The White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity issued a blueprint Tuesday that’s thick with ideas but doesn’t put the hammer down yet on taxpayers or private industry.

A national soda tax? Worth further study, but not this year. New regulatory authority over food marketing to children, or changes to agricultural subsidies to make fresh fruit and vegetables cheaper? Possibilities down the road, but why not first encourage more voluntary steps by the private sector?

The 124-page report from the task force that President Barack Obama created three months ago contains 70 recommendations for turning around the national obesity epidemic. But it looks to current regulatory authority, more federal spending and research — and public persuasion. It pushes the more politically divisive options down the road to unspecified dates.

One in five U.S. children today is obese. Experts worry that’s straining the health care system and weakening the U.S. military. The task force’s primary stated goal is to bring the child obesity rate back to 1 in 20 by 2030, as it was in 1970.

First lady Michelle Obama, the public face of the administration’s “Let’s Move” anti-obesity campaign, said at an event unveiling the report that it creates “a very solid roadmap that we need to make these goals real, to solve this problem within a generation. Now we just need to follow through with the plan. We just need everyone to do their part.”

Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, said the plan embodies the idea that regulation is “the last thing you want to do,” only after other means are exhausted. “You try to start by pushing soft regulation, by using your bully pulpit . . . by commending the companies that are really stepping up to the plate and sometimes shaming companies that aren’t doing enough.”

The task force raises the concept of taxing soda or junk food to reduce consumption. Various state and local governments have passed or are considering such taxes. But Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius took care to underscore that, while worth studying, “there is no proposal for a federal tax” at this time. She said that for now the concept “may be a strategy others want to deploy.”

The recommendations released Tuesday address a nation in which the children most at risk statistically are African-American girls, Hispanic boys, Southerners and those born to women who smoke, have diabetes or are themselves overweight.

The task force aims to bring more fruit and vegetables into children’s diets at home and school while reducing sugar and fat intake, and increasing children’s access to safe places to walk and exercise.

The report also links the problem to marketing, genetics, possible environmental and possible chemical factors, school lunch programs, food prices and urban “food deserts.”

The private sector responded favorably to the tone of the report, which included input from a dozen agencies and more than 2,500 public comments.

“We look forward to strengthening the role of self-regulation as a way to improve the balance of foods and beverages advertised to kids,” Elaine D. Kolish, director of the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative, said in a statement. The initiative, launched in 2006 by the Council of Better Business Bureaus, includes 16 soda, fast food, candy and packaged-food manufacturers.

Among the findings and recommendations:

Babies who are breastfed for at least nine months are significantly less likely to become obese.

The government should expand research already under way into possible links between certain plastics and other chemicals and obesity.

The effectiveness of a junk food tax could depend on its severity. Studies of current state-levied soda taxes suggest they haven’t had much impact on adolescent or adult weight, but experts studying the impact of tobacco taxes think higher junk food tax rates could reduce consumption.

Entertainment companies should voluntarily limit licensing of popular characters to nutritious food and drinks.

Health insurance plans should cover prevention, assessment and care for obese children.

The government should spend more money and take a more hands-on role in putting healthier food in schools and get more fresh vegetables and fruits into poor urban areas.

The government should consider how targeted agricultural subsidies might improve fruit and vegetable affordability or consumption.

Schools should be sensitive to stigmas on children who receive subsidized meals.

The Agriculture Department should update its Food Pyramid to better educate consumers about healthy eating.

New limits on children’s programming may be worth considering, but children also get food cues from non-children’s programming, billboards, the Internet and other sources.

via National soda tax, regulation not part of Obama obesity plan | McClatchy.

That’s the question Obama’s food policy team is working on this summer. The garden was always intended “as a jumping-off point for getting to what sometimes can be a complicated conversation about how we eat [and] the food choices we make,” Obama policy director Jocelyn Frye said in an interview. But as it moves beyond the symbolic to those meatier matters, the White House is grappling with the very issues that have challenged the so-called good food movement for decades: How do you simplify and sell a new way of eating?

