Obesity in America

The hot topic for the American culture is now obesity. It has gotten so drastic that 9 million American students, which is around 30 percent of all children, are overweight or obese. The number is rising every year, yet the problem can be lessened with ways we already know such as exercising and eating healthy. Schools are a major issue with obesity, especially because less schools are beginning to not require physical education. According to the textbook, Teachers, Schools, and Society, only two percent of schools require physical education at the high school level. The pressure students have with test scores, getting into a good college, homework, etc, they need to be running around and getting out of there seats. Adding more classes to there schedule is only making it worse. The average person's sustained attention span is about twenty minutes. Having hours of classes, back to back cannot be helpful without the child mixing in some lunch, recess or physical activity. The problem is not the child, rather what they are taught growing up such as what to eat, wear or how to act. At a young age, commercials, dolls, action figures, toys and lots more, are attractive to kids because that's what they want to be. They give off an appeal that kids want to become or look like, which can have an effect on them later in life.
While watching the movie Super Size Me with Morgan Spurlock, they went to a different high schools and examined the types of food in each school cafeteria. The first couple he went to, they served all kinds of unhealthy foods, and a wide variety of snack foods and ice cream's that these student's could choose from. As most young kids would do, they choose the unhealthy foods that taste good to them. One of the last schools they went to, had an amazing cafeteria for a high school. The foods were all made fresh daily by the people working there, and there were limited unhealthy choices for the students to make. When interviewing teachers and faculty, they said there was a change in the students attitudes and even there school work. This isn't the case for the rest of the nation, but if one school can do it, i believe the rest can too.
Below is a video that discusses some of the problems with obesity in this country. It also discusses a way that neighborhoods can make the right decisions by eating at healthy places such as the one in this video.