The NHS obsession with weight seems to have taken a sinister turn with this new trial reported by the BBC :

Obese pregnant women are to be given a drug to reduce the risk of obesity in their children as part of an NHS trial.

Overweight women supply too much food to a growing baby which can lead to health problems for mother and child.

UK doctors want to try to control this with metformin, which is used to treat diabetes.

So, pregnant women who are told to not smoke, not drink and eat healthily are going to be injected with hormone altering substances to prevent their unborn child from the possibility of becoming fat later?

I assume they have tested the safety of this experiment first on the long term health of the, as yet, unborn test subjects? Not that that kind of thing stops them when it comes to mass medication of children.

The article itself, as is usual for the BBC, glosses over the important part which is exactly how many of these kids may or may not be fat later :

Larger babies are more likely to be obese later in life.

No figures or studies there then to inform the poor reader. I would suggest that a kid born to a fat mother is probably likely to become fat due to the lifestyle and lack of parental education rather than any medical cause but that would be unfair to the poor fat people who are unable to stop stuffing their faces.

Anyway, the article itself is fairly lightweight stuff but the BBC manages to balls it up with the inadvertant placement of a link to a “related article” which directly contradicts one of the claims in the article itself as can be seen on the screengrab below :

Nothing like tripling the size of a problem to justify an research program is there? Just a shame we have to fund this crap (both the BBC and the NHS) through threat of imprisonment – no one would pay at all given the chance.