ABSTRACT
For over a century, motivated by a number of reasons, policymakers, moral entrepreneurs and governments in Australia, the UK and US have agonised on how to "shape up" their nation's young people. With a mounting moral panic concerning the fitness of Australian youth, this soon translated into action at the coalface of Australian school education. Research shows throughout the developed world and even in some developing countries, children are generally becoming more obese. Australian, US and UK responses varied only in matters of detail, and not in general direction and outcome of the physical fitness-cum-obesity moral panic. The three countries shared acute anxieties concerning the physical fitness of its youth, associated as they were with national efficiency and defence. Fed by risk-society theory reasoning, these old concerns reappeared with childhood and youth obesity moral panics beginning with risk-society concerns during the 1970s.
