Striking a nerve on childhood obesity

Ah, but this is the modern media world, desperate for clicks and powered by rants. And Ludwig’s mildly worded piece hit a bundle of public nerves. Fear of government intervention. Stress about parenting skills. Concern that fat people are stigmatized, that pressure on parents has grown too great.

So on a Tuesday night, the Associated Press released a story about Ludwig’s piece, with the headline, “Should Parents Lose Custody of Super-Obese Kids?’’

And by Wednesday morning, the media panic/opportunism machine had kicked into overdrive. A New York Post header read, “Doctor says government should confiscate fat kids.’’ A Forbes blog decried “The War on Bad Parenting.’’ An online paper warned of “The Fat Gestapo.’’ On TV, “experts’’ questioned how the foster-care system could possibly cope with a flood of 2 million children, dragged screaming from their parents for the sin of being chubby.

Then came the angry e-mails and voice-mail messages, from strangers who found Ludwig through the hospital switchboard. A dentist wrote that he wanted to wire Ludwig’s mouth shut. A self-professed Christian wrote that Ludwig didn’t deserve to call himself an American.

Ludwig was shaken, but e-mailed nearly everyone back, politely asking people to read the JAMA piece itself. (The journal provided it, free of charge, for a week after the controversy hit.) He urged them to consider the full story, not just the headlines.

The full story is this: American children face an obesity epidemic that has grown worse over the past 30 years. Two million are characterized as extremely obese. But Ludwig and his co-author, attorney Lindsay Murtagh, were talking about a tiny handful of them, so severely overweight that their lives are in immediate danger.

One of those patients inspired Ludwig to write his JAMA piece: A girl he’d treated at Children’s, who weighed 90 pounds at 3 and 400 pounds by the time she was 14. Her parents struggled with substance abuse, physical disabilities, emotional problems, and financial woes. The state sent her to foster care, citing medical neglect.