Keystone – Seventeen-year-old Kate Marcom sees the country’s obesity epidemic reflected in the dependence on cars in her hometown of Houston, even for a quick trip to the corner store.
Lucia Wu, also 17, observed that her Aurora, Ill., boarding school has 20 vending machines on campus, dispensing sugar-laden soft drinks, chips, candy bars and ice cream to students.
The two are among a group of 40 hand-selected high-school students from around the country mixing this week with prominent executives from the food industry, health officials and public-policy experts to grapple with the issues of nutrition, consumer choice and commerce in the nation’s schools.
Organized by the Keystone Center – a nonprofit organization that blends science, public policy and mediation – the third annual youth policy summit is challenging students to help stem the tide of obesity in children, which has more than tripled in the past 40 years.
“This is not just an issue for obese people. It’s an issue for all of us because a lot of the costs of dealing with this comes from taxes,” Marcom said, noting that diabetes, high blood pressure and other problems faced by overweight Americans often are treated with federal funds from Medicaid and Medicare.
Asked to envision how the issue will look in 2022, when a baby born today would be 16, the students dreamed that meal portions would be reduced, schools would offer much greater support for mandatory physical-education classes and extracurricular sports, and nutrition would be considered much more prominently.
“I found it interesting (to learn) how many vending machines are in the schools,” said Wu, who wrote her mandatory 15-page paper on the availability of non-nutritious foods in schools in preparation for the week-long conference.
Then, the students were offered a view of today’s reality, in which 30 percent of Americans ages 20 and older – more than 60 million people – are obese, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the problem is spreading here and throughout the world.
Staff writer Steve Lipsher can be reached at 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com.
