at The Detroit Free Press give the Snyder plan a thumbs up, which is reason enough to resist it at all cost: Editorial: Gov. Snyder points public and legislators to healthier choices

Gov. Rick Snyder delivered a prescription pad full of best practices Wednesday in his special message on health and wellness. The list is laudable. But breaking through legislative inertia in some of these areas may be just as hard as getting Michiganders in general to put down the remote and take a walk.

Snyder is right to try. He clearly wants the state's residents to understand how much they have at stake -- and how much they control their own destinies in the rising costs of health care. If every Michigander fell within normal ranges on four behaviors and four health measures -- which Snyder calls the 4x4 plan -- health care costs would fall by more than half, he said.

Funny how liberals insist we will control our own destinies as they grow the nanny state, no? Liberals - always minding other people's business.