For more than a decade, the Center for Disease Control has declared obesity the
single largest health risk facing Americans. Obesity, defined as “very fat” in
the
1984 version of Webster’s New World Dictionary (no kidding), puts people at a
greater risk of having diabetes, heart disease, and other cardiovascular
ailments.
For Hoosiers, obesity is an especially massive problem. The CDC collects data
from each state and prepares a report highlighting health trends in the U.S. The
Center declared Indiana one of the five most obese states in a 2002 report and
it doesn’t look as if many of us have gotten thinner in the past year and a
half.
Writing off Hoosier adults as being incorrigibly fat, some of our state
legislators think they can at least prevent future generations from waddling
down the same path as their parents with a new law. This past Thursday the House
Public Health Committee passed a bill that would force Indiana’s public schools
to take specific actions to fight obesity. Those actions include partially
filling high school and middle school vending machines with healthy snacks and
drinks, a mandated 30 minutes of physical activity every school day, and the
measuring of students’ levels of body fat.
Sorry ladies and gentlemen. This will have zero effect on the obesity epidemic
in our state. Tear up that bill and start over.
Why should people care what my opinion is on this subject? I have credentials
that no one on the House Public Health Committee has:
When not working as a writer, I moonlight as an overweight public school
teacher. I not only see the poor eating habits of students every day, I can
understand the food choices they make as a junk-food junky who hasn’t seen the
short side of 300 pounds in nearly a decade.
The choices school cafeterias and vending machines have to offer has absolutely
nothing to do with how fat our kids our. Every school I have worked in (five if
you include student teaching) already has healthy food options (fruit, garden
salads, etc.) available for those students that want it. The problem is, almost
no one wants it. Cafeteria workers can’t keep enough hamburgers on the shelves
while those salads just sit there all alone, gathering dust and wilting away.
Vending machines are emptied several times of their Butterfingers and Skittles
long before even a few packages of trail mix or any granola bars are sold.
Students’ don’t think about the long-term effects poor eating will have on their
health. They want something that tastes good.
Even if cafeterias sold nothing but healthy food, kids would still be fat,
because they would bring half of a Papa John’s pizza left over from last night’s
dinner before buying something they dislike from the cafeteria. Ban students
from bringing food to school and soon Little Debbie’s would be sold on the
scholastic black market. You can’t force good nutrition on students who don’t
want it. You can lead a horse to Diet Rite, but you can’t make him drink.
The exercise portion of the Public Health Committee bill is a little better idea
than the nutritional demands, but will fail as well. The only students who would
lose weight with this plan are those who make up their minds that they want to
lose weight and get in shape; they are the ones who may work hard enough at it
to do so. For some students, they would rather get shock treatments than
exercise. Unless Richard Simmons is running behind them with a cattle prod, they
will never push themselves enough to have any positive effects on their body
mass index.
So what is the answer to the obesity question in Indiana? I don’t know (if I did
I would have already made millions of dollars selling diet books by now). I do
know this: it is not something our state government can solve unless they pass a
bill that assigns every obese person a thin person to live with them 24 hours a
day who has the license to torture fat folks every time they reach for the
potato chips.
