A group of medical experts recommends calling obese kids “obese” even if it hurts their feelings.
Doctors ought to quit using fuzzy terms to define children’s weight problems and instead refer to truly fat kids as overweight or obese, a committee of medical experts recommended. Less blunt terms used by the government and many doctors diplomatically avoid the term “obese.” Instead, they refer to children many would consider too fat as being “at risk for overweight,” and “overweight” for those others would consider obese. Those categories don’t adequately define the hefty problem, according to the group, which was convened by the American Medical Association and funded by federal health officials including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This would be a return to the practice common when I was growing up. Indeed, we often assisted the medical community by making up rhyming nicknames for the fat kids. I haven’t seen any empirical studies as to how that turned out but, anecdotally, I’d say the kids nowadays are fatter.
