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Poverty Helps Drop Child Obesity in America or, Good News for the First Lady

Poverty Helps Drop Child Obesity in America or, Good News for the First Lady
February 26
14:42 2014

Michelle Obama is having an extra glass of wine these chilly winter nights because she’s toasting what looks like a great success. A decline in child obesity in America. While the First Lady has been instrumental in helping to educate our kids about saying no to excess sugar and incorporating more fruits and vegetables into their high-carbohydrate, low-fiber diets, she may be overlooking a very important factor that has aided in advancing a nation toward thinner children overall.

According to a study about battling obesity in America, “Researchers found the percentage of obese children aged 2 to 5 fell from 14 percent in 2003-2004 to over 8 percent in 2011-2012 — nearly a 43 percent drop.”

The First Lady was all teeth when she celebrated the fourth anniversary of her “Let’s Move” campaign. She said she was thrilled at the progress they’ve made in fighting child obesity in America. “Oh, puh-lease,” it seemed she was saying with her eye roll, “we’ve got this licked.”

What Ms Obama missed was the fact that around 16.2 million children in America live in households that cannot “secure” enough nutritious food on a regular basis, and go hungry from time to time each year.

Nothing does this more effectively than keeping their parents unemployed and making sure corporations in America can continue to freely send their jobs overseas to child workers who are so thin you’d feel guilty holding up a pencil next to them. Many have celebrated the First Lady’s campaign to ban fast food ads and sports stars peddling unhealthy sugary drinks in schools, but what might be more effective is sending the kids to bed hungry at night.

That will surely, over nearly a decade, pull down the average rate of obesity among children too young to secure at least a couple rounds of sodas while at school, as their older siblings and friends surely can.

It is that extra sugar that keeps us going in times of need. In a severe dearth, smart families resort to soda and junk food. The sugar is quickly stored in the body as fat. There is reassurance that for days the body will have fuel on which to run. During the Great Depression there was not the same amount of cheap fatty foods on the market as there are today. Imagine if the Joads could have loaded up on Twinkies and Funyuns for their trip West. Imagine how that would have tipped the scales in favor of the working class.

Forgotten but still fat! might have been their defiant motto.

No work in the California orchards and fields? No matter. Plenty of convenience stores. Cheetos two for a nickel. “That’s a steal!” Al Joad would say. “We got a few bucks left, don’t we Ma?” That’s chips, beef jerky, and tall sodas for the whole family. What could they have complained about if that were the reality? Ma would scrape a few greasy ones from the bottom of her apron’s pouch and hand them over. “Pick out enough for the whole family, Al, would ya?”

Thank Monsanto for their “green revolution“. They made this possible. Thanks to genetically-modified corn and wheat, there is no end to the highly-sweetened, dollar snacks that pad our organs and bellies with layers of fat to help whole families subsist through the nearly decade long deadened economy.

This is what we call progress! America has an unemployment rate of over 15 percent, at least, if you take into account those who have stopped looking for work, those who no longer receive unemployment benefits, and those who are working fewer hours than they need to pay their bills. Detroit has hovered around a 50 percent unemployment rate. How is that for impressive?

If that’s bad news for the president, and you wonder why he never talks about it, it’s damned good news for the First Lady’s anti-obesity plan. Those kids in the deserted old Motor City are missing meals left and right, and that’s going to help the obesity averages in the long run.

And yet, the nation has no shortage of fat people. Fat kids. Fat parents. Fat grandparents. Fat football coaches. Fat priests. Fat unemployed people. We’ve smartly padded on the security layers because we all knew this bleak decade or two was coming. It’s a privilege only modern Americans can enjoy. It’s a sign of this country’s innate intelligence and preparedness.

Junk food is what holds this nation together. And cheap access to the Internet.

[photo of Norman Chaney, as Chubby]

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2 Comments

  1. Greens not Greed
    Greens not Greed February 26, 21:31

    We are indeed a Fast Food Nation. And those corpulent corporate cats at Taco Bell left no fat to chance- want to jump-start your caloric intake as you roll out of bed? Look no further and loosen your belt buckle! Taco Bell’s new breakfast waffle wrapped around a sausage patty or bacon (heck, why not both?) with scrambled eggs and cheese will be available March 27–only a buck. Don’t forget a side of syrup…and a defibrillator. Live Mas.

    Reply to this comment
    • DDA
      DDA Author February 28, 16:38

      Only a buck? It’s almost as cheap and nutritious as Soylent Green!

      Reply to this comment

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