The Weight of the Nation: Part 3 - Children in Crisis (HBO Docs)

as Georgia is heavy as I was spoke a can ptosis 18 plus percent of our children right now are obese how are you about today if you'd go with the flow in America today you will end up overweight or obese as 2/3 of Americans do I don't want to be fat for the rest of my life I've got diabetes sleep apnea high blood pressure I get dizzy when I get up everything's hurting though you don't crave broccoli and our generation has grown up craving a Big Mac we have built a cheap food model and that's the one we're dealing with right now it's so hard to combat against what the TV's telling you to buy your kids the kind of food that we eat is the kind that's most profitable local and regional foods taste better the weight of the nation is out of control but we can fix that how you like the market market me everything for this neighborhood we have got to come together as a country and really make this a priority so once we stick together that's what it's about it's not only health it's about survival and well-being of the United States as a nation the reason we have government in the first place is to solve problems collectively we can't solve individually if we don't now take this as a really serious urgent national priority we are all of us individually and as a nation gonna pay a really serious price we're in the midst of an epidemic of childhood obesity with childhood obesity rates tripling in just a generation children who are obese are much more likely to become obese as adults but the health problems that obese children have start right then the evidence is incontrovertible that children who are obese are at greater risk for diabetes later hypertension and heart disease asthma a variety of other health problems if you were told while your child is at risk for cancer that would get your attention you were told while your child is at risk for some sort of brain disease that would get your attention well obesity ought to be on that list often parents feel like they're failures they're not doing a good enough job to get their kids to eat well and it's important for them to just understand that there are all these forces working against them your children are about to enter a world where they will be besieged by an industry that wants them to eat more they will be thrust into a culture that fosters eating at every hour of the day around every corner of every street that they they go on it will be very important to help protect them against those influences to buffer them from it to try to make the environment safer for your children I'm afraid because of the rising obesity prevalence and it's related cardio metabolic disorders and side effects and adverse effects that this is probably gonna be the first generation of children who are going to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents I've struggled with my weight hmm my life is missing I wanna thing he's missing out on beating just going outside you know he can't he can't walk for he says you know it doesn't bother me uh he's so full crap if this kid was 160 pounds there be no stop and I'm paid half of the world by the balls when I walk into a room people don't look at me they look at my size and they don't want to get to know me or like even at school when I go into class I sit in the back of the classroom you know try to be as low-key as possible inside me I do have an urge to go do everything see everything you know and be amazing but being fat can hold you back increasingly we're aware that obese children have many of the metabolic characteristics of an obese 25 year old they have elevated insulins they have risk of becoming diabetic their blood lipids are disturbed live dry it's important for parents to know that there are pretty significant risk factors for overweight and obesity in childhood it's not just about their physical appearance and we shouldn't be interested in solving the problem because of the way we think a child looks it's much more important than that there are pretty significant side effects from being overweight and obese in childhood if we don't do something to prevent it it's going to be a full on chronic liver disease or heart disease by the time they're in their mid-30s we don't hear and look at what's going on under the skin but biology is telling us that that the health impacts of obesity are screaming inside they're not silent we just don't hear them looks that looks like about a buck late so is about three yeah gia right that we ignore the early years at our peril if we want to do something about conquering this growing epidemic of obesity in our society one pattern my name is Sophie Oscar pony I am fourteen and a half I am 5 foot five and a quarter and I weigh 191 pounds every day I go out there probably the first thing they notice is that person's fat I think that definitely builds a whole wall from them seeing who I actually am and what I actually love doing and all my different I guess talents I would like to dance but it's not realistic if I don't lose the weight it's holding me back in every way from trying to pursue what I love doing I've always loved performing and just being able to have everybody just focus on you for that one second just this feeling of being at being the best she was actually very petite and it wasn't until I would say she was about eight or nine years old that I started to see um a growth spurt um and wait gang it has been difficult and I've seen how she has struggled and suffered from you