FEATURE: Is it right to put a child on a diet?

WHEN Dara-Lynn Weiss decided to come ‘the heavy’ with her overweight seven-year-old, she couldn’t have imagined the controversy.

The New York writer’s account of putting her daughter, Bea, on a diet and micro-managing everything she ate, even in public, has provoked debate in America, and here, where two in ten Irish children are obese or overweight.

By the age of seven, Bea’s weight was worryingly high. “When we intervened, she was 20lbs above a healthy weight and 30lbs above average,” Weiss says.