That isn’t so easy. Food — unlike, say, the space program — is a fundamental and intimate part of everyone’s life. It’s culturally, politically and economically complicated. And there’s a fine line between government involvement and paternalism: It’s one thing to educate people about the importance of a healthful diet and quite another to tell them what to eat and where to buy it. The garden has been an unqualified success; on the first family’s trip to Moscow last week, Russians were far more interested in Obama’s garden than in her fashion sense. The challenge now is to craft a strategy to capitalize on Obama’s newfound clout to improve school lunches and access to fresh fruits and vegetables and to make how we eat an integral part of the national health-care debate.

The main architects of the plan, along with Obama herself, are Frye and Sam Kass, an assistant chef who also serves as the White House food initiative coordinator.

Frye, 45, a Washington native, attended Harvard Law School with Obama. Kass worked as a personal chef for the Obama family in Chicago before joining the family in Washington. The 29-year-old oversees the garden and is often photographed in his chef’s whites working with students. But Kass spends a significant amount of time in a suit in the East Wing and out and about in Washington. Last week, he sat in the front row alongside members of Congress as Vice President Biden announced the administration’s new food safety proposals.

Given the success of the garden, it’s no surprise that part of the East Wing strategy is to keep doing what they’re doing: make fresh, healthful food seem accessible, even normal. In interviews and at public events, Obama makes a point of telling her own story. As a working mother, she often took her daughters out to eat several times a week or ordered a pizza for dinner. When the girls began to gain weight, she says, her pediatrician suggested she rethink how the family was eating. By making a “small change in our family’s diet and adding more fresh produce for my family, Barack, the girls, me, we all started to notice over a very short period of time that we felt much better,” Obama said at the harvest event.

To create that down-to-earth feeling, Obama has invited local schoolchildren, not celebrity chefs, to the garden. (Chez Panisse’s Alice Waters, who lobbied for a White House garden for more than a decade, hasn’t been asked to any of the official garden events, for example.) Obama also has made a point of appearing at soup kitchens and community health centers to talk about the importance of a healthful diet. And produce from the garden is donated to Miriam’s Kitchen, which serves healthful meals to the homeless in Washington. “Accessibility and affordability has always been part of the message,” Frye said. “It’s why we partner with elementary school kids. You pierce through all the constituencies and say, ‘It’s about kids.’ ”

That might not sound like tactical brilliance. But Waters and other pioneers of the local-food movement have long struggled with perceptions of elitism. Critics mocked their breathless praise of farmstead cheeses or the ultimate roast chicken, painting them as out-of-touch, arugula-loving yuppies. “Michelle has used her position in a way that has made people realize this is a very simple, very American impulse,” said Josh Viertel, president of Slow Food USA, which promotes small farmers and artisan producers. “What they’re doing is normalizing something that should be normal.”

“She has enormous influence,” added Tony Geraci, director of food service at the Baltimore City Public Schools. Where funders used to ask for feasibility studies, he said, they now are looking to invest, even in the midst of an economic downturn. “In the last months, there has been a national awareness that these food issues are real.”

Most appraisals of Obama’s efforts have been positive. But she hasn’t escaped criticism. In a May 31 Op-Ed in the New York Times, food writer Amanda Hesser chided the first lady for implying that cooking is a chore when she breezily admitted that she was happy to leave the cooking to White House chefs. “Terrific local ingredients aren’t much use if people are cooking less and less,” Hesser wrote. “Cooking is to gardening what parenting is to childbirth.”

Frye and Kass counter that inspiring families to cook is part of the White House plan. Earlier this month, for example, Obama invited graduates of the Brainfood program, a nonprofit organization in Washington that teaches life skills through cooking, to help prepare for a White House luau and the Fourth of July celebration. Over the course of a week, 19 students shucked corn, washed lettuce and made strawberry tiramisu.

“The garden showed the step-by-step process of how food gets to the table, but the major event culminated in cooking and eating,” Kass said. “We’re really trying to highlight that it all leads to the table.”

To Help Change Food Policy, Michelle Obama Looks to Children – washingtonpost.com.