know the comments of her classmates and friends my parents they do definitely care about my weight so they're always like Oh Sophia don't eat this don't eat that only one portion if you don't want to finish it all you can take bring it home um it's it's constant you know it does definitely get very annoying small possible you do your plate I've been trying to help Sophia on my own I really think that she needs some professional help and our help as a family Oh Oh that's some kilos she sees get too big oh my so here's here's her BMI chart so this is where she was a year and a half ago and this is where she is today so she's not even just following the lung she's actually increasing so she's gained twelve kilos over the last 18 months okay so that's a lot of weight yeah okay more than it should be so you see this stuff here okay you see how it's a darker yeah what's called a cam ptosis this is insulin working on the skin oh really you know what diabetes is you've heard of them so diabetes is high blood sugar right that's bad for you I can kill you it definitely was a wake-up call I mean I felt really shocked because I believe that even though I was at a higher weight I would I would still be healthy because of the activities that I've been doing and I thought that when he said about my insulin being high I was like oh my god because I didn't think that I would be going through this now the question is why is her insulin high possibly genetic possibly stress and lack of sleep so there are a lot of things that are tied up in this high insulin so sugars where you start okay estimates are that one in three children born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes sometime in their lifetime and this is a direct consequence of the obesity epidemic and emphasizes that unless we're able to control this epidemic we're going to have an abundance of chronic disease and disability we never thought that type-2 diabetes would occur in ten or twelve year olds but now it's not uncommon at all to see that so these are serious consequences and the tendency to dismiss this or to perhaps even see it in some cultures as a norm is getting in the way of recognizing this as a real public health emergency once there was these girls they were teasing me they call me fat and they just say you're ugly that's rude to me and I'm very sad about that I just want here to be content with her the person who she is you know mentally um I want her physically healthy and you know I want her emotionally healthy I'm just concerned about her health it is such a young age you know you have young kids seat you know development diabetes and you know certain issues and I'm just that's where my concern comes in so we're gonna go to this room back here and I want you guys to just make yourself comfortable tiara's mother is exceptional she noticed a big increase in Tiaras weight and was motivated enough to seek out the support of our program you've probably seen this before we do her height for age and her weight for age let's make believe we took one hundred eight year olds and lined them up by how much they weighed she's about 97th in line so the very first thing we do in our program is it's almost detective work is try to find out what has led to the point where we are seeing patients refer to us Tiaras case was very interesting right around the age of four or five years of age she had a big increase in her body mass index a big spike in weight gain and for us um the very first visit is a lot of a lot of questions to try to get a sense of what happened Tara do you have TV in your room yeah you did you watch it before you go to sleep at night I walk in you watch it every night I was trying to do is just completely eliminate TV during the week during the school week but that did not work with tiara having a television in the bedroom has been found to be associated with obesity the popular belief before was that if children are watching more TV they're more likely to be couch potatoes they're not being physically active but more and more research is showing actually that children are exposed to pretty toxic advertising pretty significant food advertising that does not include fruit and vegetable advertising it's all high sugary beverages um high sugar cereals and that it really is through the content of this advertising that television might be related to to weight gain and obesity and children it's a pork bus Harry old silly rabbit five huge something magical is happening at McDonald Kellogg's Froot Loops cereal part of this balanced breakfast ask your parents to go to Chuck E Cheese department play cousin mark boxes of Kellogg's cereal with the air has poopoo Panda two six-packs there's a very large research literature on the effects of food marketing directed at kids and I think it can be distilled into three words it's powerful its pernicious and it's predatory and these are very strong words but I think absolutely warranted by the deplorable environment that's created the food marketing about one and a half billion dollars a year is spent by industry on the marketing of food products to children those foods are not the healthiest foods for children the worst foods are the ones that get marketed most aggressively especially to children kids develop brand loyalty very early in life for things like certain types of sugared beverages or certain types of fast foods studies show that food marketing affects children's food preferences food choices their diets and their health it shapes what they want to eat what