Word: childhood
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...place to begin that transformation is in schools, since that's where children spend much of their waking lives--and ingest up to 50% of their daily calories. Here, Arkansas--a state that has had one of the nation's highest rates of childhood obesity--is in the vanguard. Led by Joseph Thompson, director of the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement, the state in 2004 began tracking the BMI of more than 400,000 children, sending home confidential health reports to parents. BMI is an imperfect metric since it often mistakes a stocky or muscular kid for an obese...
Arkansas isn't the only state trying to tackle childhood obesity. In 2003, California led the way by banning sugary sodas from public schools and was soon followed by states across the country, with the result that the major soft-drink companies agreed to withdraw all high-calorie sodas from schools by 2009. In Arizona, the Pima tribe of Native Americans, which has some of the highest obesity levels in the world, is growing school gardens in the desert to supply cafeterias with fresh vegetables and reconnect kids to a traditional cuisine. Today at least 17 states have set nutritional...
...part of its fight against childhood obesity, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is seeding local initiatives like the Healthy Schools Program, which will provide on-site support for more than 8,000 schools by 2010, improving access to healthy food and increasing opportunities for students to exercise. Last year 16 states supported policies to improve physical-education classes, which have been cut back severely in recent years, and just this month Florida governor Charlie Crist signed a bill requiring physical-education programs in the state's elementary schools. Denver has renovated more than 50 school playgrounds, significantly increasing children...
...double the number in 1970, and many of the ads were for just the kinds of nutritional junk that's causing so many of our problems. The $2 billion--plus marketing budget of a company like Coca-Cola dwarfs even the $500 million over five years being spent on childhood obesity by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation...
...obesity seems to be the default fate. "This is probably the most important public-health problem facing the country today," says Lavizzo-Mourey of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. "We are committed to doing what it takes, for as long as it takes." So should we all be, until childhood obesity no longer has a geography...