Fighting Childhood Obesity

Critiquing the administration’s recommendations that better diets, more exercise and breast-feeding will curtail childhood obesity does not make one a hard-right conservative Republican. The issue remains that these soft advisements have not yielded tangible results.

Examples of ineffective government programs to corral obesity and improve the American diet abound. Since the early 1990s, when nutritional labeling was added to packaged foods and the Food Pyramid Guidelines were introduced, the number of states with a prevalence of obesity over 20 percent has mushroomed from zero to 49 states. And new studies show that the government-imposed mandate to post calorie counts on restaurant menus has done nothing to lower calorie consumption.

A better approach is to go directly to the source: the food marketers. By offering them incentives to aggressively lower the calories they sell, a quicker, more lasting solution will result.

Our children’s health depends on it.