A five-year-old has been taken into care after her weight ballooned to 10 stone (Picture: PA/File)

A five-year-old girl whose weight ballooned to more than ten stone has been taken into care, council officials have confirmed.

The unnamed child, from Newport, Wales, weighed more than three times the normal average for her age.

Child health experts were astonished at how the 10st 5.5lbs girl could have gained so much weight without intervention from doctors, teachers, or her family, describing her case as ‘shocking’.

Newport City Council said that she was taken into care last August solely because of her weight.


One month after the girl’s weight fell to 8st, but her Body Mass Index (BMI) was still roughly twice the normal average.



‘She has been let down by everybody. It’s tragic,’ Dr Tam Fry, an obesity expert and honorary chairman of the Child Growth Foundation, said.

‘There is no way that a child between nought and five can have lived without going out into the street, without having gone to nursery school or the GP and somebody, somewhere along the line, should have said “something is wrong”.’

He blamed processed food, poverty, less exercise and ignorance about healthy eating for the rise in child obesity.

Thirty-five per cent of children under 16 are classified as overweight in Wales.