With nearly 33% of children in America considered to be overweight or obese - a rate that has tripled in adolescents and more than doubled in younger children since 1980 - an Obama Administration task force recently established a goal of reducing the childhood obesity rate to just 5% by 2030, less than a generation away.
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According to C & R's Youth Beat, kids eat at a restaurant 2.5 times a month. In an average 30-day month, there are 150 meal occasions:
- 30 Breakfasts
- 30 Lunches
- 30 Dinners
- 60 Snacks (at twice a day)
If kids are only going to restaurants 2-3 times a month, they account for only
2 percent of all meal occasions.
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President Bill Clinton Honors 179 U.S.
Schools
The Alliance for a Healthier Generation, founded by the American Heart Association and the William J. Clinton Foundation, today recognized 179 schools that have transformed their campuses into healthier places for students and staff.
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According to the Nanny State Liberation Front, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors is  not only going after kids meals, but certain breakfast items marketed to adults as well. The article states that a Sept. 27 amendment was added to the city’s proposed Happy Meal Toy Ban ordinance. “A new category of items — breakfast items — are required to contain 0.5 cups of fruit.” Additionally, the amendment demands that the hamburger buns or other sandwich breads used in the meals must contain at least 50 percent whole wheat.
One has to wonder what the reason is for including restrictions on the breakfast meal breads seeing that adult customers do not purchase fast-food breakfast meals because of toy incentives.
According to a recent blog post from www.nannystateliberationfront.net, a new report appearing in an American medical journal says the federal government is exploiting the nation’s obesity ‘crisis’ to “extract more money from taxpayers and to expand government.â€
“The article’s authors note that nanny state bureaucrats have already failed in their attempts to meet self-imposed goals for reducing obesity, perhaps, because they are targeting food sources that pose no proven risk to Americans’ waistlines.
Michael L. Marlow, Ph.D. and Alden F. Shiers, Ph.D., both economists at California Polytechnic State University, write in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons that the federal government has erred in its decision to use ‘sin taxes’ as its weapon of choice to win the war on obesity. The primary target of these sin taxes is sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB), despite empirical studies that do not show a clear, if at all existent, link between SSBs and obesity, the authors state:
‘It is sheer folly to single out a specific food or beverage as the ‘cause of obesity’ when common sense indicates that obesity is a product of genetics, hormones, food choice, exercise or lack thereof, and the basic equation: Calories consumed minus calories expended = weight gain or weight loss. If one eliminates soda pop from his diet, while consuming 10,000 calories per day and expending 1,000 calories per day in exercise, that individual will gain weight. Moreover, if government interventions somehow reduce soda consumption, it is likely that substitution willtake place, such as eating more food or simply adding more sugar to home-brewed iced tea. Effects on weight are thus ambiguous at best.’â€
