Big Wigs Talk About Kids Getting Big

Marc Ambinder:

With a flourish of his pen, President Obama signed an executive order this morning creating yet another national anti-obesity strategy. He was flanked by gaggle of usual suspects — and his wife, Michelle Obama, for whom combating childhood obesity is a cause. First ladies, you see, have “causes.”  (Barbara Bush’s was literacy. Laura Bush’s was literacy.)  Childhood obesity prevention needs a mission manager.

Researchers aren’t sure why, but the growth rate of childhood obesity has slowed in recent years as state and local governments ramped up the attention they paid to the type of food kids are served at schools and the food industry instituted a number of largely prophylactic but cumulatively contributing steps to reduce food consumption by kids. But celebrating a plateaud or slowed growth rate is akin to cheering flood waters that have stopped rising.   (Adult obesity? The problem can’t be solved. That’s a sad reality — and why the White House isn’t focusing on obesity per se.)

Michelle Obama wants to be the leader of a movement that ends childhood obesity in a generation. What that means is unclear. What is clear is that she has a sophisticated understanding of the socioeconomic dimensions of the problem. One thing the White House won’t tell you is that because she is the nation’s most admired black woman, Obama hopes to be able to speak directly to African American mothers about their responsibilities. There is a fascinating but difficult to simplify literature on weight stigma in the black community, and how that contributes to — or takes away from — the environmental triggers of obesity.

A fascinating new study by the CDC figured out that childhood obesity growth rates could be curbed by three behavioral changes: eat dinner as a family, make sure kids get 8 hours of sleep a night and reduce the amount of TV that kids watch.  Unfortunately, in the communities where obesity is most problematic, family structures aren’t intact (either because mothers are raising their children without fathers or because both parents work, many parents don’t pay attention to their child’s weight gains or losses and the health infrastructure is poor; television and Internet are ubiquitous).  Neither a lecture from the government nor a laissez faire approach will solve this inherent gap between what works and what people can actually do. If you’re prepared accept the fact of childhood obesity in society as a given, then you can move on. If you’re not — if you see a moral dimension inherent in the question, you cannot treat this policy issue like others; it is not matter of choice for the people who are hurt the most by it.

Julie Gunlock at NRO:

Speaking about the issue during a meeting with cabinet members and congressional leaders, the first lady said: “It’s going to require us working together — not just the administration, but Congress, governors, mayors, parents, teachers. Anyone who has access to children in their lives is going to have to work together. And one of the things that’s also very clear is that this problem won’t be solved by any single federal solution. This is going to require national action.”

Mrs. Obama is certainly correct about one thing: The problem won’t be solved by a federal solution — not even the one she went on to propose.

Although she was murky on the details, the first lady’s new plan involves four basic initiatives. She wants to increase the number of “healthy” schools, and she also wants to increase the number of physical-activity programs made available by them. She hopes to improve the “accessibility and affordability” of food for all Americans. (Apparently, Mrs. Obama is unaware that Americans pay far less for their food than citizens of other nations do, spending only 7 percent of annual income on it, according to a 2009 Department of Labor study.) Lastly, she wants to “empower” consumers to make better food choices — whatever that means.

The first lady made no mention of how much this new initiative will cost, but, according to a 2009 Congressional Research Report, federally funded child-nutrition programs, along with the WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) program, cost American taxpayers $19 billion in 2007. How much more will Mrs. Obama propose we spend to overhaul these programs, especially at a time when her husband is calling for a government-wide spending freeze?

Most children are smart enough to make good decisions for themselves when given guidance and attention from their parents. Considering the vast number of resources available to the Obama girls even before their move to the White House, it’s clear that nothing had a greater impact on these young ladies’ health than their mother’s involvement. When Michelle Obama was advised by the doctor to pay attention to her children’s food decisions, her reaction was that of a concerned parent ready to take responsibility, not a parent looking for a government program to step in.

By all means, let the first lady urge American parents to follow her example and take the lead in making better food choices for their children. Just as parents need to ensure that their children get enough sleep, do their homework, and avoid dangerous activities, they need to teach their children proper eating habits. Parental involvement, not the federal government, is the only long-term cure for childhood obesity — as Mrs. Obama has shown by her example, if not by her policy proposals.

