The town one over has banned peanut products from the elementary schools - not provided by them and segregated to a special table if brought from home for a decade. This year the local Vo Tech sophmore class fundraiser is frozen cookie dough - including peanutbutter.

If you offer kids the lunch choice of broccoli or birthday cake, most of them will opt for cake. (Let’s face it, some of us would, too.) Offer them the choice of broccoli or fresh fruit, and no matter which they choose, everybody wins.
Don’t ask me how to pay for it: I’m playing an imaginary game already…

Fresh fruit and veggies are not as expensive as we’re led to believe. The reason for that is that meat and dairy are heavily subsidized by corporate welfare programs. So, if we stop subsidizing the foods that are less healthy and start subsidizing the foods that are more healthy, we’ll see a drop in consumer prices of healthy foods.

See “Why A Salad Costs More Than A Big Mac” for details:
http://www.pcrm.org/magazine/gm07autumn/health_pork.html

It’s all about the Farm Bill - all of it. The farm subsities, the WIC and food stamp stuff, the school lunch programs. When we ask “what can I do about it?” the answer is make a big stinking deal about corporate welfare. The answer is lobby for change. The answer is pressure your representative. The answer is change the laws.

As many of you know, cities these days are usually designed around the car not the pedestrian. Roads are wide, often without bike lanes, and uninviting sidewalks. There is often very little shade or protection from the elements or the road. Not even bus stops have shelters. Couple that with more and more cars (where now each family has two cars when ‘back in the day’ they only had one) and more and more driving (living further away from work and school) and you’ve got unsafe pedestrian environments.

For the vast majority of children growing up in today’s American suburb, it simply isn’t safe to walk to school. They’ll get hit by a car.

City/urban planners are realizing this and changing heir plans to cater less to the automobile and more towards the humans, but it’s going to be slow-going. You can’t transform suburbia overnight.

I think the anonymous who replied first to your post pretty much nails it.

When I was a child I was told never to take candy from strangers. One day an elderly man tried to hand me a piece of candy and I screamed “No! I won’t take your candy, you stranger!” and then I ran away in terror. Not to mention the constant stories of poisoned Halloween candy (or the candy with the razor in it - take your pick). The point being that while times might be more paranoid than ever, it’s not like parents didn’t put fear in the hearts of their children back in the olden times of the 70s and 80s! I’m also willing to bet that there are still children who go outside to play. Not every parent is keeping their kids under lock and key because of Megan’s Law - I mean c’mon!

My point, which you didn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole, was that in this OBESITY CRISIS!!! hysteria, we’re relating to kids like a bunch of lazy, junk-food swilling dummies, who learned their wicked ways from their fat, lazy parents. It’s simply bogus. Because obesity is a bogus crisis. The average person weighs about 7 - 10 lbs more than they did 20 years ago, and the reason overweight has skyrocketed is because the standards of overweight have been lowered. There is a real skyrocketing of teen suicide rates, particularly teenage girls. Bullying fat kids is practically public policy now; it’s gotten out of hand. This obsession with weight and fitness is unhealthy! Especially for children.

So while I support taking on the big food companies in demanding that they stop corrupting our food supplies for bigger profits I don’t support people who call themselves progressives expressing contempt, ooops, I mean concern, for our so-called epidemic of fat, inactive children.

Kids should play sports and run around outdoors because it makes them happy and they love doing it. Once you turn it into something they have to do for their health, you strip the joy right out of it. And yeah, I think that’s a real shame.

Pretty sure that “disciplined” was an adjective in the sentence you took exception to, not a verb.

Bet you that there is a significant number of folks claiming which religious fervor that the goal of any business is not to produce anything, or serve anyone, but to make money. Products and service (as anything else) are optional and should not get in the way of making money.

Then tell me what you think.