Childhood obesity? What about starving children?
Michelle Obama recently launched a new campaign to fight childhood obesity and I can’t help but feel frustrated, angry, and a little disgusted.
Yes, I know that childhood obesity is a serious issue which faces the youth of America, but there is a far more serious issue which needs to be addressed NOW. There are millions of people in the United States who do not have enough food. In 2008 the USDA reported that 17 million children lived in households where food was scarce, 1.1 million of them starving. Add the adults into the mix, and we’re talking 49 million people struggling for food. If you consider that the population of the United States in 2008 was just over 300 million people, that means approximately 16.3% of all Americans struggled for food in 2008.
During Barrack Obama’s presidential campaign, he pledged to eliminate hunger among children by 2015. What is being done to bring about the end to childhood hunger in America? So far, the answer has been to throw more money at existing programs (which are not working) and wait for the economy to recover.
The amazing thing about both issues, childhood obesity and childhood hunger, is that they are connected. Both are a result of a failing economy, rising poverty level, and a government too concerned with public relations to do anything serious about anything serious. Part of me thinks that childhood hunger is getting less attention because it admits that our system is failing. Go on television and talk about all the fat people in the US makes it sound like hunger isn’t an issue here, doesn’t it? If we only talk about the excesses, people might not notice the desperate and needy, right?
Childhood obesity and childhood hunger are issues which both need to be addressed, but it amazes me that starving children didn’t win out on Michelle Obama’s list of top priorities. What do you think is more important?
March 4th, 2010 - 15:55
I guess it will have to be OK to be fat because I am fat. I don’t see how any rational person can think that all it takes to be thin is to go on a diet, make rational food choices, as it was described in the clip, and then you will be a socially acceptable weight. So get with the program, FATSO! If this is the answer why do 95% of people who lose the weight regain it all and then some within the next five years or so? It is always possible to motivate yourself and watch every thing you put in your mouth and work out like crazy and lose some weight. That doesn’t make you a socially acceptable size person. It basically makes you temporarily not fat. What naturally slender build person that you know needs to work out every day and watch the amount of calories they put in their mouth daily to stay the size they are? Another thing that is never mentioned is the fact of the increase of foods that trigger the appetite produced by our food industry. Since I started eating whole grains, I have noticed that if I do eat their processed counterparts I am unbelievably hungry a couple of hours after I eat. This includes any pasta, bread, cracker or pizza dough made with white flour. In the modern food processing world, when they remove all the nutrients from the flour during processing,then “enrich” it by adding back some vitamins and nutrients, the product is left without the essence of the food that fills you up. The same is true of any food prepared for consumption in restaurants or prepared in the supermarket. This is a source of lobbying money for those who love to pile on massive government nanny programs however, so you can expect to keep taking the blame for your personal failure to stop shoveling food into your craw to the expense of the government health care programs all the skinny folk are going to have to subsidize for the lardos. Are you prepared to opt out of any government run health care program so you can be fat? Sure I will opt out of paying any state and federal income tax as well, thank you very much.