Reuters, February 9, 2010
Alarmed that nearly a third of U.S. children are obese or overweight — and likely to stay that way all their lives — President Barack Obama launched an initiative on Tuesday to roll back the numbers and put his wife in charge of promoting it.
“I have set a goal to solve the problem of childhood obesity within a generation so that children born today will reach adulthood at a healthy weight,” Obama said in signing the order at the White House.
He assigned his cabinet officers to meet …

The New York Times, Hannah Wallace, February 5, 2010
About 20 high school students stood behind the butcher counter, staring at a 160-pound piece of meat from a recently slaughtered cow.
“All of our meat comes from local farms, and we get it all whole,” said Tom Mylan, 33, one of three butchers at the Meat Hook, a new butcher shop in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that buys its meat locally and prizes nose-to-tail eating. “We don’t just buy steaks or pork chops or whatever.”
“How much does the whole cow cost?” one boy in …

The Huffington Post, Jeffrey Levi, February 1, 2010
One of the biggest public health crises our country has ever faced is finally getting serious attention.
During the State of the Union address Wednesday night, President Obama announced that First Lady Michelle Obama was going to take on the childhood obesity epidemic. I’d say the epidemic better watch out! It now has a worthy adversary.
Mrs. Obama is stepping up to provide leadership, recognizing if we don’t take serious measures now, this generation of kids could be the first in U.S. history to live …

Rob Stein, Washington Post, January 22, 2010

One out of every five U.S. teenagers has a cholesterol level that increases the risk of heart disease, federal health officials reported Thursday, providing striking new evidence that obesity is making more children prone to illnesses once primarily limited to adults.

A nationally representative survey of blood test results in American teenagers found that more than 20 percent of those ages 12 to 19 had at least one abnormal level of fat. The rate jumped to 43 percent among those adolescents who were obese.
Previous studies had …

Tara Parker-Pope, January 25, 2010, The New York Times
Can something as simple as the timing of recess make a difference in a child’s health and behavior?
Some experts think it can, and now some schools are rescheduling recess — sending students out to play before they sit down for lunch. The switch appears to have led to some surprising changes in both cafeteria and classroom.
Schools that have tried it report that when children play before lunch, there is less food waste and higher consumption of milk, fruit and vegetables. And some …

Between them, Kristin Richmond and Kirsten Tobey have worked on Wall Street, traveled the world and taught school from East Africa to Ecuador. Now they make lunch for a living.
Friends since they met in business school at the University of California, Berkeley, Ms. Richmond and Ms. Tobey founded Revolution Foods Inc. to ride a political and economic wave: surging support for healthier food in school cafeterias.
Federal nutrition guidelines require subsidized school lunches to meet benchmarks on calories and fat, but they do not require that foods be whole, local, …

BBC News, December 10
More than one in five children in England start their school life overweight or obese, NHS figures show.
What is more, by the end of primary school the rate rises to nearly one in three, the government’s child measurement programme showed.
Obesity levels were higher in London, the North East and West Midlands than elsewhere in 2008-9.
But the NHS Information Centre said there were no significant changes in the results from last year.
NHS chiefs warned the true levels of obesity were likely to be a little higher as the …

September 1, 2009, Nanci Hellmich, USA Today
The healthy choice should be the easy choice, says family physician Eduardo Sanchez.
To make it easier for children to eat healthfully and move more, local governments in towns and cities across the country need to help create a better environment, a new report says.

Children and their families should have access to grocery stores that offer plenty of healthful food such as fruits and vegetables, and schools shouldn’t be surrounded by fast-food restaurants. Children should be able to ride their bikes or walk safely to …

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, October 26, 2009
Researchers find that children’s cereals have 85 percent more sugar, 65 percent less fiber and 60 percent more sodium than cereals marketed to adults. In addition, companies are spending more than $156 million dollars a year to market these cereals directly to kids.
These findings are part of an extensive analysis of children’s cereals conducted by researchers at the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity as part of the RWJF-funded Cereal FACTS (Food Advertising to Children and Teens Score) project. The results of …

Swooping in to save the kids from the evils of the junk food junkies, the all new comic book superhero, Super Nutricia, created by Inland Empire Health Plan IEHP will help fight childhood obesity and unhealthy eating among children.
This is the first ever female superhero from IEHPs squad of masked avengers that already includes Rad R

ider and Eradicator.Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20090811/DC60167Super Nutricia is scheduled to launch her first mission at the annual Route 66 Rendezvous event on September 19 in downtown San Bernardino, complete with a live showdown including an array of …