Obese people should not be allowed to adopt children
Dear Damien Hall,
I cannot imagine what it must be like to find out that you are unable to have children of your own. Naturally, you turned to adoption after you received this news but you have been told by Leeds City Council that you are ineligible to do so as you weigh 24 stone. You have been informed that a reapplication will be considered if and when you slim down. Harsh as this may sound, I’m siding with your local council as you seem unable to grasp the dangers that your weight poses.
First, a basic lesson in health risks. Obesity is a major risk factor for heart disease and heart attacks as it increases cholesterol levels, raises blood pressure, induces diabetes and can lead to joint and muscle problems for obvious reasons. You have a body mass index (BMI) of 42, which is classed as ‘morbidly obese’. To put that in context, should you be the same height as me (5′8″) you would weigh a whopping 276 pounds. Leeds City Council have told you to get your BMI below 40 and to keep it there if you want to be considered for adoption. In an interview with Radio 5 Live you complained that “it’s hard to lose weight under pressure” and protested that ”I’m not a couch potato and I don’t sit eating takeaways every night”, which begs the question of what exactly it is that makes you so incredibly fat. You went on to play the sympathy card when you said: “I just feel as though we were only judged on my weight and not all the other good things about us. We don’t drink or smoke and we could give a child a happy and safe home.” Your wife insists that you are an ‘active person’, which you’ll have to excuse me for being a little skeptical of, although her point that “you’ve got a child in care who’s going to get up tomorrow morning not knowing where it’s going and we’re here ready to take a child on. They seem to be saying it’s better for them to be in care and being shoved from pillar to post just in case Damien dies.” Well, yes, duh.
Leeds City Council made their views perfectly clear when they wrote to you regarding your application. The adoption panel “are unlikely to approve applicants with a BMI over 40 because of the long-term health risks” and to be honest I find it incredible that you are arguing about this. The long-term health risks are bad enough; the short-term risks are even worse. Having a BMI of 42 means that the chance of an early death, let alone making through to retirement age, is significantly increased. The council went to say that they have “a legal responsibility to ensure that children are placed with adopters who are able to provide the best possible lifelong care.” I know that the age-old saying of “the only thing that matters is that a child is brought up in a loving environment” can be wheeled out here. Even so, the BBC reported recently that carrying extra fat around your middle substantially increases the risk of an early death, in which a new study found that every extra 2 inches (5cm) around the waist raised the chance of early death by between 13% and 17%. If this figure is applied to you, the statistical risk of you dying young is frighteningly high.
I accept that Leeds City Council’s decision may be hard to swallow (pun intended) but surely you can see where they are coming from. The fact that you don’t smoke and don’t drink is a credit to you. My attitude on this matter is that despite your protestations of possessing good parenting skills, you cannot escape the reality of what you are offering an adoptchild: a potentially single parent family crippled by the early death of a parent caused by obesity plus the subsequent trauma this would inflict on a child who has presumably experienced enough pain and suffering already. If you can get your weight down and show that you can keep it down, good luck to you in your next application. Otherwise, I suggest you look in the mirror if you still don’t understand why your local council won’t back you.
Yours sincerely,
A.Tory
UPDATE: according to the story on the BBC website, Darren weighs 24.5 stone (156kg). Watch the video about Darren and see how little of him they can fit in the camera shot if you are unsure of how unhealthily large a 24.5 stone guy is.
Witanagemot Blogs
so now you are a fattist social democrat – shame!
I cannot imagine what it must be like to find out that you are unable to have children of your own.
Let me tell you, then. It’s awful. Truly depressing. Life may be short, brutish and nasty at the best of times, but at least it does not usually feel short, brutish, nasty and pointless.
My immediate thought on reading of this story is that while we do not know why this couple are having difficulty conceiving, extreme obesity on the part of the male is a factor in reducing fertility. So reducing his weight may in fact help him on a number of fronts.
My experience is that infertile couples are the last people who you should listen to on this subject. Their experience is likely to introduce a degree of paranoia, which will be reinforced by the apparently illogical decision to keep a child in care rather than give it to them, despite the fact that unsuitable couples conceive naturally day in, day out. Clearly there is an official conspiracy against them, then. Hard as it is for them to accept, though, the duty of the adoption panel is to assess them as a fit and proper home, and their arguments to the contrary are as irrelevant as they are appealing.
Oh, and Alistair – I’ve not met LFAT, but I suspect Damien Hall is the fattest, actually*.
(*with due credit to Jimmy Carr for that one)
Alastair, what are you talking about? I would have thought accusations of right-wing lunacy were more the order of the day….
Patently, well spotted on the infertility-obesity link. I’m still not entirely sure why Radio 5 saw this as a particularly surprising incident worthy of a news programme, seeing as the adoption panel is well within their legal and moral rights to turn down this couple.
