The Weight of the Nation

The "chatter" on our Grab Your Greens Facebook page this week has been about the four part HBO Documentary, The Weight of the Nation.  The Weight of the Nation premiered this week on HBO, in conjunction with the Institute of Medicine, the Center for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  The documentary addressed America's obesity epidemic.  The sobering statistic is that 68.8% of Americans are overweight or obese.  Almost 20% of children and adolescents are obese.  (Here is some great reading on Food Marketing to Children)  We are bombarded at every hour of every day with an excess of food, or rather food-like products, that are calorie-dense and nutrient-poor.  How frustrating it is that this has become an American epidemic, with such grave consequences and implications, when the very simple solution is not the next fad diet, but rather cutting our highly sugary processed food diets and instead eating...REAL food, with a large emphasis on plant foods!  Imagine that!  If you haven't already watched, it is worth your time!  All four parts can be watched online at The Weight of the Nation. 
From the documentary:

We're living in a damage control mode, where we're waiting for people to get sick:  hospitalized, diabetes, stroke, cardiovascular disease, cancer...and then we're investing an enormous amount of money in trying to mitigate the chronic disease state.  That's a huge drag on our economy.  Someone who's obese costs, on average, $1,400 MORE to care for per year, than someone who's not obese.  Someone with diabetes costs, on average, $6,600 MORE to care for per year, than someone who doesn't have diabetes.  Collectively, obesity costs $150 billion per year.

Often parents feel like they're failures, like they're not doing a good enough job to get their kids to eat well.  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 beseiged by an industry that wants them to eat more.  They'll be thrust into a culture that fosters eating at every hour of the day, around every corner of every street that they go on.  It will be very important to help protect them against those influences, to buffer them from it, to make the environment safer for your children.  

Make today matter-
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