First Lady Michelle Obama officially kicked off a national campaign to combat childhood obesity on Tuesday, February 9, 2010 in Washington D.C. 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. The initiative concentrates on improved school lunches, increased physical activity, and more available nutritional education. Michelle spoke about the four key components of the nation-wide program (www.letsmove.gov):
1. Improve the information and the tools that parents need to make the changes that are desired in their families.
2. Improve the quality of foods in the schools.
3. Improve access and affordability of healthy foods, and
4. Increase physical education for our kids.
“This isn’t about trying to turn the clock back to when we were kids or preparing five-course meals from scratch every night. No one has time for that,” the first lady said in her remarks. “And it’s not about being 100 percent perfect, 100 percent of the time. Lord knows I’m not. There’s a place for cookies and ice cream, burgers and fries — that’s part of the fun of childhood.”
The dangers and statistics related to childhood obesity speak to the importance of Michelle’s concerns. She has noted that a whopping one in three children in the U.S. is overweight or obese. In her interview on Larry King Live, the First Lady noted that “we’re already seeing high cholesterol in young kids, high blood pressure, asthma that is preventable, and type 2 diabetes which is the most troubling.”
The core of the program is “about the quality of life of our kids … it’s about fitness and its about overall nutrition … We need to change how we eat,” states Michelle Obama.
And the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports will be revamped so that it no longer focuses on how many sit-ups and push-ups a child can do — or how long they can hang, batlike, from a high bar. Instead of focusing on athleticism or stupid human tricks, it will address health and well-being.
The first lady has decided to take up that fight and to make it her signature issue while in the White House. One in three children in this country is either overweight or obese, Obama said Tuesday. If that trend continues, this generation of children will not live as long as their parents. Obama has said she would like her fight against obesity to be her legacy as first lady. But it will be impossible to measure success — at least by her standards — until long after she’s left the White House. Because her goal, she said, is to see that “children who are born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight.”