Prevention of childhood obesity: complex and confusing VS simple and solvable

To date, experts and the media have come together to present childhood obesity as a complex problem with multiple variables that are difficult to control. For example, there’s the modern fast food diet and the working mom who doesn’t have time to cook for her kids. There’s the television, video games, and the computer, all of which conspire to make sure that the children of the 21st century remain as physically inactive as possible.

Add to that all the advertising that encourages the consumption of sugary foods, the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables due to the lack of supermarkets in poor neighborhoods, the lack of daily physical education, along with genetics and metabolism problems, and it all sounds complicated. and confusing, right? How do you attack? How to measure and evaluate? And how do you pay in a bear market?

We’re spending billions

Regarding your payment, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has decided that childhood obesity is such a threat that it has dedicated $500 MILLION DOLLARS over the next five years to find a solution to childhood obesity. If you add up all the other foundations, corporations, state and federal funding mechanisms, we have to spend billions annually in an effort to control the childhood obesity epidemic that threatens future generations and our nation’s financial viability.

Looking at an obvious and simple solution

But you wouldn’t know. After spending all that time and money convincing everyone how complex and confusing childhood obesity is, suddenly there is an authority who has the audacity to raise his hand and announce that childhood obesity is not as complex and confusing as the conventional authorities want us to believe.

In recently describing Operation Pull Your Own Weight as “A simple, easy to implement, readily documented, and affordable solution to childhood obesity,” the American Society of Exercise Physiologists implied that conventional authorities have overlooked at least one solution. obvious, simple, and affordable, while focusing attention on more complex possibilities.

As complex as you want to make it

So when it comes down to it, you can make childhood obesity as complex and confusing as you want to justify spending billions, while overlooking simple solutions that have been hiding in plain sight for years. That is effectively what we have done to date. Or you can open your eyes and see what every physical educator has intuitively known for decades. That is, children who can do pull-ups are never obese.

Yes, regardless of your eating and exercise habits, your neighborhood economy, family genetics, or your fondness for video games, if you show me ten kids who can do push-ups, I’ll show you ten kids who aren’t obese. And given access to a simple height-adjustable pull-up bar and leg-assisted pull-ups, almost all kids can learn to do pull-ups in a predictable amount of time. Therefore, almost all children can be inexpensively immunized against obesity for life if we simply start them early (kindergarten, 1st and 2nd grade) and help them learn to do push-ups.*

Why ignore the solution

So why have legions of experts overlooked this obvious and utterly simple solution to childhood obesity? Let me answer this question with another question. When was the last time you saw someone spend billions to find an antidote for polio? Here’s a hint. Dr. Jonas Salk developed the first effective polio vaccine in 1952, and once the solution was discovered, the research money stopped.

In other words, the moment someone discovers a real solution to childhood obesity, that’s the moment all the research money dries up and disappears. That is, experts are paid to study the problem, not to solve it. In fact, existing financial incentives pay to avoid a real solution, and that’s a real problem.

Complex and confusing VS simple and solvable

But with or without an expert’s blessing, the real solution to childhood obesity lies in the hands of individual parents and educators working directly with individual children, with real names, real smiles, and real needs. It is these parents and educators who must decide whether childhood obesity is a complex and confusing dilemma, or a simple and highly solvable problem.

If they choose complex and confusing, they will have a ready excuse to wring their hands and procrastinate further. But if they choose something simple and solvable, they turn confusion and procrastination into understanding and action. At this point, the problem will be solved, one child at a time. Parents and educators, he is in your hands.

*Substitute any sufficiently challenging functional acid test (ie dips, rope climbing, rock climbing, standing push-ups, Superman push-ups) in place of pull-ups and the results will inevitably be the same.