I am a child abuser: official

It appears that Prof Steven Field has deftly picked up the baton from "Sir" Liam Donaldson and is spouting the time-honoured drivel:

"Unless parents exert more control over their children's diets, they are risking a lifetime of health problems, and even premature death - death before their parents, which is almost too sad to contemplate," said Prof Field (1)

His harshest criticism was reserved for parents who put their children at risk by smoking in front of them and he suggested they "are committing a form of child abuse".(2)...

His warning comes after Andrew Lansley, the health secretary, called for people to take more responsibility for their own health and behaviour, instead of relying on state intervention. (3)

1) Not true. The wholly unsubstantiated scare story is that this generation of children will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents, but seeing as a) there is a long term trend for life expectancy to increase by one year every decade; b) parents tend to be thirty years older than their children (so will tend to die thirty years earlier); and c) parents who feed their children Unhealthy Food will probably eat it themselves as well, the idea that such parents will outlive their children is fanciful in the extreme.

2) Guilty as charged, Your Honour. Take me down.

3) He seems to have entirely missed the point. Lansley actually said that all this nannying and hectoring was at worst counter-productive and expensive and pointless at best.

UPDATE: see also Health Minister Dick, Longrider, Gawain Towler; JuliaM.