Last week, the National League of Cities, which represents over 19,000 cities, villages and towns, hosted its annual meeting in Boston, with one of its three aims to “strengthen neighborhoods and families.” What better way to accomplish that goal than to challenge fast food’s influence in their communities? While a couple of conference sessions featured First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! program, missing from the agenda was the role fast food plays in communities. That’s why Corporate Accountability International released a report and action guide earlier this year called “Slowing down fast food: A policy guide for healthier kids and families” – to fill this void. Read rest at Corporate Accountability International…
Posts Tagged ‘Let’s Move’
Time to Stop Marketing Food to Kids

I recently gave several talks at the American Public Health Association conference, an annual gathering of some 12,000 enthusiastic public health professionals. In years past, not many presentations (other than my own) focused on the role of corporations to harm the public’s health. I am happy to report this is changing, as numerous panels struck such a theme. The following is a summary of my talk on the recent failed attempt by the federal government to rein in junk food marketing to children, and why it’s time to set a new and much bolder course to fix this problem.
Why I Am Not Attending or Watching “Weight of the Nation”
The national hysteria over obesity has reached a crescendo this week, as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hosts the conference, “Weight of the Nation” in Washington, DC. If you couldn’t make it, no worries, more fear-mongering is on the way in a four-part mini-series on HBO to air next week. The show of the same name is produced in coordination with several federal government agencies. The trailer alone almost brought me to tears, seeing all the awful stereotypes of fat people.
Sorry Mrs. O, But Jumping Jacks Won’t Cut It
At a recent summit on childhood obesity, the first lady announced a shift in her well-known Let’s Move campaign — away from food reform and toward an increased focus on exercise. Instead of “forcing [children] to eat their vegetables,” she told her audience, “it’s getting them to go out there and have fun.” Yes, you heard that right. The first lady actually said that eating vegetables is a chore. And that playing is a preferable focus for her campaign because it’s easier. Read rest at Grist…
A White House Chef Defends the First Lady
Marion Nestle, the author of Food Politics, recently got a reminder that food is indeed political, right up to the nation’s highest office. On November 30, the first lady made a speech in which she announced that her Let’s Move campaign (on childhood obesity) would have a renewed focus on physical fitness, to combat “the crisis of inactivity that we see among our kids.”
School food politics: What’s missing from the pizza-as-vegetable reporting
Over the last couple of days, news outlets have been having a field day with a proposal from Congress that pizza sauce be considered a vegetable to qualify for the National School Lunch program. Headlines like this one were typical: “Is Pizza Sauce a Vegetable? Congress says Yes.” (The blogs were a tad more childish; for example LA Weekly: Congress to USDA: Pizza is So a Vegetable, Nah Nah Nah Nah Nah Nah.)
First Lady Recommends Limiting Screen Time for Children
Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move After Year One: Little More than PR?
The following op-ed was recently published in numerous newspapers across the country through McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
How Walmart Swindled the White House
When Michelle Obama first announced her Let’s Move program to end childhood obesity “within a generation” last year, I tried to remain open-minded. Like many others, I was happy to have the First Lady bring attention to this important problem. And there’s no doubt that her leadership has helped, for example, to get Congress to make improvements to school meals. But I remained concerned that the White House was reluctant to take on the food industry in any meaningful way. It seems that things are worse than I thought.
















