POSTED: Thursday, July 14, 2011 - 10:34pm
UPDATED: Friday, July 15, 2011 - 6:00am
TYLER - A new article in the Journal of the American Medical Association is stirring debate. The article suggest that morbidly obese children should be removed from their homes and placed in foster care.
KETK spoke with Dr. Valerie Smith, a Pediatrician in East Texas. She tells us while there is a lot of children suffering from obesity, only some are considered morbidly obese.
"Those morbidly obese kids are those kids who are above the 99th percentile which means if you took 100 kids of the same sex and the same age, they would be more overweight than 99 percent -- 99 of the 100 kids."
The article says the main reason to remove the children is to save their life and Dr. Smith says as the children get older, the health risk can even become greater.
"Things like high blood pressure, coronary artery disease, worsening problems with joints like arthritis, worsening asthma, high cholesterol, things like that and the unfortunate thing is now as children are becoming more and more overweight we have more children who are morbidly obese, we're starting to see all those problems in children."
Even with the risks, some East Texans say it's not the job of the government to be a parent, it's the parents.
One East Texan tells us "I think it's all the fault of the parent not controlling what there children east, you're the parent there the child -- you teach they listen."
To see the article click here. [2]