EDITORIAL: Childhood obesity battle
First lady Michelle Obama last month rolled out an ambitious and much-needed plan to get U.S. children moving more to reduce overall obesity rates.
Her Let’s Move initiative — pitched Feb. 20 at the National Governors Association’s meeting — is already earning high marks.
With 31 percent of children and adolescents ages 2 to 19 considered overweight, according to a 2008 study by the Centers for Disease Control, something must be done, and soon. Obesity is directly linked to high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, edema and heart disease.
In Texas, 28.3 percent of the population was obese in 2008, the CDC reported. Nationwide, 66 percent of adults are obese, according to the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
So it’s no wonder we are raising fat kids. As adults, we must set the example through sensible diet and exercise to our children. Slimming down must start at home.
Let’s Move stresses this and includes information to parents to help children eat properly, ensuring that schools offer more healthy food, helping children get regular physical activity and ensuring that all neighborhoods have healthy food.
It also recognizes there is no simple cure that will apply to everyone. But the starting point is for us, as a nation, to start cutting the fat. “We have to be honest to ourselves,” the first lady told governors. “Our kids didn’t do this to themselves.”
Indeed, the little ones strapped in car seats that we drive up to fast-food joints to get a squirt of grease and a pump of drinkable fat are not benefiting from our poor choices.
Instead of driving to find food, how about driving to a park and kicking around a soccer ball? Or go swimming as a family?
Obama stressed that her plan does not have to be expensive. And we all know how important saving money is right now. But we also must realize unhealthy children cost us money through higher insurance premiums, hospital visits and doctors’ visits.
Let’s look in the mirror and move forward.
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