A nation on the ‘Move’
Three children sit on the swings on a school playground. According to national statistics one of these three children already is or will be obese. Its a sobering thing to think about but fortunately for us our very own First Lady seems to have taken this is
sue under her wing.
A personal article written by Obama herself for Newsweek detailed how she has started a plan to combat bad eating habits, exercise habits and over all health issues with children today. Her program, called Lets Move, aims to do just that. Get kids moving. And adults too. Get them moving in the right direction to make better choices for our children and lead by example when it comes to eating habits and physical activity.
One interesting point of her campaign is her stress on the importance of simply cooking meals at home. We live in a world where more there are more college students who watch cooking shows than who actually know how to cook. And these are our future parents. This is a generation of people who have grown up eating fast or frozen or both nearly every night. How are they ever going to learn how to cook good, healthy food for their future families if they themselves have grown up eating convenience food?
The problem in America goes beyond obesity. It is about a certain knowledge base that is simply non existent. We have students about to graduate college for whom culinary knowledge expands no further than boiling pasta or preheating an oven for a frozen pizza.
These people do not know how to feed themselves. For years they have relied on the services of cafeterias, fast food restaurants, and occasionally parents. But here is a news flash, fast food is not your friend, its a business looking to provide food that tastes good and costs the least. Not exactly a recipe for a healthy option. And while cafeterias may seem to mean well they are still ultimately trying to provide cheap and tasty food, except they have the added complication of trying to meet a set decades old nutritional guidelines enforced by the United States Department of Agriculture.
As part of her Lets Move program the First Lady intends to set aside more money for the school lunch program and have the USDA re-evaluate their nutritional guidelines for school lunches. Whether or not these actions will be enough remains to be seen. There is also the possibility that this is too little too late for our fourth, fifth and sixth graders today. We know bad habits start young, but how can these bad habits be reversed when the parents don’t even know what they should be doing? Our country is in need of one extreme makeover, both physically and mentally.