they're willing to eat and unfortunately today it shaped what they want to eat into foods that will kill them that will give them heart disease cancer and diabetes yummy part of this balanced breakfast it is the advertising which drives the food supply which drives the likelihood of obesity and children that watch a lot of television the First Amendment doesn't give companies a right to deceive children or to undermine their health it doesn't give them the right to promote unhealthy products to children children who don't fully understand what marketing is there's some suggestion that television ads for foods has gone down relative to the advertising that's available on TV that doesn't mean that food marketing has gone down it means that indeed marketers are moving to other venues and even though online advertising expenditures is still a relatively small part of overall advertising we're about to see an explosion of advertising it's clear that public health and industry is interests differ here industries interest isn't protecting the status quo because children are such valuable customers there's almost perfect overlap between the worst nutrition cereals and the ones that are marketed most aggressively to children what I imagine you'll hear in the subsequent talks is that here's a long list of positive changes that the industry has made what I plan to do today is to show how self-regulation is meeting and responding to IO m's recommendations the goal was to shift the mix of advertising to kids so it included healthier products now 84% of cereals are participants advertised to kids contain no more than 10 grams of sugar per serving and of course it's not just about the sugar it's also about nutritional density and that's improving too all of General Mills big cheese cereals contain at least 8 grams of whole grains and last year carrots also included whole grains in two of its iconic cereals further all the cereals and participants advertised to kids include many essential vitamins and nutrients and they're usually consumed with milk part of this good breakfast craze those crazy squares food marketing to kids is handled almost exclusively through self-regulation the companies themselves define what is unhealthy food for example Kellogg says frosted flakes are healthy or General Mills thinks that some of their sugary fruit snacks are healthy foods which are clearly junk food the best fruit taste aside of the Milky Way while the boxes and the names still may be goofy but charming what's inside the box has changed recently you might have noticed that a lot of cereals that you would have thought of being more like a dessert than a breakfast food are starting to really claim that they are in fact quite healthy so what you'll see are lots of claims like here on Reese's puffs that they're whole-grain and here on the Corn Pops they are a good source of fiber or Cocoa Krispies are a good source of vitamin D so it's really confusing to the consumer to try to identify which are the healthy versus unhealthy cereals for their families Froot Loops and Apple Jacks have three grams of fiber in every near the cereals your kids love and the five of their tummies low Froot Loops and Apple Jacks and oh so good source of fiber I have a sense of a bit of a trap in the we're getting better and better instead of getting good our charge is to accelerate progress in the reduction of childhood obesity and we've heard one argument which says the eat on the food issue at least you can't you can't really accelerate progress unless you regulate and I'm hearing counter argument that no you don't need regulation we can we can do this voluntarily and what I'm not hearing is what will it take to accelerate progress I understand you've gathered here in Washington this week to discuss some of the most pressing issues that your industry faces now I know you're all familiar with the statistics here how childhood obesity rates have tripled over the past three decades and that's really where all of you come in that it's okay to eat unhealthy foods because they're endorsed by the cartoon characters our children love and the celebrities our teenagers look up to so let's be clear it's not enough just to limit ads for foods that aren't healthy it's going to be so critical to increase marketing for foods that are healthy so we went to Congress and worked with Senator Harkin to require the Federal Trade Commission in a number of other federal agencies to develop one consistent set of nutrition standards a set of nutrition standards developed by experts not by advertisers once they came out as draft standards and we saw how much pushback there was from the food companies then I realize what a really good idea it was these subcommittee's will come to order I'm pleased today to be holding a joint hearing on such an important issue clearly the iwgs initial proposal went way too far frankly we'd like to find out what you have been cooking up in the kitchen right now I'm not sure I like the smell of it mr. Vladeck you recognized for five minutes I'm David Blahnik director the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection parents don't have an easy task when it comes to getting their kids to eat healthier foods the FTC is committed to working with its sister agencies and all stakeholders to make that burden on parents less daunting before coming to CDC I was a professor of pediatrics at Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston and I'm a prior president of the obesity society and prior president