“I’m still not entirely sure why Radio 5 saw this as a particularly surprising incident worthy of a news programme…”
For the same reason Channel 5 runs those lowest-common-denominator ‘fattest/ugliest/tallest man’ frak-show programmes, perhaps? There’s a nasty, voyeuristic streak in humab beings…
A distinct possibility, although this time they seem to be demanding sympathy from their listeners rather than poking the fat people with a stick (metaphorically speaking).
Its part of our obsession with medicalisng society’s ills. Fat people aren’t eating too many pies or being lazy, they’re *obese*. They have a medical condition and are protected under the DDA, don’t you know. Oooh, that raises a point – was it legal to discriminate against a disabled fatty on the grounds of their weight?
To be fair, its not an inconsistent decision as Social Services can now take your kid into care if THEY are obese. Which reminds me of the old joke from the 80s: what’s the difference between a social worker and a rottweiler? You get half your baby back from a rotty.
The thought about discrimination also struck me when I was reading through this.
To my mind, this is not evidence of discrimination because there is no prejudice involved (something that a lot of people forget is part of the definition of discrimination) but I can see why some members of the public might expect a lawsuit to follow.
surely the point is that the chaps weight is irrelevant to whether he and his wife are able to provide a caring home to bring up children in. Yet another example of a stupid nannying decision.
Leeds Council appear to have been very sensible on this. They haven’t actually said that fat people cannot adopt – but that if you have children you have to face up to your problems and start addressing them. If the couple really want children getting his BMI down from 42 to 40 shouldn’t be too much of a problem, especially if he has an active lifestyle (perhaps his wife might just reduce the food intake ever so slightly). And if they are not prepared to make such a small commitment, which would be for the benefit of any adopted child then tough.
Alastair, his weight is not irrelevant – it could be more relevant. If he is at serious risk of an early death then Leeds City Council would be negligent if they didn’t take this into account.
TB, I agree that this is hardly a big commitment. Darren complaining that it’s hard to lose weight under pressure is an unbelievable shirking of responsibility.
Whatever you think – exercise, diet, advertising, evil food companies, evil pedlars of sedentary entertainment – in the end your weight is YOUR responsibility. If you are too fat, YOU are at risk of early death through avoidable conditions. Nobody else, just YOU. So while you can blame who you like, in the end its YOU that carries the can for what happens which is why its YOU who should be most interested in changing your situation and probability curve.
Despite the misinformation we have been fed over the years by the dieting industry and the medical profession, overweight is not caused by ‘overeating’; it is caused by weakened blood vessels leading to fluid retention and salt sensitivity. – Here is how to reduce these problems easily, quickly and safely:
Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs, hunger or expense by eating less salt! – Try it! – You will feel so much better!
“overweight is not caused by ‘overeating’”
And the award for the best quote of 2009 so far goes to…..
In all fairness, LFAT, a very, very, tiny minority of people have disorders that lead to their bodies accruing more size than they would do ordinarily; thyroid disorders and so forth…
I know, I know. The quote just amused me. Disorders such as Prader-Willi syndrome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prader-Willi_syndrome) are certainly not amusing, but I assume – perhaps optimistically judging by some comments – that people understand the difference between a medical condition and people stuffing their faces out of choice.
Oh I agree but as I pointed out, this is part of our society’s wider trend towards ‘medicalising’ behavioural or social problems. Gluttony becomes obesity. Being a naughty kid becomes Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. If its a disease, its not your fault so your responsibility is nil.
(comment deleted for breaking the rules of this blog)
Obesity is not caused by overeating or inactivity, so it cannot be reduced or prevented by eating less and/or exercising more.
Obesity is caused by fluid retention, caused in turn by salt sensitivity. So obesity can be prevented or reduced by addressing the problem of fluid retention. The simplest way to do this is to avoid eating salt and salty food.
Lose weight by eating less salt! – Go on! – Try it! – You will feel so much better.
Obesity is not caused by overeating or inactivity, so it cannot be reduced or prevented by eating less and/or exercising more.
Obesity is caused by fluid retention, caused in turn by salt sensitivity. So obesity can be prevented or reduced by addressing the problem of fluid retention. The simplest way to do this is to avoid eating salt and salty food.
Even if you are right (and as an MS sufferer, I have long arguments with the salt-water diet mob all the time so its not a given), then its STILL a mater of individual choice. Eat less salt, something science advocates on the grounds of cardiac health anyway. What you ingest is, after all, your responsibility as nobody else slaps food in your gob and nobody else will pay the price for it.
Hi Shaun
The complication is that eating salty food does not much affect the weight of people who are not sensitive to salt. – It is the sensitivity to salt that is the crucial factor. – And overweight people are rarely aware that they are sensitive to salt. They are too busy struggling to lose weight by dieting, which we have all been conditioned to believe is the way to lose excess weight.
