This has great potential for long-term benefit. Obesity, and particularly childhood obesity (because it leads to adult obesity) is central to our nation’s health problems. It is linked to higher risk of just about every disease you hope to avoid — high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis, sleep apnea, stroke, gallstones and cancer.
In front of a packed audience in the State Dining Room at the White House on Tuesday, first lady Michelle Obama rolled out her national initiative to combat childhood obesity with a show of force that included medical, business and government leaders, grassroots activists, celebrity public service announcements, cartoon characters as nutrition experts, as well as those most directly affected — the kids themselves.
Dubbed “Let’s Move,” the project also received a presidential nod of support, to be backed up with as much as $1 billion a year in federal funds for 10 years. Earlier in the day, in the Oval Office, President Obama signed a formal memorandum establishing for the first time a national task force on childhood obesity — one that draws from the departments of the Interior, Health and Human Services, Agriculture and Education and is charged with turning the first lady’s ambitious list of proposals into action.
At its core, the initiative has four pillars: more nutrition information, increased physical activity, easier access to healthy foods and, ultimately, personal responsibility. It has bipartisan support, as demonstrated by the presence of two mayors, one a Republican from Hernando, Miss. (population 10,000) and the other a Democrat from Somerville, Mass. (population 77,478). Hernando’s Chip Johnson described how he established a soccer league in his town by leasing a parcel of land from a local resident for $1 a year. And Somerville’s Joseph Curtatone noted that his job as mayor is not to legislate diets but to create an “atmosphere and opportunity for good health.”
All of this is coordinated with other related Administration initiatives:
Schoolhouse nutrition would be addressed by pushing for the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, and the administration is requesting $10 billion over 10 years to improve school meals. As part of the initiative, companies such as Sodexo, Chartwells School Dining Services and Aramark, which supply food to schools, have agreed to cut salt and fat content, and offer more whole grains and more fresh fruit.
The 2011 budget includes something called the Healthy Food Financing Initiative. It would invest $400 million to help bring grocery stores into areas dubbed “food deserts” — or, more accurately, healthy-food deserts. It would also offer incentives for convenience stores to carry more nutritious food options. The goal is to eliminate these produce-free wastelands throughout the country within seven years.
