Ariyah DeSouza, Associate Recruitment Marketing Manager:
The CDC reports that today nearly one in three American children ages 6 to 19 are overweight, while one in five are obese. The childhood obesity rate tripled between 1980 and 1999, creating an epidemic and a generation of people with shorter life spans than their parents.
Michelle Obama has called childhood obesity both a health and an economic issue for communities that “can drastically alter the economic landscape of our cities and towns for generations to come." She believes everyone must work together to abolish this epidemic. If we’ve learned something from her husband’s term, it’s that a leader can’t drag whole communities into change unless they’re up for it. You cannot empower others; people empower themselves.
You can, however, through your leadership provide people the support they need. The National League of Cities (NLC) has been working with the first lady in supporting municipal officials’ adoption of a holistic solution to childhood obesity. Obama’s Let’s Move! program aims to reduce our nation’s childhood obesity rates within a generation through the reform of behavioral and environmental factors.
Cities and towns electing to participate in the initiative must choose at least one action to take in the following 12 months in each of these four areas:
1. helping parents make healthy family choices
2. creating healthy schools
3. providing access to healthy and affordable food
4. promoting physical activity
Participating officials will submit an end-of-year report describing their city’s or town’s actions. These communities will be recognized on the Let’s Move! website, and mayors may participate in conference calls and events with federal staff to share ideas and challenges.
The Let’s Move! website includes a blog, facts for raising healthier kids, recommendations for eating healthy and getting active, and steps to taking action. Officials can visit the US Department of Health & Human Services website to sign up.
As a collective, we need long-term, strategic solutions to resolve a problem of this scope and endurance. I appreciate the education and tools the White House is giving businesses, communities, schools and parents to address childhood obesity.
The investments recommended by this campaign might seem too simple or minor – but not if you understand their long-term necessity. For example, as Obama puts it, “By building more sidewalks, you could help kids get healthier today and reduce health costs and budget strain tomorrow. By investing in more nutritious school lunches or more P.E. time, you can take steps that will lead to a healthier, more productive workforce in the future.”
The first lady cited statistics. In the ten cities with the nation’s highest obesity rates, the direct costs connected with obesity and related diseases are $50 million per 100,000 residents. If these ten cities reduced their obesity rates to the national average, they together would save $500 million in healthcare costs every year.
Fortunately, more than 500 cities have decided to take charge and have signed up as Let’s Move Cities and Towns.
Their investments today should pasy off for US employers tomorrow. Obese children are likely to turn into obese adults. Overweight and obese adult workers today miss 39 million work days and cost employers $13 billion in healthcare annually. And today’s obese children affect today’s workforces. Studies show that obese children are less healthy and miss far more days of school on average. For the parents of those kids, that can mean more tardiness, more early departures from work and higher absenteeism to stay home to care for these kids.
Some employers might prefer to operate in locations where citizens are healthier, given higher worker productivity and lower health costs. The California Department of Health Services reported nearly $25 billion in private and public medical services, lost productivity, and workers' compensation in one year alone, attributing these costs to the 59% of California adults who are obese or overweight. In a 2004 article in the Los Angeles Times, Susan Foerster, chief of cancer prevention and nutrition for the California Department of Health Services, cited “car-dominated or unsafe neighborhoods and limited access to fresh fruits and vegetables” as possible sources of the state's surge in obesity. She also stated that “it's not a matter of simply pushing away from the table or getting up off the couch—the increase in rates over time has been a function of changed lifestyles and changed environment.”
No one disputes that Let's Move! addresses some key issues with long-term strategies. A major concern that many obesity experts and medical groups have raised, however, is that the initiative doesn't treat kids who are already obese – a staggering 20% of American children ages 6 to 19. Current treatment options are rarely reimbursed through insurance and few people have access to them, especially minority and lower-income families whose children are more likely to be impacted by obesity. Ideally, our government would advance solutions for both treatment and prevention.
If you want to engage in the movement on a fun level, check out the Let’s Move! Facebook page.