at the American Society for Clinical Nutrition the more television a child watches the more likely they are to consume foods while watching television and those foods are more likely to be the foods that are advertised on television we don't need the federal government dictating which foods can't be marketed to children the government should stop pretending after all these decades that it has the answers because it doesn't so rather than being attacked for a government intrusion or other such nonsense we know we should be saying thank you because I think your report helps all of us as parents and all of us as a country I am Dan Jaffe executive vice president of the association of national advertisers the iwg in effect is attempting to re-engineer the American diet by declaring war on many healthy products these guidelines need to be formally withdrawn and returned to the drawing board the food manufacturers and advertisers are not going to change what has been working for them because what has been working for them is adding to their profits the overwhelming majority of products marketed to children are still of cornu trishul value industry doesn't even want a compromise they want Congress to step in and kill the interagency workgroup we think that this is a very radical proposal we don't think that that's hype we just think that's the fact they were so unhappy to have a strong set of nutrition standards proposed by these federal agencies because they want to look like they're limiting junk food marketing without really having to do it the iwg should completely withdraw these recommendations and do what they were instructed to do by Congress conduct a study and report the findings to Congress it's just hard to explain to a little girl why she's developing so fast and why she's not like the other kids it's always been a stigma like they'll never be my kid but when it happens to you it's almost like it's kind of like life-changing understand that sometimes it's not a choice to be the way you are for her it's been definitely a challenge a lot of the kids or just really mean to her like normal kids would be you know just taunting and teasing her you know we've always instilled in her that she's beautiful and she's smart and you're not supposed to let anybody create your self-worth let's see if I can race you on your scooter race me OK we're gonna run you ready okay I don't want anything to weigh her down I just want her to be comfortable in her skin she's already a positive person she's very optimistic she's very outgoing so just want to keep that going this place is wonderful for care they make exercise fun and exciting we both didn't grow up knowing how to eat correctly coming here the dietician kind of show us what to look for we go by the calories and the sugars just do a little bit more research on what we give her seeing other kids who are in the same struggle as she is I think that really helps to have peers who are not judging her I'm still gonna talk to mom about letting you walk home possibly from school I think it's a good idea because I think it'll be good exercise for you you know two things and besides the peas fitness I love you have a good day okay I take pride and say my baby enjoy life seeing her healthy mm-hmm and we just want her to be the best taya she can leave and I just want her to look back and say yes mom and dad you did put in the effort and hard work and you did try I just never want her to feel like we didn't try you as the childhood obesity epidemic has unfolded it has forced a lot of people to really look carefully at the cafeteria to see how it has changed because there is a commercial interest meaning that the cafeteria needs to be self-supporting they have really been kind of put in a corner where they need to figure out a way to sell the most product to the students and unfortunately what they've done is really come to mimic a food court you might see in a shopping mall so a lot of school cafeterias will have stations set up or children can buy chicken nuggets and french fries and you know hot dogs and pizza and all the typical foods that we think of as really being fast food and unhealthy food they're a lot of what people call competitive foods because they compete with the school lunch program they undermine the school lunch program because if you can sell Ho Hos and chips and Gatorade in competition with you know a grilled chicken patty on a whole-wheat bun with a fruit or a vegetable it's hard for that healthy school meal to compete our school cafeterias are setup free efficiency how do we get as many kids through the system as quick as possible they don't have good food they don't have enough time to eat um it's pretty dismal actually we see more attention problems behavior problems and just exhaustion because they're not well fed I do not eat the school lunch if I eat the food on regular basis here I gain weight I think sometimes as organizations we've looked at things that go fast I mean we have fast turnaround we have fast recess fast lunch and maybe we just need to slow it down a little and look at the questions that we're asking ourselves about our kids health and nutrition I think really what we serve them is more convenience for our central kitchen to mass-produce it and get it out and where we just have to keep it warm today we're serving chicken thread each student get three chicken strips 1/3 cup of fresh frozen broccoli and announced all cheddar shredded cheese the chicken nuggets are bouncing on the pizzas takes 10 napkin to