This evening I watched the Channel 4 Cutting Edge programme about Dana, the 8 year old who is described as an anorexic.

Much was made, and rightly so, of the fact that younger and younger children are getting caught up in the dieting lunacy that looms so large in the thoughts of so many people, particularly young females, these days.

See http://www.channel4.com/culture/microsites/C/cutting_edge/dana/index.html

Efforts were made to pin down just what had turned Dana from being a healthy little girl into one obsessed with the determination to lose weight, come what might. Her mother thought it was probably several factors that came together, and mentioned one as being that Dana had taken to watching a weight loss channel on TV.

It's easy to think of other likely factors - the witless obsession with dieting in most glossy magazines, the unnaturally slim/thin models pictured in the magazines, the dieting junk that comprises a lot of the 'food' sold in supermarkets and elsewhere.

It's all deplorable: that healthy children and young people (and older people) spend so much of their waking hours consumed with thoughts about how to avoid eating, when they should be getting on with living their lives...