Older teenagers also need more protection, including chaperones at shows, according to the Model Health Inquiry, a group investigating the health of models.

The inquiry was set up by the British Fashion Council, which runs London Fashion Week, in the wake of a long-running controversy over superthin 'size zero' models.

The panel said there was a trend for the industry to use younger models, who are more vulnerable to eating disorders such as anorexia.

Rejecting the idea of weighing models and banning those under a certain weight, the panel said that 'size zero' doesn't exist in British shops and is 'meaningless'.

'There was also strongly expressed concern that it is profoundly inappropriate that girls under 16... should be portrayed as adult women,' said Baroness Kingsmill, chair of the the panel.

'The risk of sexualising these children was high and designers could risk charges of sexual exploitation.'

It received mixed evidence on whether models should have tests to assess their body mass index, a measure of fat.

Many models told the inquiry that they feared losing work because they were not thin enough. The panel also highlighted health risks from stress, substance abuse and poor working conditions.

'We have grave concerns about other health areas, such as drug and alcohol abuse and the stress caused by working conditions for model,' the panel's interim report says.

It is also concerned that 'modelling is very much a hidden profession with very little transparency about the working conditions that many models have to endure'.

The panel wants better training for designers and agents to help them spot models with eating disorders.

There should be a clampdown on drugs and smoking backstage and models should have access to healthy food, it added.

The size of the models was in the news during the London Fashion Week in February, when experts thought if people saw really thin models they might try to copy them - something that may not be healthy.

Super skinny or 'size zero' models have been banned in some countries, including Italy and Spain.

Underweight models became a hot-button issue in the industry after the deaths of two anorexic Latin American models last year.

Madrid last year became the first high profile fashion week to bar models whose ratio of body weight to height was so low that it was deemed an unhealthy example to the public.

REUTERS