wipe off the grate so I don't like I don't mass-produced in that sort of sort of I don't assess mo we currently have is called a pre pack system it's it's a very efficient it's built on the Industrial Revolution model where people stand in a line and they pack you know the three chicken nuggets and then they pack a handful of fries and then on a different line they pack in orange slices and then vegetables and things like that so kids can grab those and put their hands on on a daily basis they're responsible for my child when he is there and so they're responsible that they're giving him real food that they're if they're filling his body full of things they should be filling his body full of real food and parents and medicine have been complaining about this at least a dozen years my son comes home and says oh I had fizz edibles and chocolate milk for lunch like what the heck is a phys-ed Abal he tried to explain it to us and we're like is it like a potato chip well sorta is it like he couldn't uh I don't still don't know what it is it's a goldfish cracker it is yes it really that's not food we need to rethink what is the most effective methodology to providing those meals to our kids that pre-pack system which it probably isn't anymore I can imagine it's hard to balance all of those things right you up Steve this pot of money and you have this thing you need to do and I don't think it's easy I can't imagine you know how it is that they will make that switch but I know others have done it and so I expected I expect that they will find you know the bet you'll see the best interest of our kids and they won't take the shortcuts they'll find a way to get fresh food to our kids because that's their job food service in general for a k-12 education is lowly underfunded for what expectations need to be for what we're feeding our kids we're painted into a corner of pouring more money into food service and competing with educational programs and the answer unfortunately is too easy at the end of the day we're not going to take resources out of the hands of kids in learning to provide them a different food product I'm a special assistant to the president at the Domestic Policy Council and my role is to coordinate and facilitate the development of administration policy on a number of issues including childhood obesity and the nutrition programs as well the president will shortly be signing into law legislation that for the first time ever it will give the Secretary of Agriculture the authority to set nutrition standards for all foods sold and regularly sold in school during the school day which hopefully will really change the food landscape within schools and really empower parents who release their children into this environment to know that when they're there they will have good food to eat Harry Truman said that nothing is more important in our national life and the welfare of our children and proper nourishment comes first in attaining this welfare all children should have the basic nutrition they need to learn and grow and to pursue their dreams you the Healthy hunger-free Kids Act is the strongest child nutrition reauthorization I think Congress has come up with in decades it invests more money into the school lunch and other child nutrition programs than ever before the child nutrition reauthorization bill builds on several reports from the Institute of Medicine which have made recommendations about what the composition of those foods should be that act does a great job sort of moving us to the next level in terms of nutrition those foods are likely to be lower in fat sugar and salt parents have a right to expect that their kids will be served fresh healthy food that meets high nutritional standards Congress released a new spending bill last night that changes President Obama's plans to make school lunches healthier the new bill keeps french fries on the menu at school it delays a requirement to boost whole grains and it calls the tomato paste on pizza is a vegetable under the current school lunch regulations Pizza is classified as a vegetable the Obama administration recently tried to change that rule but a new spending bill blocked new tomato paste regulations and kept pizza in the vegetable category changes were requested by food companies that make frozen pizzas and buy potato growers nothing scares potato lobbyists more than Michelle Obama like health freaks who might prevent them from putting french fries on school lunch trays every single day ah it's not democracy it's DiGiorno so Tara I'm gonna have you come up here come up on the table you look all the way up Tara she has this kind of dark ring around her neck and it's an indication she might have early signs of what's called insulin resistance where her body can't handle the insulin very well we need to figure out what she's eating that might be affecting her blood sugar so that we can actually start working more specifically on changes in her diet to bring down the sugar content Tara what do you usually drink at home boys juice apple juice okay any soda and candy soda up some Sun you used to and then what happened now she um told me stop drinking soda good that is one thing you'll hear from a lot of us today is no soda it's not so difficult to convince a family that soda really has no nutritional benefits it's harder to try to convince families that juice can have almost exactly the same sugar content as a glass of soda we're substituting juice for soda in so many different venues Bill Clinton went to the soft drink