All she has to do is tour the U.S. carrying a sign which states:
"Do you want to grow up to look like me?"
Cheap but effective.
The "obvious answer" should be they eat way too much junk. It's a LOT easier to take in calories and gain weight than it is to burn calories and lose weight. You'd have to jog about 10 miles to burn the calories from a single doughnut. I could be off on the numbers, but not by much.
Mc Donald’s existed when I was a kid. So did junk food, and even video games. And I was still not fat.
When I was young my mother would routinely kick me out of the house first thing on a hot summer morning. “Go out and play!” she’d yell. “But there’s no one to play with!” I’d protest. “Play with yourself!” she’d reply.
The menu's I've seen in my daughter's school suggest this is a horrible idea, the kids would be better to stay home and play X-Box than to eat the crap they serve at schools.
Typical menu:
Corn dogs
Mac N Cheese
Milk
generic desert
That isn't much better than McDonalds, but even if a kid eats that, if they are playing outside and staying active, they won't gain weight. But if you sit at home playing video games and eat that, you're gonna get fat!
P.S. The secret to perfect Snickerdoodles was Crisco..
It’s nobody’s fetchin’ business how fat kids are today!
We've gone from riding our bikes to the nearest convenience store to buy comics, cards and candy, to not letting kids ride alone at all -- even in the relative safety of suburbia, even if we've bought them cell phones...
...In the Southern Arizona neighborhood of my youth, the elementary school was also the local park. The grounds were open, so playgrounds and fields could be accessed any time, day or night...
...When I was a kid, early arrivals at school were guaranteed a spot in games of football, kickball, soccer, basketball, tetherball, four square and whatever else we could think of. The sooner you got to school, the more you got to play.
He hit the nail on the head.
When I was a kid (I graduated from high school in the mid-1980s, so it wasn’t all THAT long ago) we spent most summer days outside playing sports from morning to dinner time. Spring and fall were even better for weekend evenings, though — because when it got dark around 7:00 PM it was perfect for playing “manhunt” and causing all kinds of mischief in the neighborhood before getting home at a reasonable hour.
Bingo. I've had people come to my door to hassle me because my little boys (8, 6, 4) go to the playground within sight of our house "alone."
I watch them cross the street, so they don't stop to fight in the middle of it and get hit by a truck.
***juvenile obesity epidemic can be reversed by significantly expanding welfare programs***
My observations suggest that kids on welfare tend to be the fattest, along with their mommas.
More food stamps for all!
There you have it folks; the poor in America are fat and lazy. . .so let's give them more money.
Genuinely poor people, like the kind I saw in places like Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe would all be very confused how one manages to be in poverty and yet still be fat and "inactive." They would not understand it and they would think it was a joke. . .well, it is a joke. . .and the joke is on the U.S. taxpayer.
While exercise is good for turning fat to muscle, it is no good for weight reduction. The bottom line is that the body is *supposed* to turn good nutrition into fat. So it has all sorts of mechanisms to increase weight and defeat weight loss.
Males needed more muscle and less fat for hunting and combat, so it is easier for them to lose weight and gain muscle mass. But females need fat to support their immune system while it changes over during pregnancy and after. Sperm actually increases in potency when males are somewhat starved, but females lose fertility when they are somewhat starved.
I recall when I was in a kid during the Kennedy era, there was something called the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. Evidently , even then the government felt the need to intervene in childhood activities. However, today it is worse. I do not know what the solution is for those sad inner city minority youths whose obesity is staggering due to inactivity and too much television watching. They have no parental supervision or encouragement and their culture is often dictated by values foreign to those I and a million other Americans were brought up on. I do know that their parents ought to take responsibility for their upbringing, and not sit around waiting for Michelle Obama to get them hand outs. However, for those children who are getting too fat in suburban and rural America, there is no excuse. Parents need to reevaluate what is important in life. When I was a girl, mothers were at home so there was always watchful eyes in the neighborhood. Today, parents panic because they hear stories about kidnappings and perverts haunting neighborhoods. Although I think these incidents may occur less frequently than dramatic news programs record them as happening, it would rarely if ever happen if there were people home and active in their houses during the day. In the past,most of the family activity was centered around the home and the yard so kids preferred to be there. Schools should go back to having two recesses in addition to the after lunch play time to foster increased physical activities. I could go on and on, but one thing I think is important to repeat, more government intervention is not needed. The more your taxes go up to pay for these silly programs, the more you have to work outside your home to pay them, and the less time your child has to just be a kid.
I don’t remember snacking when I was a child, we ate three meals and it was rare if we were offered a cookie etc. If I was hungry after school for some reason... my mother would offer me an apple.
By the time I had children, most of the pediatric literature on raising children encouraged both mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks. If I took my kids to a park or the playground with other mothers, everyone brought “snacks” to replenish the kids. Even if I only brought some water and slices of apples, my kids would beg me to let them have some of the snacks the other moms were offering.
The obvious answer: The socialists have to make everything a crisis and especially make Americans feel bad by telling the ‘our kids’ are fat. If they repeat it enough people believe it.
We had fat kids in my day too. Nothing new here.
Cut down food stamps and watch them get thin.
I see a lot of kids. I walk by a grade school, a junior high and a high school.
I almost never see a fat kid, even at the high school.
Adults are getting fat as pigs. I went to Wal-Mart yesterday and I can tell you this for sure.
I don’t know when it happens that skinny kids become fat adults but I don’t think there is that much of an obesity problem with kids.