Santiago Mendoza weighs three stone – a healthy weight for any six-year-old child.
The problem is that Santiago is only eight months old .
Has he got a medical condition, a disability, some innate problem that has made him put on so much weight? Why, no.
He merely has an incredibly selfish, ignorant, and idiotically abusive mother.
Eunice Fandino took a healthy child – a lucky break in itself, one many others are denied – and GAVE him a medical condition.
She fed him so much that she could no longer pick him. She made him so fat he needed hospital treatment and set him up for a short and unpleasant life with diabetes, skin conditions, digestive trouble and low self-esteem.
The only decent thing she’s done for Santiago since his birth is to contact a charity which has taken him off her hands for a proper diet and a series of operations.
Eunice admitted the problem was due to her own ignorance and said: “He was born with an anxiety so if he cried I just fed him.”
Back up a second, Eunice. What were you feeding him, exactly? Lard? He’s eight months old. Don’t tell me he got that big on baby milk and a few spoonfuls of Cow&Gate.
Let’s back up a bit further – he’s been to hospital because of his size already, and no health professionals took her aside and asked her what the hell she was cramming down his gullet?
And let’s look at this from the future, when Santiago has been helped by the charity, his weight brought down, his appetite retrained, and he goes back home to Eunice who will still be stupid.
No-one is fixing the cause of the problem – just patching up the poor kid who’s a victim of it then sending him back to suffer more. It means that the doctors and charity workers will end up just as culpable as Eunice.
And before anyone thinks ‘oh, well, it’s Colombia isn’t it, poverty, not a lot of education’ let’s remind ourselves of last month’s Daily Mirror investigation which found the UK had eight primary school pupils weighing more than 20 stone .
Eight children, none more than four foot tall, who EACH weigh the same as the combined weight of a dishwasher and two chests of drawers .
In Britain in the past five years 74 morbidly obese children have been taken into care, but it’s a drop in the ocean when you consider that 183 primary-age children have been found to weigh more than 16 stone.
SIXTEEN STONE! That’s a rugby player! And there’s 183 of them!
The National Obesity Forum reckons half of us will be obese before 2050 and the problem’s getting worse; the league table for who’s fattest seems to indicate it’s linked to unemployment ; and yet worldwide, obesity is most common in wealthier nations .
We can’t blame it simply on food manufacturers, poverty, wealth, nor on sugar, salt or the latest health scare.
Fat children are the fault of their parents, simple as that. Children don’t buy their own pizza or understand what ingredients are.
Children rely on the adults around them for a balanced diet and a healthy attitude, and I am tired of hearing people who can’t provide either blame anxiety, supermarket prices, or the fact Quavers aren’t a health food.
Such parents are either a) stupid or b) mentally unwell. In both cases it is a form of child abuse, they need intervention, and all the excuses need to be given the short shrift they deserve.
Every other kind of child abuse produces social disgust or action from the authorities, but a fat kid is more likely to be tolerated.
“Oh, poor thing, well he’s just bigger than you, don’t be mean, don’t mention it, he’s probably gluten intolerant.”
NO HE’S NOT. HE’S FAT AND WHOEVER IS FEEDING HIM IS A MORON WHO NEEDS TO BE TOLD THEY’RE KILLING HIM.
In adults, a food problem whether it’s anorexia or obesity is a result of mental illness, of a psychological refusal to care more for oneself. It’s a form of self-harm and needs understanding and medical help.
But in children, it’s different. A child who was starving because of its parent would be taken into care and its parent put on trial for neglect. A child who is dying because of parental overfeeding is usually mollycoddled with the same kind of blind, unthinking tolerance as the BBC did Jimmy Savile.
Sure, some are taken into care – but not all. And more often than not they return home to the same problem they were once rescued from.
She shopped and cared for her parents, and rarely went out. On a typical day she would eat two loaves of jam sandwiches, five bags of crisps, two packets of chocolate biscuits, cake, trifle, sausages, and fizzy drinks.
She went off to fat camp in America for a few months and lost half her body weight with a healthy eating regime.
After she returned, she said: “I was really looking forward to trying it all out back home but, when I arrived, my mum said she hadn’t had time to prepare any healthy food so we had fish and chips instead.”
Of course Georgia needed help – but so did her mum. Would you put a child who’d been beaten back in the home without establishing it wouldn’t happen again? Would you give a heroin addict their child back if they weren’t clean?
But with fat children we do exactly that, and it is horrifically damaging to them and to society as a whole. They become fat adults, and suck up our finite resources with a straw.
At one stage the local health board refused to pay for Georgia to go back to a fat camp because it was not “appropriate”, and we ended up paying far more when she hit 63 stone and had to be cut out of her house by the fire brigade.
She had another hospital stay last year for cellulitis, pneumonia and organ failure – a cost that was avoidable, with judicious intervention.
As a child Georgia was let down at every stage by the adults who had responsibility for her – her mother, social workers, health bosses. They gave out the message that fat didn’t matter and abuse would be tolerated.
As an adult, Georgia has help available but it’s come very late. It cost us more money when we don’t have any, it probably shortened Georgia’s life, and it’s so stupid it makes me want to scream.
She recently said: “I just want to live and be normal.”
So does every child. So does Santiago Mendoza, and if he were only old enough to speak that’s what he’d tell us.
They love their parents, but their parents are killing them. Why don’t we shout about it?
It is time we stopped tolerating fat children – and told stupid adults when they’re guilty of child abuse.