industry to get them to pull sodas from elementary schools and the soda industry agreed and they have done that for the most part around the country but why did they agree to that the reason because the soda companies also own the juice and sports drink companies and those are not included in the deal so the only thing that's changed is that they've changed the vending machine 48% of people's sugar consumption comes from sugar sweetened beverages and those calories are half of what has been the increase in calories in the u.s. in the last 20-30 years we need to reduce the sugar do what we can to change people's taste buds to the degree that they will accept products with less sugar in it do kool-aid in 2010 children ages two to five saw almost as many ads for 5-hour energy drink as they did for Capri Sun teens are targeted by energy drinks flavored waters and sports drinks the American Academy of Pediatrics states that energy drinks should never be consumed by children or adolescent so they're intentionally going contrary to what medical advice is that kids shouldn't be drinking these but they're there's marketing the more to kids than they are to grownups if parents are going to help their children develop healthy eating habits and try to promote a healthy weight they need to stop being undermined by the food industry which is marketing the worst products directly to kids we talked about sugars because if you drink a lot of sugar that sugar turns into what that yeah which is very very unhealthy for the body and so I have a little demonstration here Becca have some LaVon tears come up and help me with this we have natural oranges we have a Red Bull we have a starbucks Frappuccino so out of those which one has the most sugar the Starbucks okay how many teaspoons do you guys think it has good gone good gone 15 keep going 20 25 25 teaspoons 100 grams of sugar and the starbucks Frappuccino the coke and the sprite have 17 teaspoons the chocolate milk has 16 the orange juice has 10 teaspoons a lot of parents think juice is good for my kids it has vitamin C as a little sprinkle of vitamin C it has a ton of sugar in it if you're only gonna remember one thing from today is to just stop drinking juice stop drinking soda you guys don't need it changing what we eat and drink making it easier to do the healthy things that's the sweet spot for public health we have to change for children what good looks like we know physical activity for all Americans of every age has gone down over the last 20-30 years and we know kids don't do physical activity and we know at a certain age girls just seemed to stop moving much at all in young children the neuromuscular development is so compromised when you see a toddler sitting for hour upon hour throughout the course of the day for seeing four six eight hours a day engaged in sedentary behavior and the likelihood of them men engaging in a sport and becoming physically active as they get into elementary school is very compromised my daughter got a computer and she's on the computer and she's communicating with their friends on the computer so that's sitting in one spot actually she has the computer and she has a television and then she'll eat in front of the computer in the television and that could be that could be my fault it feels like I have to get a crowbar to get my kids off the couch sometimes on the weekends we have to physically push him out the door make him go out there against his will to play you know when's the last time you seen kids playing wiffle ball kickball street hockey anywhere this kid never goes out he's in all times in front of his computer or TA ah we tried every sport in the book to get Kaylin up and moving right now we're we're kids socializes online um use your Facebook on games I mean his friend time is sitting in a chair with his headset playing a video game I mean this kid has been on basketball teams who've been on baseball teams he's had swimming lessons he's been on soccer leagues he had fencing lessons he I was like yeah oh yeah we have tried it all and he did not find something that he really baseball he did that find anything that he connected to you'd never want to hear the news that things are less than optimal in your child's health go okay heels against a wall you try to push your belly button backwards look straight ahead let's go slide down a little bit towards your feet okay Kayla it's important to stay very still now for me Kayla was always a kid that would get a little wider and then you get taller and then get wider and get taller and there's a point that he wasn't keeping up with that same pattern they have some of those tests come back and show that yes you know his cholesterol is elevated and astragalus rides are elevated you know that's hard I mean that's hard to take because you think all those are adult problems I mean you know I have high triglycerides and you know spotty cholesterol just coming to the level of your knees now Kaelyn two minutes to go you're doing a great job he's a kid he shouldn't be having these kinds of issues we are almost done hang in there the BMI graph here Kaelyn we'd really like to be below the 85th percentile which would really be our goal to KY say now we're in this healthy range thirty or forty years ago most children were able to walk to school today less than 20% of children walk to school according to the women's Sports Foundation in the last 35 years the physical education system for children has crumbled PE is no longer mandatory in most states many parents