Give slim students higher marks
Education ministry rejects diet doctor's "strange" idea to give pupils credits for keeping their weight down
CONTROVERSIAL diet doctor Pierre Dukan has said baccalauréat students should gain or lose points according to their weight.
However, what he called "a good way to make teenagers aware of the need for a balanced diet" has been rejected out of hand by the Education Ministry who called it a "strange" idea and suggested he should "concentrate on his slimming business".
Dr Dukan said in a book Lettre Ouverte au Futur Président de la République that students should get extra marks for maintaining a good Body Mass Index - a controversial measure of body fat based on height and weight. He suggested bonus marks for students who kept their BMI between 18 and 25 while at lycée.
However, France is already one of the lowest-rated countries in Europe for obesity, with just 11.7% of men and 12.7% of women seen as obese. BMI has also been criticised as a way of calculating fat content as it takes no account of muscle bulk - meaning Olympic athletes could be rated as obese.
The Education Ministry said that the adolescent health problems were sufficiently serious not to be taken lightly - and it was the same with the bac which was an "examination of knowledge and learning; not a health check-up".
It has already got a Health, Well-being and Sport at School programme in place and the government recently imposed a tax on sugary drinks.
Dukan's diet has four million followers in France.
Last September he was condemned at a court in Toulon for failing to return medical files to a woman patient. He had prescribed her the slimming drug Mediator which has been implicated in up to 2,000 deaths. After the verdict the woman's lawyer said she would be lodging a complaint that he endangered her life.
