WASHINGTON — First lady Michelle Obama called on the nation’s governors Saturday to join her effort to combat childhood obesity, citing Arkansas’ experience as a model for other states looking for solutions to what she characterized as a national crisis.
Speaking at the annual winter meeting of the National Governors Association, the first lady said states can play a key role in helping reduce the number of children who are overweight or obese - a number that studies show is nearly one in three nationwide.
“Arkansas started on the issue of childhood obesity way back in 2003,” Obama told the governors.
“They screened students’ BMIs [body mass indexes], which was controversial,” she said. “They got healthier food into their schools and required regular physical education classes. And as a result, that state was able to halt the rise of childhood obesity completely.”
Michelle Obama’s appearance came the day after she discussed the issue with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a longtime advocate for reducing childhood obesity, on a rare venue for the Obama White House - the Fox News network.The two taped an interview Friday that aired Saturday and will run again today on his weekly talk show, Huckabee.
Michelle Obama told the governors Saturday that her recently launched “ Let’sMove” campaign provides a “call to action” for all segments of society to come together to confront the childhood obesity problem, but she explicitly said the answer is not “for the federal government to tell them what to do.”
“It is simple,” she said. “Let’s stop wringing our hands and talking about it and citing statistics. Let’s act. Let’s move. Let’s give our kids the future they deserve.”
She’s not the only first lady who will be making the issue a focus of her official duties. Arkansas first lady Ginger Beebe is developing a state initiative with similar goals, incorporating better nutrition and more exercise to reduce childhood obesity rates, said her husband, Gov. Mike Beebe. Both were on hand to hear Michelle Obama’s speech at the beginning of the three-day conference in Washington.
When Ginger Beebe launches that campaign, she’ll have a backlog of Arkansas data dating to the Huckabee administration when the state began collecting information about public-school children’s body mass indexes. Since then, the results tabulated by the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement have shown the state’s childhoodobesity rate holding steady, but not increasing.
At the governors’ meeting’s opening news conference, Beebe pointed out that “there’s a natural alliance” between the efforts already under way in Arkansas and other states and the first lady’s Let’s Move campaign.
“It’s an education initiative, educating not just the children but specifically the parents, but it’s also an actual action being taken where states, and in some cases the federal government can control that action,” such as establishing nutritional guidelines for school food or restricting vending machines at schools.
Beebe said that governors’ spouses - “at the risk of having some of my colleagues throw something at me, especially female ones” - are in a unique position to affect children’s lives.
“Certainly it’s that way in Arkansas,” he quipped, eliciting laughter from his colleagues.
The discussion of childhood obesity came as the nation’s governors focused their meeting on the soaring costs of health care, which puts a particular burden on state Medicaid budgets.
“We’ve got a system that needs some significant reform, there’s no question about that,” Beebe said. “But I’ve always thought our biggest problemthat has to be attacked first is getting a handle on the escalation of costs.”
That’s where he hopes the focus will be as Congress returns Monday from the Washington’s Birthday recess to again take up discussion of health-care overhaul. President Barack Obama is set to release his own legislative proposal and hold a bipartisan meeting on the issue at the White House later in the week.
But those larger issues cannot be addressed without focusing on childhood obesity, Michelle Obama asserted.
“If we think our healthcare costs are high now, just wait until 10 years from now and think about the many billions we’re going to be spending then,” said the first lady. “Think about how high thosepremiums are going to be when our kids are old enough to have families of their own and businesses of their own” if health-care costs and waistlines continue to grow, she said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 02/21/2010