Nick Gillespie at Reason:

Mrs. Obama isn’t just worried for the sake of fat kids in the Land of Plenty and the dangerously low national reserves of stretch fabric. No, she speaks a secret truth that all too many public figures are afraid to utter: Fat loads threaten our very survival in a world of increasing threats. Citing “a recent study” that proves that “obesity-related diseases” cost “$147 billion a year,” she notes

“This epidemic also impacts the nation’s security, as obesity is now one of the most common disqualifiers for military service.”

Sweet fancy Moses, I thought I’d heard all the reasons that Nanny Staters trot out for slimming down, but this military service angle is a real freaking stunner, like a new line of Snapple flavors. And in a country that’s been bogged down in two quagmire-like wars every bit as sticky and difficult to leave as a Golden Corral restaurant, Obama may have just given a new generation of draft-dodgers the new way out, especially now that pretending to be gay ain’t gonna work no more.

More here, including plans to yet again reshape the dreaded USDA “food pyramid” into a ziggurat or a geodesic dome or some other equally useless imaginary shape.

This strikes me as one of the worst arguments ever for fighting obesity. Lady Obama is the perfect age to have learned via Animal House that being fat, drunk, and stupid was no way to go through life. But she also should have learned just a few years later from Stripes that the U.S. Army is the perfect staging ground for a weight-loss regimen that could turn even a lard-ass Canadian like John Candy into a lean, mean, fighting machine.

Paul Campos at TNR:

In fact, a new comprehensive meta-analysis of data from more than a dozen countries, including the U.S., reveals that, for a decade now, obesity rates all over the world among both adults and children have been largely flat or actually declining. The study points out that alarmist claims from public health officials about an “obesity epidemic” are all explicitly based on the mistaken assumption that obesity rates are continuing to rise.

In particular, the claim that life expectancy in America is going to decline is unsupported by any demographic or epidemiological evidence. (This widely repeated claim can be traced to some data-free musings in a New England Journal of Medicine article five years ago, from which the authors subsequently backed away.)

The choice of weaponry in this unnecessary war is also unfortunate. The Obamas want to improve the nutritional value of school meals, help children become more active by making urban areas amenable to physical activity, improve labeling on food products, and decrease the number of “food deserts”–areas where it’s difficult and expensive for people to buy fresh fruits and vegetables.

These are all laudable goals in and of themselves, but it’s a terrible mistake to pursue them  in the name of getting rid of fat kids. First, numerous studies indicate that, just as with adults, improving children’s nutrition and activity levels is beneficial to their health, but usually produces little or no weight loss (which is all the more reason to focus on health rather than weight). Nor are thin children in any less need of good food and healthy activities than fat ones. Indeed, over the past 20 years, extensive research has demonstrated that, when studies control for factors such as physical activity levels, weight simply ceases to have any meaningful correlation with health.

Second, a rich literature on stigmatization shows that the health costs of social stigma are high. I don’t believe Michelle Obama wants to stigmatize fat kids, but a campaign dedicated to eliminating them is guaranteed to do so in a profound way.

On that same theme, one wonders if the First Lady has considered that putting her pre-teen daughters on diets is far more likely to make them eating disordered rather than permanently thin. (If the kind of obsessive monitoring of food and activity choices Obama recommends to parents actually “worked,” there would be almost no fat kids in America today, at least in the middle and upper class families where Obama’s anxieties about her daughters’ weight are all too common). And does she really think it’s a good idea for her husband to make negative comments about his daughter’s body to the nation’s media?

Everyone should support reasonable attempts to make it easier for all children to enjoy a healthy balance of foods and the pleasures and benefits of physical activity. Trying to do so by stigmatizing the bodies of one out of every three American kids is a horrible idea.

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel at Science Insider:

David Ludwig, a childhood obesity specialist at Children’s Hospital Boston and Harvard Medical School, is cheered by Michelle Obama’s obesity initiative: “The obesity epidemic isn’t [due to] a lack of knowledge. It’s a lack of political will in Washington.” That includes reluctance to push for high-quality food in schools, have farm subsidies that are in line with public health and not special interests, and make healthy foods available to low-income neighborhoods, Ludwig says. “There’s certainly room for discussion among the experts” about how best to tackle all this. But Obama’s campaign “offers a promise of ending this paralysis” and Ludwig says he’s hopeful it will. Others are not as sanguine.

UPDATE: E.D. Kain at The League