Perhaps you're familiar with the French cookies known as Le Petit Ecolier (translation: The Little Schoolboy).

Across the channel in Great Britain, the name might have to be changed to Le Grande Ecolier. A number of schoolboys have apparently made themselves a little too familiar with various kinds of cookies.

So much so, in fact, that British retailer Marks and Spencer knows a plump market when it sees one. The company now offers a line of school uniforms for the horizontally-challenged youngster.

The BBC reports the retailer's new line, Plus, provides clothes for preschool children with waistlines up to 23 inches. Such pants usually are worn by children twice that age.

Marketers for the company tell the BBC the clothes are just a recognition that a lot of children are, uh, fat.

They are simply supplying a demand. Thus, waistlines go up to 41 inches for older kids and teenagers.

The clothes are primarily available online.

"We want to make sure our schoolwear range is accessible for children of all shapes and sizes," a company spokesman tells the BBC.

The demand certainly exists, Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum, tells the BBC.

"This is the actual commercial recognition of what we have known for some time, that obesity in preschoolers is building up," she says. "Now 27 percent of entrants to primary schools are overweight or obese.

"Parents should not fail in their responsibility -- it is they that put food in their children's mouths, send their children out to play," she adds. "But at a government level, they have consistently ducked out of regulating the food industry. If you allow the food industry to self regulate -- and the government sanctions the fact that they are not going to regulate -- then the food industry will just carry on making the food it is making."

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