I see a socio/political obstacle to declaring war on fat in school.
We have now reached the point where most people are fat. And a scary percentage that are obese or even worse. And these are the parents of the children. A critical mass if you will.
So now we are going to drill it into kids that being fat is bad.
Have you ever tried to tell a fat person that raising a fat kid isn’t a good thing?
Yeah, SOME are enlightened. Many, not so much.
exercise facilities are more common at job sites now. But that doesn’t mean people will use them.
Agreed. Oatmeal is the devil’s spooge.
Pass me a single egg scrambled with some fresh salsa, and we’ll talk. A nice protein hit, with a side of fresh veggies from the salsa.
PE where I went to school was softball. Not the same as hitting the gym for 45 minutes, especially if you weren’t any good and were stuck in the outfield.
In schools:
The cafeteria here currently offers things like french toast, syrup, and strawberry milk at breakfast. That’s a lot of calories and not a lot of nutrition. That shouldn’t even be an option. Serve eggs, oatmeal, healthy cereals, etc. Make it so that there’s lots of choices and all the choices are good.
It’s not really practical to try to teach kids to eat healthy. Unhealthy foods taste so much better and the health consequences are not felt until decades later. What 10-year-old is going to say, “I’ll pick plain oatmeal instead of pancakes so that I’ll avoid heart disease in my 40’s?”
God yes, if gym hasn’t evolved anymore than this, I’ll pass.
45 young ladies taking one-at-a-time turns at tumbling. Sitting around waiting. We always wondered why the hell we had to shower when no one got even close to breaking a sweat.
And yeah, I was in the outfield. 
IMO, pretty much everything in the original post is useless.
For example, displaying the percentage of daily allowed sugar is nonsense, because there is no reasonable way to come up with how much sugar a person should eat. (You can get by just fine with 0 but very few people find that acceptable nor necessary.)
It would help to get rid of nonsense serving sizes, though. A 0.5l bottle of coke is two servings? Yeah right.
Sure, it’s good to get kids to move with PE class and whatever. But that’s not going to help: you can be active and fat, and you can use excuses to get out of it. Or be injured and legitimately be unable to participate.
Getting people to cook at home, also useless. That ship has sailed. Whenever a shop closes, a month later it’s turned into a cafe or a restaurant or take out place. People simply don’t cook anymore.
I think the single most important thing is to get softdrinks out of schools. Second, teach kids (but adults too) what good portion sizes are. Yes, giving kids of different ages and sizes different amounts of food is a hassle, but it’s important.
I’m not sure we can actively blame the schools, although they certainly aren’t helping. Kids learn to like what they are given to eat as young children. If you feed them healthy food, that is what they will gravitate to later. It’s not that they won’t eat junk, but they are unlikely to crave it as much as a child who receives it regularly at home.
I’m one of those annoying people who can eat anything and doesn’t gain weight, but there are many many health problems in my family. So I have always tried to eat healthy in hopes of balancing out the health risks. I fed my two boys the same things I ate and to this day (they are 33 and 30), they still eat pretty healthy, even after all the temptations they’ve been exposed to outside the home.
And it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that what the mother consumes during a pregnancy also conditions a child’s likes and dislikes. They are, after all, sharing whatever the mother eats.
The other, crucial, thing is limit gaming system and television time for kids. Make them move around and do things! Even if it’s because they are bored and can’t think of anything else to do when tv is taken away, they will still get up and play. Even better if they can do active things with the parents. We went on family hikes after church on Sunday mornings, weather permitting. We took bicycle rides together, or just long walks. My husband and I were naturally active people, both former athletes, so this was something we did naturally. Turns out it was a really good idea for the boys, too. We allowed the kids gaming time (Nintendo was new back then), but it was limited to an hour a day. And the tv was never on all day long as a babysitter in our home. We sat down to watch something specific, then turned it off.
I truly believe that the earlier you instill good eating and exercise habits, the easier it will be to solve the bulk of the obesity problem.
One last comment and then I’ll get off my soapbox. 
Please, please, please don’t contribute to fat shaming. Particularly for children. They have not chosen their eating plan at a young age, their parents have. Shame the parents if you must, but leave the children alone.
Actually, if you hook the gaming system and tv up to a treadmill, kids will gleefully exercise away.
I know that this is a hot-button issue for many that frequently devolves into naming and shaming, but I feel like most posts in this thread are actually looking at the topic of obesity as a public health crisis and not just “EWWWWWW, fatties.”
Not every thread about weight is personal.
