Queen Nwabueze
A nutritionist, Aaron Nee has slammed the ‘moronic’ National Child Measurement Programme BMI checks after his slim five-year-old son was branded overweight and sent home as a result.
Join our WhatsApp ChannelMr. Nee, from East Sussex, said his son Jacob, who ‘hardly has an ounce of fat on him’, came home with a letter urging his parents to ‘make healthy changes’.
He said: ‘I was very angry reading that because as you can see my son hardly has an ounce of fat on him — he is certainly not overweight and he is certainly not unhealthy.
The 3ft 11 boy was weighed at school in March as part of a nationwide scheme, and was deemed overweight at 26.2kg (4st 1lb).
Reportedly, the nutritionist father was furious when he found out that the child BMI measurement system was being used to assess the weight of children, arguing that it fails to take into account muscle mass and bone density.
He said this is ‘dangerous’ because it means youngsters may be wrongly labelled as overweight or obese, as he believes his son was.
‘Jacob is totally oblivious to what’s gone on because I wouldn’t say anything to him and I’m obviously not going to put him on a diet or anything like that,” Nee fumed.
Mr Nee fears it could lead to widespread eating disorders, by encouraging parents to put their children on diets from a young age.
‘Luckily for my son I’m very educated on the matter, but the majority of parents aren’t. The letter just went straight in the bin,” he said.
Department of Health officials, who oversee the annual National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP), claimed it helps to ‘inform action’ to improve the health of all children and promote a healthier weight.
Childhood obesity reached ‘unprecedented levels’ during the Covid pandemic, with youngsters sat at home and not able to run around in playgrounds.
NHS figures show one in five youngsters in England are overweight by the time they start primary school.
NHS data show the number of obese or morbidly obese children starting or finishing primary school fell in May 2022 in England.
Available data show that Obesity is still more prevalent in boys than girls across both age groups. For reception-age children this year, 10.6 per cent of boys were obese compared to 10.2 per cent of girls. Among year 6 pupils, 26.5 per cent of boys were obese compared to 20.3 per cent of girls.
The National Child Measurement Programme is an NHS scheme that measures the height and weight of children to assess obesity levels within primary schools.
These two measurements are used to generate a Body Mass Index, which is then compared to a national scale to determine whether that child is underweight, normal, overweight or obese.
