Foster care for certain obese kids?

Find an inconsistency. Bring it to light. Poke fun at it.

Many comedians use this simple formula as a way to get laughs. But many comedians also get condemned or labeled as controversial for following this formula by those who refuse to see the inconsistency as inconsistency.

Animal lovers and avid hunters may not have laughed, for example, at what comedian Chris Rock said about Michael Vick's incarceration for killing dogs.

"[Sarah Palin] is shooting mooses, and . . . Michael Vick's like, 'Why am I in jail?' What the hell? They let a white lady shoot a moose if a black man wanna kill a dog, that's a crime."

Please do not interpret the use of this example to infer that I'm for dog fighting. What I am for is finding inconsistency, which is what Rock has done, and bringing it to light whether it be in government policy, an opinion piece in a newspaper, a rant on a blog, or a routine in a comedy club.

More than a way to take a wrong and make it a right in society, recognizing inconsistency is a great way to gain perspective. Even if Rock's comment doesn't make you chuckle, it should make you think and realize that in this case the line between what is socially acceptable or unacceptable, legally permissible or impermissible is a rather thin one. Gun clubs in the state of Pennsylvania, for instance, can still conduct pigeon shoots legally.

And if you can recognize the fine line, it makes it far easier to be a bit more tolerant of others or their ideas because instead of recognizing differences you are now seeing similarities.

In my case, I can see the similarity between a child being undernourished or overnourished.

Food is more than energy and enjoyment for the very young. Their bodies are still growing physically and mentally. A lack of proper nutrients undermines that growth and jeopardizes their long-term health.

Parents who cannot provide proper nutrition often receive help from the government to do so. If they are still unable, the government intervenes.

In cases where the health and well-being of the child is in jeopardy, the government takes the undernourished child away from the parents not to punish them necessarily, but to do what's best for the child.

So why has an editorial in the July issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association caused such controversy? In it, Dr. David Ludwig, an obesity specialist at Children's Hospital in Boston, and Lindsey Murtagh, a lawyer and researcher at Harvard's School of Public Health, suggest the same pattern be followed at the other end of the spectrum.

They believe that where neglectful parenting has helped a child become extremely obese they use the case of a 400-pound, 12-year-old girl the child should be placed in foster care while both the child and the parents learn that a balanced meal does not mean eating the Whopper with both elbows on the table. In the 400-pound girl's case, for instance, she lost 130 pounds in the first year away from her parents simply by eating a typical teenage diet and doing a moderate amount of exercise.

For those uncomfortable with this degree of government intervention even after acknowledging the government has done this for undernourished children for years consider the alternative: a reduced life span. Children who develop type 2 diabetes as a result of obesity live at least 15 fewer years when compared to other children.

There's a reduction in their quality of life as well. In fact, a 2002 quality-of-life study found a closer similarity in quality of life between obese adolescents and adolescents diagnosed with cancer than obese adolescents and healthy children. Additionally, extremely obese kids are far more likely to get sick and be depressed.

And all this illness creates medical expense, further burdening an already ailing health care system.

Not to mention that being obese as an adolescent is just about a guarantee that you'll be obese as an adult. That's why that spokesman for Subway who lost so much weight by eating Subway sandwiches twice a day is such a celebrity. He beat heavy odds and quite unconventionally.

Now you may argue that society is at fault, that the way we've constructed our lives increases the likelihood that children become obese. That society's insatiable desire for food convenience and immediacy is really at the core of the entire obesity epidemic.

Do so and you will hear no argument from me.

All I know is that extremely obese children develop other health problems that left unabated can kill them by age 30. Parents of extremely overweight children have to know this.

And if their personal problems are such that they jeopardize the health of their children, then state intervention is not heavy-handed gate-crashing but a heartwarming godsend.