The headline jumped out at me from the Yahoo home page:
"Vietnam grapples with newfound weight issues"
I thought it looked like an interesting story, so I clicked to it (thus safely avoiding work for another five minutes!) I had to re-read the first few paragraphs several times to be sure I hadn't misread:
HANOI (AFP) - When La Huong Giang was a child, her mother struggled to find enough food to put on the table. Now a mother herself, Giang worries how to stop her daughter eating too much.
Eleven-year-old Hang has an insatiable appetite and already weighs 52 kilos (114 pounds) while standing 1.60 meters (5 ft 3ins) tall, one of an emerging generation of oversized children on Hanoi's streets.
(Full story here)
5'3" and 114 pounds?!?! Overweight?!?! Huh? I guess I need to go check out the recommended weight charts or see a picture of the poor girl, but this sounds quite normal to me, even given the current status of our own children in America being alarmingly overweight. My 12-year-old daughter is 5'5", and weighs about 110-115 pounds. She's weighed the same for months now as she has grown inches rapidly, but she has been anything but fat even when she was 5'2" or 5'3" at the same weight! People comment constantly about how she is so skinny. I just have a hard time seeing these numbers as accurately describing an "oversized" child. The article also talks about Vietnam's rapidly rising rates of diabetes and other health problems as a result of overweight, but I think they picked a bad example. I feel sorry for Hang, who shall among her friends forevermore be called "the one who was in a news story because she was so fat." Imagine the self-portraits in her head.
Weird stuff...
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Oh my gosh. Those numbers startled me, too. Is it just a popular news item now to discuss overweight children? The thing that gets me in America is that they keep addressing the food issue. Only occasionally will a news story bring up exercise as part of this equation. The last story I did see that addressed this showed the kid being required to jog in his neighborhood. Oh yeah--that's great. Bore him to death. The kid was used to playing video games all day. Give him a basketball and take him to a neighborhood park with a net and let the *KID* (these are *kids*) play for an hour and a half! Duh! Kids used to play outside for exercise. How did we get so stupid?
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