purplerabbits

It's possible to have a civilised debate on these issues, just rare, but I figure if it's possible to have a civilised online debate on circumcision (as happened on the brits_americans community a while back), anything is possible.

The question is who organises the debate and can you exclude people from the debate too, to keep it civilised.

I feel very sorry for this kid, and hope the media interest leads to him getting useful help (as opposed to his mother being told she's crap, which I suspect she knows already). Also, while you can't learn much about trends from one outlier, you can learn about system failures from a worst-case scenario - eg why no doctor or school nurse picked up on this boy's problems earlier, what sort of exercise is offered at school, what are children allowed to eat at their school, etc. Similarly a train crash can teach us a lot about the requirements of maintenance and where the failures are, but nothing about why on average 10% of trains are late.

My job atm is creating more healthy and sustainable food in London, which involves working with schools, hospitals, NHS, DoH, farmers, supermarkets, etc, to influence what food gets eaten, particularly in schools and hospitals where the consumers can't go elsewhere. Lots of work on education for children and adults, and lots of successes, but in some areas it's a hard struggle - eg the nutrition information scheme that most supermarkets refused to use, creating their own misleading one based on percentages of an adult's daily intake, even for foods eaten mainly by children.
On the plus side, there's loads more public awareness than there was a year ago - you can't open a paper without seeing a story about healthy eating or buying local food. On the minus side, most of that, outside rural areas where coverage is based round 'support your local farmers', is based on the idea of 'keep your body healthy and the planet's life support systems healthy'. And the perceived decline in health is solely thanks to people seeing increased obesity.
People don't register more people having heart attacks or strokes, but they notice fat people.