are afraid to send kids outside for unsupervised play so they end up staring at TV and computer screens it turns out that only five states actually require physical education so more and more schools are making PE optional all across the country starting a number of years ago schools began to drop PE and in fact today only one out of six schools in the United States require PE at least three days a week many of us remember growing up in school settings where we had to change into our gym uniforms three four times five times a week that there's been a pretty significant change in that a recent speech President Kennedy said he was afraid we were getting to be a nation of spectators and we prefer to look instead of play ride instead of walk I welcome this opportunity to speak to the people of America about a subject which I believe to be most important and that is the subject of physical fitness a country is as strong really as its citizens for the physical development of their children with a participation in the vigorous life and then also as their children get older inculcate into them a desire to maintain that vigor with the cooperation of 19 leading educational and medical organizations the President's Council has developed a recommended basic physical fitness program for the nation's schools Texas has the sixth highest rate of obesity in children with a twelfth basically fattest state in the country and that has consequences it's pretty well documented in the state of Texas at least if our population continues the way it's going by 2025 private employers will incur an additional 30 plus billion a year in health care cost I would argue and this report I think would argue that PE is one of the smartest investments this state can make prevention is always always always cheaper than medicine the bill that I had had filed was a k-12 physical education daily I couldn't pass that bill you cannot imagine the the obstacles that we faced I mean it was a lot of resistance from the administrators who they're their strongest argument was that the focus needed to be on academic instruction there's a tension principals will say well I can't increase the number of phys ed classes because I've got to get the math meeting scores up that that's really misguided first off even if you don't increase the number of hours that kids are spending in phys ed you can improve the quality of the physical education do you think today if you were to come back and file a new PE bill and I'm sort of pushing on this cuz went to two schools yesterday they out to two middle schools they have populations of six seventh and eighth graders who are already overweight and only 8% of senior girls are passing nine percent of the boys and they have fallen off the cliff well our agenda was you get the kids exercising you you make sure that we've got a atmosphere a structure in a culture where they're getting exercise every day and then it's about calories in calories out we're still trying to get it re implemented in high schools from the economic perspective which is what obviously is my focus if we have a trend line going in the wrong direction more obesity more overweight less fewer kids able to pass your Fitnessgram than I would say to the legislature we're going to have a Productivity crisis on solution short target workout I put in some money as comptroller in my last four years to get kids to have a fitness grant so that they would do PE and then they would be measured to see what worked there's been considerable research that shows that physical exercise improves a brain development for learning kids are getting physical activity on most or all days they're gonna learn better in class if kids aren't bouncing up and down in gym they're gonna be bouncing off the walls in class you all have been working really hard you got daily PE here what improvements if any are you seeing in these kids total improvement maybe scared kids understand and have become I would say accountable for their own level of hit I'm just thrilled to see them running I love the got sweatshirts I think it's all fantastic my belief is that if you give kids the opportunity lifetime to do PE you will in fact get your money back by reductions in health care No oh we did gym for at 20 minutes we knew about the pediatric Fitness clinic at the University of Wisconsin our pediatrician gave us her blessing and so we decided let's give this a try and see what they have to offer I was on my elliptical herd 20 minutes Pilon was making his own goal about what he wanted to do fitness wise and he really connected with the staff so he wanted to go there he wanted to do their after school workout time he was really engaged in what they were doing we've been very happy to have a team of people that can help us help him so he can figure out this for himself about how he wants to be a healthy young man Kalin's found Ultimate Frisbee after school and as really latched on to that as something that he enjoys having him be more aware that he needs to be more active that there's a direct connection between activity level and health seem to be on the right trajectory okay Kaylin come on up a take a look now one of the most important values on here for us is called the percent body fat that tells us what percentage of your body weight is that most important to us is how much muscle is there and how much fat is there the scan that's on the screen now Candace when you're 11 years old 8 6 2009 when we first met you we did your first scan when I hold in my hand is the