Michelle Obama Fights Child Obesity, But What About Hunger?

My PD colleague Lynn Sweet writes in her Daily Flotus blog about First Lady Michelle Obama's carefully calibrated roll-out of her first substantive policy issue: childhood obesity.

She planted a vegetable garden on the South Lawn last spring, and given her interest in what comes out of the White House kitchen, promoting better eating and exercise habits for our nation's children seems not just to grow out of a real passion but to be worthy of White House attention.

(Click play below for a video about the White House Garden)

It's also caught the eye of U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, who has just issued a report outlining her "vision of a healthy and fit nation."

It's about time. Some 12.5 million children, or nearly one in three kids ages 2 to 17, are considered obese or overweight, with another 16.5 million teetering on the edge of becoming so, making them candidates in adulthood for diabetes and heart disease. As a daughter of a man who died last year from complications of Type II diabetes, I can personally say that the costs of a disease that eats people alive is too high, not just financially, but especially physically and emotionally, to be worth the pleasure of eating too many ________ (fill in the blank with your favorite sweet or salty high-calorie foods). The obesity epidemic is so severe that it threatens to make the lifespan of the nation's youngest generation shorter than our own.

And there's a whole subset of issues to tackle, starting with school lunches, which Congress is preparing to reauthorize. Last year the Institute of Medicine recommended watching the calories and halving the amount of sodium in the meals eaten by about 31 million children each day. My only consolation for how bad the noon meal can be is anecdotal: the food only gets picked at, if my recent foray into the public school cafeteria for lunch with my 4-year-old is any indication.

But for all the urgency of the situation, it may be that Michelle Obama has her head turned the wrong way. A new report released by Feeding America shows that hunger is sharply on the rise in the United States. It now affects 14 million children, up from 9 million four years ago. It's my best guess that insufficient food on the table comes directly from economic hardship, including a job loss.

Maybe the First Lady's work needs to be two-fold: chipping away at childhood obesity by day and, over her family's dinner each night, prodding her husband to push his new budget, which includes a $1 billion increase for child nutrition. Above all, she should remind him that an electorate, like an army, moves on its belly.