I’m sorry to learn that you have MS. I urge you nonetheless not to be dismissive of the ’salt-water diet mob’, as you describe them. – Overweight people genuinely do lose excess weight easily, swiftly and safely once they give up dieting and simply make a real effort to avoid salt and salty food as much as they can. – Most obese people lose about a stone in the first month. – But it is important to give up dieting and counting calories. – One person lost 5 stone (70 pounds) in a year by following my advice. – And I do hope that you do not decide that either of us is lying about that because that is not the case… – And she did NOT eat less food, only less sodium.
Fluid retention depletes the body of calcium and shortage of calcium leads to fat retention, so by reducing salt intake and thereby reducing fluid retention, fat retention is also reduced. – You don’t have to take my word for this, Shaun. – Eating extra dairy calcium by way of low fat yoghurt was featured as a way of increasing healthy excretion of fat on the BBC2’s Truth About Food series a few years ago. There is also an increasing wealth of research that is finding that many (most?) people are short of vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin, and that optimising vitamin D intake, as well as guarding against brittle bones (because vitamin D is necessary to metabolise calcium) also promotes loss of excess weight.
I think that many here are missing the point – adoption is about the child and its rights. If people want to carry on pigging away that is their choice but it doesn’t mean that they have the right to inflict the consequences on adopted children.
As for what ultimately causes obesity there are lots of theories – however applying will power and eating less and exercising more are pretty undisputed remedies.
A very small percentage of the population are predisposed to putting on weight and find it harder than most to lose it. You could say these people would have survived some of the great famines which is small consolation in these times of plenty. I am also skeptical about BMI*, but that is easy to fix – nip down to the nearest BUPA hospital and for a small fee I am sure they will measure your fat content and tell you exactly what your target weight should be.
However that is no excuse for the whining victim-hood that is generated whenever someone is given a few facts of life. As someone said earlier, if they really are committed to wanting to adopt it wouldn’t take long to shed a few pounds.
*I recently calculated that Phil Vickery and various other Wasps players are overweight or obese according to BMI. However I don’t think this guy falls in to that category.
Alistair said: “surely the point is that the chaps weight is irrelevant to whether he and his wife are able to provide a caring home to bring up children in”
Surely the fact that he is so massively overweight shows that what he TRULY cares for is his stomach. If getting kids by adoption really is important then losing a bit of weight should not be an obstacle. Grossly overweight people initially lose weight very quickly.
To go from a BMI of 42 to 40 (assuming a height of 5′8″) means losing 1 stone – going from 19st to 18st. Anybody can do it and do achieve it would send a positive signal to the adoption agency that this issue really does matter to him and that he is prepared to make an effort.
@Margaret Wilde
The body is very simple. If you consume more energy than you expend then it stores as fat. Expend more energy than you consume and you lose weight.
There is nothing magical here. Water retention via excess salt will not add 10 stones to your weight. Sitting in front of the telly all night eating double portions of pork pies and chips and washing them down with 3 or 4 cans of beer is not a recipe for staying slim.
Hi Hawkeye
I think I’ve expended enough energy explaining my points, which I hope some people will give consideration to. I’ll leave the discussion now.
Hawkeye – no it doesn’t – what it shows is that he is overweight.
Adoption is about the welfare of the child being adopted. What on earth does his weight have to do with that? There is no evidence that he belongs to an evil sect intent on foisting obesity on the rest of the world. His weight will have no bearing on the job he does as a foster parent.
I would agree that he would gain benefit himself from loosing weight, but I do not agree that this is any business either of LFAT or more to the point Leeds City Council.
The nanny state is all pervasive – beware the nanny state.
“I would agree that he would gain benefit himself from loosing weight, but I do not agree that this is any business either of LFAT or more to the point Leeds City Council.”
And it isn’t. No-one is planning to kidnap him and maroon him in the desert on a diet of locusts and honey until he drops below 13 stone.
But they can, and should, prevent him from adopting a child until he’s shown self-control and reduced his risk of dying while the child is still in nappies….
Adoption is about the welfare of the child being adopted. What on earth does his weight have to do with that?
Plenty.
He’s putting himself forward as a candidate to look after a child for (potentially) the next 18+ years. At the same time, he’s setting himself up for an early death.
The two are not consistent.
I’m sorry you feel that way. I find this whole thing quite awful. Here we have what seem to be two perfectly lovely human beings wanting to give an orphan a home! Whether they are fat or not shouldn’t even come into the discussion. I do hope that the Conservatives don’t carry on with this sort of attitude when they finally take over.
Nobody knows when they will finally die or what condition may strike in the future. What are we going to do next, make people have a DNA test to see how vulnerable they are to cancer before they are allowed to adopt?