one that we did today let's take a look at some of the changes this is your muscle total lean mass back then - 8 3 4 7 before let's look at today 3 9 507 that's great huge increase in muscle mass let's take a look at the percent fat mass our goal was that it didn't go up remember that 36.2 34.5 yeah not only did not go up it went down it's a nice drop wow so the relationship between muscle and fat is getting better and better when Kailen saw all the improvements on the different measures seen the look on his face that was great you know it's tangible it's something that we can point to and say the things that you are doing are having a direct effect on your health I mean this is really good news that's the kind of thing that motivates a teenager in a way that mom saying you need to turn off the television and go outside never will he's got some ways to go to get his cholesterol and triglycerides where we want him to be but there's so many things that we see every day where he's doing what we're hoping for and he feels good about it that's what counts I would encourage anybody is in a similar situation they have the opportunity to take advantage of a resource like that to do it diera she lost weight and she's more active at home she's not watching as much TV I tell her we don't say can't we don't say I can't do this it may be difficult but if one person has done it you can do it too I'm involved and I want to educate my daughter I think it's harder for Tierra because I think she's she has a knowledge but not the understanding you know she knows that there's a issue with her health but she doesn't understand the long-term effects of it and that's fine that's fine for right now long as she knows and I can just say to her you know Tierra healthy unhealthy that's good enough for me the child hasn't created the environment in which he or she is living the child hasn't grown the foods or marketed the foods or or decided which aspects of the sort of food distribution system are going to be you know active in their community child doesn't decide where parks will be situated the child doesn't decide how much education they're going to be able to get about nutrition and an active living you know in their school system the obesity crisis is a moral challenge for us as a society but fundamentally the root of it is the question of what kind of society are we and what kind of environments do we owe all of our children we've got to develop a multi sectoral multi-component program that addresses sugar drinks that addresses physical activity that addresses physical education in schools government has a responsibility to act but they're not the whole answer we also need companies to step up to reformulate their products to change their marketing practices to make healthy options available in restaurants families have a responsibility we all share in this responsibility and all need to do our part obesity will crush the United States and we will fade in the rearview mirror in Oblivion we could have done something different we should have done something different and we lacked the moral fiber and love for our children to do the right thing it is much better to prevent these problems than to try to fix them later to wait to not intervene early to deal with problems after the fact is basically sentencing some part of the population to a less healthy and shorter life what a tragedy after all of these years of building up our health care in a circumstance where people are saved from premature disability and death we could turn that all around we could lose all of those gains it could hardly be more serious than when you think about it in those terms do you want your children and your grandchildren to inherit a society where their hopes for a long and healthy life are not even as good as yours worth that can't be the right thing to do we simply not genetically programmed to turn down calories when they're in front of us back in the day when there wasn't a lot of food available to us and we were presented with a large animal we needed to consume as much of it as we possibly could over a short period of time we're living in an environment in which it's possible to eat yourself into obesity without any physical activity other than dialing the cell phone unlimited number of calories my food addictions McDonald's pizza with extra cheese fried chicken fast food I like it all it's the policies that promote the way our communities are designed at the promote cheaper food anytime I want fast food I just stand here I go like hmm what degree of free will do people really have if by just knowing someone zip code you can pretty well predict their BMI it would cost the industry about 36 to 40 billion dollars if we reduced our caloric intake by hundred calories the triple whopper is one thousand one hundred and forty calories most farmers don't view what they grow as food but as a commodity that's going to go into high fructose corn syrup part of it is it's the least risky thing to do all that corn is insured we can do something about this but it's going to take national recognition that this is a priority you you

Channel: HBODocs

Views: 671,399

Rating: 4.8217111 out of 5

Keywords: hbo documentary films, docu, docs, weight of the nation, may 14, may 15, weight, fat, troubles, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, diabetes, high blood pressure, blood pressure, liver disease, infertility, cancer, stroke, overweight

Id: T24B6T-hp0E

Length: 67min 35sec (4055 seconds)

Published: Mon May 14 2012