The Problem behind Childhood Obesity

America, do we have a problem!

We know that the obvi­ous con­trib­u­tors to the obe­sity epi­demic are a poor diet (includ­ing lack of good nutri­tion and too many empty calo­ries from junk food and sugar-laden sodas), over con­sump­tion (sim­ply eat­ing too much), and lack of exercise.

Since the 1950s, the per capita increase in the con­sump­tion of soft drinks has risen by 500 per­cent. Today, roughly 50 per­cent of school dis­tricts have con­tracts with soft-drink com­pa­nies allow­ing them to sell sodas on school premises—unheard of when I was a kid.

The aver­age child views about 10,000 food ads each year. And, just in case you won­dered, these aren’t ads for fruits and veg­eta­bles; 95 per­cent of them are mar­ket­ing fast food, sodas, candy, or sug­ared cere­als to chil­dren. The ad bud­get cor­po­rate America is spend­ing to con­vince your kids to eat and drink and chew is esti­mated at $10 billion.

Apparently the adver­tis­ing is pay­ing off. Children are con­sum­ing vast quan­ti­ties of these food-like sub­stances, much to the detri­ment of their cur­rent and future well-being.

There are an increas­ing num­ber of con­cerned and qual­i­fied voices speak­ing out on child­hood obe­sity, and that’s good. But in order to suc­cess­fully reverse the child­hood obe­sity epi­demic, true change needs to occur in our core val­ues and this needs to be reflected in pub­lic policy.

Sodas and junk food should be removed from pub­lic schools and replaced with farm-fresh food grown with­out pes­ti­cides, hor­mones, antibi­otics or genetic mod­i­fi­ca­tion. Our chil­dren deserve to be treated with care and respect. There is an absence of stud­ies val­i­dat­ing the long-term safety of these chem­i­cal and biotech-lab exper­i­ments. They have been rushed to mar­ket with an “inno­cent until proven guilty” reg­u­la­tory stan­dard that favors cor­po­rate prof­its over health and safety.

Physical edu­ca­tion in schools needs to be rein­stated. According to the American Heart Association, 22 per­cent of schools don’t require stu­dents to take any phys­i­cal edu­ca­tion at all. Only 3.8 per­cent of ele­men­tary schools, 7.9 per­cent of mid­dle schools, and 2.1 per­cent of high schools pro­vide daily phys ed for the entire school year. Yet 95 per­cent of par­ents believe phys ed should be part of a school cur­ricu­lum for all stu­dents in grades K–12.

Making bud­get cuts to phys­i­cal edu­ca­tion pro­grams and serv­ing processed, low-nutrient foods for school break­fasts and lunches while sell­ing out our kids to soda and junk-food com­pa­nies is a false econ­omy. Being over­weight and obese takes a health­care toll on our nation to the tune of $147 bil­lion per year. Wouldn’t it be prudent—not to men­tion humane—to spend some of these ill­ness dol­lars on pre­ven­tion? While we’re at it, some urban redesign­ing could be done in neigh­bor­hoods to pro­vide safe areas for walk­ing, bik­ing and playing.

This isn’t Einstein stuff. It’s really just com­mon sense, but it points out that our national pri­or­i­ties are pretty screwed up, to put it politely.

We need to value our chil­dren and our health as a national pri­or­ity. True health­care means more than being able to afford doc­tor vis­its, drugs and hos­pi­tal bills. In an econ­omy that’s all about the money, com­pa­nies are mak­ing prof­its sell­ing diets full of sugar, salt and car­bo­hy­drates, and other com­pa­nies are mak­ing “health­care” prof­its deal­ing with the sad, and in some cases tragic, results. Crazy? Yes, but that’s the sys­tem that guides the some­times incom­pre­hen­si­ble deci­sions com­ing out of Washington.

We sim­ply have to re-establish the true core val­ues of the American peo­ple and their fam­i­lies and have our government’s poli­cies reflect these. The prin­ci­ple of sim­ply mak­ing a profit may be good enough for Wall Street and cor­po­rate board rooms but it’s not enough for a sus­tain­able America. We just wit­nessed an eco­nomic melt­down in this coun­try from oper­at­ing on those val­ues. We are also going through a health melt­down, though it’s less obvi­ous. Corporations are get­ting rich while our chil­dren are get­ting fat and sick.

Profit must be tem­pered with ethics. How about a sys­tem of Sustainable Capitalism? This would place worth on peo­ple, envi­ron­ment and qual­ity of life along with prof­its made from for­ward­ing these val­ues. From such a sys­tem we could obtain a true mea­sure of both our pro­duc­tiv­ity and our happiness.

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