Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I teach preschool and my center got this book for our "Healthy Bodies" unit and I was disgusted and surprised by this book. It's an eating-disorder waiting to happen. It was a missed opportunity: "Why should I eat well?" could have been answered with so many body-positive answers (to help our bodies grow healthy and strong, for example). Instead, this book is full of "fatty"-this and "fatty"-that. "fatty burgers, fatty french fries, fatty potato chips...sweet, fatty doughnuts," all the while it shows the girl getting bigger and bigger until her pants are splitting, even though the girl really doesn't look like that in the book (the pictures of her with the new girl show her as an averaged sized child)--it's the imagination that eating those foods make you bigger and uglier and your clothes will split. Each page shows/imagines her getting bigger and bigger and uglier and uglier. It's shaming. It continues on to say you'll get pimples and your teeth will decay (not could or might--WILL--as if these foods are the only thing responsible for pimples). It goes on to say that you'll catch every cough and cold (and apparently lose your clothes and be embarrassed). It goes even further and places the girl at the top of a burger/pizza/fries mountain (exaggeration much?) stuffing her face with all the foods at one time and draws the conclusion that clearly she's eating LIKE that (binge eating) and imagines that she'll, "gain weight...won't be fit and -- who knows? --you might even get sick" At this point one of my students was like, "what happened to her? What's wrong with her? Why does she look like that?" And SCARING the kids. Cause that's a great tactic. Shaming a scaring kids...and placing values/morals on food ("good and bad" foods), instead of talking about how our bodies need variety or the value of having variety or talking about having foods in moderation or having foods "sometimes," we're just going to scare the kids with the pictures and place values on them. As if fat people can't be fit. Or as if only fat people get sick. Or if someone is thin, they must be healthy. Garbage. Here's my sum-up. This book is garbage. It promotes fat-phobic narratives, it is NOT body-positive. It contains rhetoric that you'd find in the world of eating disorders. While it wasn't my money that purchased this book, I'm ashamed that it was even read once to my preschoolers. I wish I could take the time to make a more formal, well-written review, but I don't want to waste anymore time on this book. Don't buy it.