Our First Lady Michelle Obama has taken on a big issue....kids and obesity, with her new Healthy Kids Initiative and a project called Let's Move. I applaud her efforts and I think she is partially on the right track.
The Healthy Kids Initiative is aimed at the "American plague of childhood obesity", which has caused our government to spend $150 BILLION per year on obesity related health conditions. Apparently our fat comes at a high price.
The initiative includes getting kids to move physically, by dangling a pretty little carrot called the "Presidential Active Lifestyle Award" for moving those little bodies for 60 minutes a day, 5 days a week, for six weeks....which is a good thing but is she missing the bigger picture?
Food is the issue. Moving our bodies is wonderful and beneficial but that alone is not going to stop this freight train of obesity. We have to change what we are eating and feeding our children.
Now to give fair credit to the First Lady, part of her initiative does address school lunches, which will target cleaning up 1000 school lunch programs per year and double the amount of produce offered in 10 years. Wow, that is a long process. I am anxious to see how this pans out. Did you know that school lunches are largely made up of surplus crap that the government subsidizes? Tater tots and chicken nuggets served at school teach our children to make poor choices. How is Big Agriculture and the Big Industrial Food Industry going to react to this new plan? Where is all the subsidized corn and soy going to go?
The government will also be setting aside $400 million in grants for convenience stores to develop a healthy foods corner and to encourage small town markets.
One thing that the government needs to examine is how it is that in the last 30 years our obesity rates have tripled? TRIPLED! Ironically when you look back in time, 30 years ago is when the government encouraged us to trim the fat. Big industrial food biz enjoyed an huge boom in low fat and fat free foods. Suddenly everything was labeled low fat and fat free and we ate it all up! We ditched the whole milk and started drinking fat free. We bought low fat/fat free everything, even cookies. So how then did we get fatter? We did as the government suggested, we adopted their new food pyramid. We went on low fat diets, passed on the artery clogging, cholesterol raising eggs and beef, we traded out butter for heart healthy low fat margarine, across the board we trimmed the fat, increased our grains & cereals.....and got fatter.
It is time to not only get kids moving and offer grants to convenience stores...we need to re-examine the food pyramid. Veggies and fruit should be at the bottom, they are the bulk of what we should consume daily. Cereals and grains need to be closer to the top with sweets, as these things quickly convert to sugar in our blood stream. We need more Real Food, not boxes of faux foods that are labeled fat free. Fat in our cookies is very clearly not the problem.
We need to stop letting big industrial food shove their hands into our pockets. We need to start subsidizing carrots and apples not corn and soy. There are some big fundamental changes that need to be made. Michelle Obama has great intentions, and I am sure we will see some small level of success, in the big picture we need to start with the farmers and work our way up the food chain. We need to make being a broccoli farmer worthwhile.
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