This is more or less correct. BMI is totally non-scientific woo with no basis in medical science. The ‘crisis’ was caused by the Diet Industry paying off a re-jiggering of what defined "obese’ or “overweight”.
http://www.obesitymyths.com/myth1.3.htm
Who Was Behind the Redefinition of “Obese”
*In 1997 a front-page expos� in the Newark Star-Ledger noted:
"Eight of the nine members of the National Institutes of Health task force on prevention and treatment of obesity have ties to the weight-loss industry, either as consultants to pharmaceutical companies, recipients of research money from them, or advisers to for-profit groups such as Weight Watchers…The notion that 65 percent of Americans are overweight or obese derives in part from a 1998 decision to redefine “overweight,” which cast more than 35 million Americans into that category. This decision was made by a National Institutes of Health obesity panel chaired by Xavier Pi-Sunyer, one of the most influential obesity researchers in the country.
Over the years, Pi-Sunyer has received support from virtually every leading weight-loss company, including Novartis, Sanofi-Aventis, Ortho-McNeil, Wyeth-Ayerst, Knoll, Weight Watchers, and Roche. He has served on the advisory boards of Wyeth-Ayerst, Knoll, Abbott, Johnson & Johnson, and McNeil Nutritionals. He once headed up the Weight Watchers Foundation and is currently a board member of that organization. Pi-Sunyer gave the “obesity overview” presentation on behalf of Knoll, maker of the weight-loss drug Meridia, at a 1996 FDA advisory panel hearing on the drug. He has also been paid to sign his name to ghost-written journal articles used to promote the dangerous weight-loss combination known as “fen-phen.” …The decision to redefine “overweight” was a big boost to the diet drug industry. In April 2005 The New York Times reported: “[M]any drug industry analysts see a potentially even bigger market if such a drug also catches on among the more than 60 percent of adults in this country who are statistically overweight, those with a body mass index of 25 or more.”
The weight-loss industry appears to appreciate the flawed BMI standard. In 2001, Roche, maker of the weight-loss pill Xenical, promised a donation to NAASO for every individual screened during “BMI Awareness Week.”"*
Now, true- American fast food is HFCS and fat laden crap, and kids need more exercise.
I’d ban HFCS. 
We dont need the kids drinking bottled water.
Let’s shrink the work day to 6 hours.
Seriously? Really? Look, I work with a lot of kids, too. I’m a public librarian. And when I was a kid, there was, like, one fat kid in your class. And looking back, they weren’t that fat. Now I see lots of fat kids. And some of them are very fat. And most of the fat kids are poor.
If you don’t look around and see fat kids, either you’re not noticing the fat kids or your sample size is messed up because you live in, like, Park Slope.
Interesting. I haven’t seen anything prior that drew such a strong correlation, but a total increase of 22% in cost is pretty substantial on an already expensive item. It makes sense that this would make the correlation clearer.
Of course, even that decrease left almost 20% of the population smoking. So it’s a bigger deterrent than I thought, but not a solution by itself.
Taxes are certainly not a solution for obesity if we can’t find a better way to write it than the one Washington state tried.
Sure. But let’s have a definition of “fat kid” that isn’t based upon bad science (actually no science at all) and bought and paid for by the Diet Industry. That same industry that is killing our kids via anorexia and bulimia.
Man I don’t need MORE people at my gym who just check in and then sit on a piece of equipment reading the paper!
Not to be snarky, but where are the studies where they tell people to change their lifestyle and they are able to keep the weight off for 5+ years because of that advice? Losing weight is hard, but not impossible. Keeping it off is something that people generally cannot do as that requires ignoring and overpowering biological urges daily for the rest of your life. A tiny minority succeed, but they are the outliers. Medicine needs to find ways to help people keep the weight off that they have lost and IMO this will require altering the endocrine system to fix the changes to leptin, T3, ghrelin, CCK, etc. etc. that occur after a weight loss. Until you fix those you are going to be fighting an uphill battle against biology that most people will eventually lose.
If someone lost 100 pounds in 4 months on a fad diet, and after they lost the weight you gave them drugs to replace the leptin, CCK and T3 they weren’t making as well as drugs to block ghrelin and fatty acid synthase enzymes that are being produced more I’m guessing that would have a realistic chance at long term success.
I’ve just got to say I’ve rarely read such unmitigated ignorant bullcrap.
That is all.
I agree but it think just as important is creating a health conscious society. And reducing the amount of high calorie choices people are bombarded with everyday.