Join community leaders, teachers, doctors, nurses, moms and dads in a nationwide campaign to tackle the challenge of childhood obesity. Obesity threatens the healthy future of one third of all American children. Obesity rates have tripled in the past 30 years. We spend $150 billion every year to treat obesity-related conditions, and that number is growing. For the first time in American history, our children’s life expectancy may be shorter than their parents.
We need to get moving. Let’s Move! has an ambitious but important goal: to solve the epidemic of childhood obesity within a generation.
Children need 60 minutes of active and vigorous play every day to grow up to a healthy weight. If this sounds like a lot, consider that 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 ½ hours to using entertainment media including TV, computers, video games, cell phones and movies in a typical day, and only a third of high school students get the recommended levels of physical activity. To increase physical activity, today’s children need safe routes to walk and ride to school, parks, playgrounds and community centers where they can play and be active after school, and sports, dance or fitness programs that are exciting and challenging to keep them engaged.
Let’s move to increase opportunities for kids to be physically active, both in and out of school and create new opportunities for families to be moving together.
The Presidential Active Lifestyle Award is provided through the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports. This challenge for both children and adults is to build healthy habits by committing to regular physical activity five days a week, for six weeks. Measuring daily activity for six weeks isn’t easy, and deserves recognition. As part of the First Lady’s commitment to solve the problem of childhood obesity in a generation, the Council will double the number of children in the 2010-2011 school year who earn a “Presidential Active Lifestyle Award” by engaging in regular physical activity.
Take the President’s Active Lifestyle Challenge by visiting http://www.presidentschallenge.org/the_challenge/active_lifestyle_rules.aspx or contact Shirley Emerson, MPH at the Douglas County Health Department at (417) 683-4174.
Douglas County Health Department is an equal opportunity / affirmative action employer partnering with the Missouri Department of Health and Human Services. Services are provided on a nondiscriminatory basis.
