Economic Disruption and Childhood Obesity

Abstract

Using and adopting Simon Szreter’s framework on how economic growth had a deleterious effect on children’s health during the Industrial Revolution, this article presents a parallel argument that economic growth, in modern times, also has disrupted the lives of our children expressed by increasing rates of childhood obesity. A comprehensive perspective is presented that describes how economic growth in postindustrial United States has distracted our nation’s attention away from a public health’s concern for the health of children and social justice. The new normal of childhood obesity represents a disconnection from the harmful reality of childhood obesity and displaces the value of childhood health too far behind adult’s pursuits of utility. To provide children a fair opportunity to health, and to help children secure their own future liberty and utility, children need to be able to achieve “just levels” of health that would ordinarily exist if remediable injustices that threaten health were reasonably addressed and eliminated.