Children as young as five being treated in hospital for anorexia
Half of girls and a third of boys are willing to take extreme measures to get a perfect body or reach an ideal weight, a study has found.
The pressure that children felt to have a certain figure meant that one in ten young boys would take steroids to become more muscular while one in eight girls said they would resort to diet pills or laxatives to help them slim down.
Researchers who surveyed 810 youngsters aged 11 to 16 revealed that over 50 per cent of girls and more than a third of boys said they compared their bodies with those of people on TV, with about a quarter of both gender willing to undergo cosmetic surgery to recreate the look they wanted.
