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Agreeing to the problem but not to the solution is something that comes up in the political mud pit. Yes, this is a "fitness" blog but fitness and politics merge together when it comes to health care. Those of us reading can't deny that Michelle Obama's doing the right thing by trying to get fat kids thinner. It's only a matter of time before the current crop of obese kids hit their 30's and we see the motherlode shit-storm of type-2 diabetes like this country has never seen before. Most of us know that's a gateway disease to a host of other issues that need to be treated... and paid for. You've heard the percentages before but have you actually LOOKED at the NUMBER of fat kids that is? Well, here it is...23,629,000 That's a number that would take you about 3,800 hours to count out. No wonder they put it down as a percentage!
So, obviously we need to get a handle on this. The question becomes how, and that's where I diverge from Mrs. Obama on. She's taking a lot of criticism from my side of the fence and, as far as I'm concerned, for good reason. Apparently, we just can't do this by ourselves. We know what that means when it comes from people like her: government trying to regulate our behavior through taxes, funding and regulation. Things like a soft drink tax, which is gaining an increasing amount of traction. It really irritates me when people throw around this notion that the government is part of the solution to fat America. If anything, it's been been a long-standing part of the problem all along, never really getting the full-share of the blame.
Nearly 100 years ago, President Woodrow Wilson often opined that the US Federal Government lacked the transformative power to shape and form the nation socially and economically. This was also around the time where the government essentially allowed a certain, powerful medical trust to regulate and control pretty much medical care in the USA. It was bigger than that. They began to mold how the American thought about medicine and health. They began to espouse such brilliant ideas that drug therapies were best, Chiropractors where basically quacks, and that strength training was very unhealthy (you know, it would use up your heartbeats and make you muscle-bound)... just to name a few... in those early years.
That was passively allowing bad decisions to happen. There's also the US government's brilliant call about hydrogenated oils. Right around the 1950's, they started telling us that we should be eating margarine rather than butter. After all, a food that Americans had been eating for a century and a half with a marginal rate of heart attacks was now public enemy number one. So, we stopped eating that and eventually began following government guidelines that told us to eat lots and lots of grains. How's our heart attack problem now? 
Oops.
Things are different now. We know better now. Besides, you can trust this rendition of the federal government, we're not like the other guys and gals from the past 100 years. You know... "Change we can believe in!"
Seriously, how much longer are we going to continue to look outward and upward to other entities to fix problems like the fact that we're all fat? Study the history of "modern" medicine and industrialized food manufacturing enough and you'll see that the abominations that occurred in food and health coincide with the government becoming a more integral part of our lives. Why is it that the first two, justifiably so, get shit for the bad things they've done but the latter is always exonerated and seen as a part of the solution? They were helping the former two do their thing all along!
Dear Michelle Obama,
When my kids are old enough to go to school, I'll be sending them with their lunches already packed, thank you very much. I won't be needing your assistance, or the government's assistance either, to feed my kids healthy food.
Thank you,
Justin_P
This whole feed the kids right is just part of the bigger problem of Fat America. The solution isn't going to come from having the same idiots with the same ideas about how the culture should function telling us how to fix it. We need to get back to the notion that responsibility is personal and individual. We need to fix it by ourselves and stop blaming others for it and expecting others to solve it for us.
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