I would have thought a loving home is far more preferable to any child than living in an institution and feeling unwanted!
Just adding to Patently’s last comment he is also setting a precedent for his child’s future health. It won’t be easy for a child to grow up healthy, active and slim if his at least one parent is morbidly obese. Who will kick a ball around in the park, play chase or even play games that require movement from the couch?
Leeds council are doing an honorable thing in not only encouraging a current fatty to lose weight but also preventing a child from growing up in an unhealthy environment.
As to Margaret and this ’salt’ nonsense. If it was simply salt then how come when I started going to the gym four or five times a week instead of doing nothing I lost 4 stone?? I have never added salt into anything from before going to the gym to now – so this intake hasn’t changed. Maybe what you are seeing is a knock on effect by making someone aware of the salt content of their food they automatically became aware of the fat and sugar content of the food also and therefore unwittingly lowered the fat and sugar!
Yes, much better that he grows up roaming the streets, perhaps breaking the law and getting into trouble because he feels unloved and has had a raw deal in life!
Have any of you been to a government children’s home?
“Yes, much better that he grows up roaming the streets, perhaps breaking the law and getting into trouble because he feels unloved and has had a raw deal in life!”
Indeed. After all, that never happens to kids with fat parents, only thin ones…
If it was a choice between Mr Blob and a government-run childrens home, I’d reluctantly go for the former. But it isn’t. There’s no suggestion that this means a child languishing in the government’s ‘care’ – there are other foster couples.
Here we have what seem to be two perfectly lovely human beings wanting to give an orphan a home!
But this isn’t about him. It’s about the child.
And if the local authority homes are dreadful places, then the correct response is to improve them, not lower our standards for adoptive parents.
Nobody knows when they will finally die or what condition may strike in the future.
No, we don’t. Any of us could die at any time. But we can be confident that, for some, it is a lot more likely than for others.
there is a picture of the couple here. http://www.google.com/reader/view/#stream/feed%2Fhttp%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.adamsmith.org%2FASIBlog
I think your assessment of the chaps size is positively libelous.
This link worked for me:
http://www.adamsmith.org/blog/justice-and-civil-liberties/too-fat-to-adopt-200901132750/
He looks pretty substantial to me, I have to say. There are indeed issues around the predictive ability of simple BMI measurements in the 25-35 range for tallish muscular men, but 42 and 24.5 stone is not healthy, sorry.
But in any case, if he thinks he’s healthy and the council is wrong, he is free to go and look for medical evidence to disprove them. If he can find it…
Yes, we should fear the nanny state. But that does not mean we should opt for a free-for-all instead.
If he emigrates to America, he needn’t think about sitting on a jury either:
http://patterico.com/2009/01/12/striking-obese-people-from-a-jury/
Well apparently he has such an ‘active’ lifestyle that I’m sure he’d balk at the thought of remaining indoors for so long in any case.
patently, not healthy is your judgement. if you are a doctor and he is your patient then you would be qualified to hold that opinion, although not qualified to share it with us.
You will I am sure find lots of parents in the world who are that sort of weight, or bigger. Are you suggesting as well that our nanny state should take children away from those parents?
Yes, that’s my judgement. I don’t need an electrician to change a lightbulb for me; I don’t need a lawyer to tell me that theft is illegal; I don’t need a doctor to tell me that a BMI of 42 and a weight over 24 stone is unhealthy.
At the margin, yes; a professional’s opinion is needed. But 42 is not marginal relative to a healthy range of 18-25.
Are you suggesting as well that our nanny state should take children away from those parents?
No. There is a world of difference between taking away the natural children of people we think might not be good parents, and the decision to place a child with someone we think might not make a good parent.
Childless couples do not like to have it pointed out to them (I know, I spent 4 sad years staring into that particular abyss), but it is still true that there are plenty of people who will not and should not be approved as adoptive parents but whose natural children should not be confiscated.
If anyone develops a crystal ball that can remove all element of doubt from these decisions, then the two thresholds could be brought together. Absent that magical device, we have to decide in which direction to err when there is reasonable doubt. That must be in favour of the child; which means either leaving it with its natural parents or waiting until a suitable adoptive parent becomes available.
It’s rather obvious to me that they are both too fat to be granted a child. The BMI limits should be lowered even further. Didn’t anyone see the woman? They could barely fit them both into the camera frame. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they could raise a child to adulthood. Pitiful that people let themselves go like that.
He’s in Obese Class III. I did the actual numbers and his actual BMI is 45.2 which no one else seemed notice. Everyone else just mentioned that it was more than 42. This means something. It means that he is at significantly higher risk. Everyone else is simply fudging the numbers trying to make it look better than is. Jeez, someone just tell the truth.