mentioned the growing body of research showing obesity fears and “healthy eating” messages have taught children that low-calorie and fat-free foodsgood nutrition. Even adults, especially women, have come to believe low-fat, low-calorie (and low everything) means healthy eating. But a story in the news today demonstrates how extreme the fears of fat have become, not only among parents, but even degreed professionals caught up in the anti-obesity frenzy. It points to very real dangers possible for their children and others following their example.

The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale awarded a mother from South Jordan, Utah, $1000 for coming up with “A+Lunches” — ideas for parents to give their preschool and school children to “battle the ‘global obesity epidemic.’”

It is typical of the menus increasingly being recommended by anti-“childhood obesity” activists. The lunch includes no sweets, no meat and no “fattening” foods, only foods believed to be “healthy”: carrot and celery sticks, a few apple wedges and berries, a small dollop of peanut butter between flower-shaped pieces of bread, and skim milk. The mother tested it on her four-year old.

A brief nutritional analysis of this lunch menu revealed that it supplies less than 20% of the energy needs (calories), dietary fats and iron recommended even by the government’s Dietary Guidelines for a typical four-year old, let alone an older school child. It demonstrates the increasingly overzealous adoption of “healthy” diets, arising from the belief that if a little restriction of “bad” foods is good then more is better.

But unbeknownst to most parents, such diets not only have no sound evidence to support them, but they have been shown to result in harm to children’s health....