Dr Max Pemberton: The NHS psychiatrist on autism diagnosis creep, treating food influencers with eating disorder, why childhood obesity is a type of child abuse

Children who are obese are as much a victim of neglect and child abuse as underweight and underfed children.

That's the shocking view Dr Max Pemberton, a medical doctor and psychiatrist who spent more than a decade running National Health Service clinics treating patients with severe eating disorders and addictions, shares with Unfiltered editor-in-chief Joe Warner.

While many people would have no argument that an underweight child is suffering from neglect and child abuse - surely the fundamental first rule of parenthood is to provide shelter, safety and sustenance to your child - the claim that an obese child is suffering from an equivalent level of abuse is far too outrageous a statement for many to stomach - especially today when childhood obesity is such a white-hot issue and divisive subject, and the body positivity movement, including Health At Every Size, is at its most vocal, prominent and powerful.

But even in our "cancel culture" age, for Dr Pemberton soaring rates of childhood obesity in the UK - 9.2% of British children aged 4 and 5, and 22.7% of children aged 10 and 11, are obese, according to the UK’s National Child Measurement Programme in data published by NHS Digital, which also found far higher rates of childhood obesity is socially- and economically-deprived parts of the country - makes this too important an issue to remain quiet, whatever the professional and personal cost.

Because further inaction is a fundamental failure to safeguard both the short- and long-term health, happiness and opportunity of our most precious, important and cherished asset - our children.

They also discuss Dr Pemberton's decade of running National Health Service clinics treating patients with severe eating disorders, which included a number of very high-profile Instagram food influencers.

Patient confidentially tied his hands at the time, but now he can reveal his frustration that these social media personalities continued to post prodigiously about food, nutrition, recipes and “healthy” diet strategies to their hundreds of thousands of admiring followers, despite privately battling crippling eating disorder issues and having entirely dysfunctional relationships with food.

Dr Pemberton’s front-line experience paints a heart-breaking picture of our current social media world in which unqualified influencers who happen look the part, or know how to created compelling content, wield enormous power and influence over impressionable and insecure young people who are primed to absorb ill-advised comments and advice from people in no position to give it.

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