Too fat to fight: Pentagon grapples with obesity epidemic

Sorry completely didn't finish my post. I got too eager lol.

We drank our grog at Charlie Rock where I got punched in the chest extremely hard with our crossed rifles. They gave us a little vodka in the grog so we were feeling fine (at least they told us there was vodka in it. To this day, I don't know. I was too tired to know).

 

This is sort of an interesting topic but it seemingly puts blame for obesity of children in the hands of public schools. School lunches are not why children are overweight and adults are fat. Obesity is only one reason that men and women are not joining the armed services. I said it years ago that if the U.S. had to raise an army to fight in another world conflict, we wouldn't be able to do it. Nourishment services in public schools are managed by professional dietitians in which diets are generally nutritionally well-balanced and provide special diets for children with diabetes and food allergies.

When I was a kid, I went to a parochial school and lunch wasn't provided. My father was a fireman supporting a family of 7 and my mother made our lunches from whatever was left over from dinner the night before. If there wasn't anything left, we were given a peanut butter or canned tuna fish sandwich to bring for lunch. I remember envying a kid that would bring a baloney sandwich for lunch because we rarely ate luncheon meat, it was too expensive. Sometime my mother put a banana or a couple of cookies in our brown bag lunches, if she had any. No children were obese in my grammar school, not one. We had one boy that was chubby but not severely obese as we routinely see kids now. I lived in the city and my school didn't have school buses, so everyone walked to school and back (roughly a mile each way). As teenagers nobody owned a car and even our fathers didn't have cars so we all walked if we wanted to meet after school to hang around a diner, etc. Nobody was fat. Look at old photos of crowds of people from the 50's, 60's, and even 70's, you'll see something striking, they're all slender people in those photos. We didn't have fast food places all over the city and we all got plenty of exercise riding our bikes, roller skating, playing baseball or kickball in an empty lot. The American diet is only one problem and we can look to many causes for that. Poverty, affordability of fast food, ignorance, and more.

There's something that people don't understand when it comes to military enrollment, it's the lack of patriotism. Yes, I said it. During 1st and 2nd world wars, men and women joined the armed forces to fight and die united with allies for a common purpose. World War II was the last legitimate war fought by the U.S. All the other 'conflicts' fought since 1945 were not wars to defend the U.S. they were wars to contain communism and protect capitalism like the Korean conflict. The U.S. got involved there because we also feared the "domino effect" where communism/USSR would take over one country after another. And Vietnam, well...I don't even want to think about how many 'boys' in my high school graduating class were drafted to fight in that 'non-war' and we never saw them alive again, but it was too many.

Every conflict since WWII... Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Niger have been non-declared armed military conflicts that have nothing to do with American patriotism. The rationale for why the U.S. inserted themselves in these conflicts is a contentious issue for sure, but protection of democracy is not one. They have been selfish wars, wars that still take the lives of our men and women or return them home missing limbs or suffering with PTSD. To risk their lives, people need a reason, a true good cause and feel they're fighting for a reason and not for protect poppy fields or chasing armed rebels in regions of Yemen or Niger.

Bottom line, food lunches are not the reason for obesity and lack of enrollment in the Armed Forces.

 

the obesity problem in the usa has been going on for some time now. when michelle obama tried to address it, republicans/conservatives went mental and shamelessly made it a political issue.

that aside, this does need to be addressed, good thread!!

 

Obama’s consort wanted to make the food so unappealing that the kids would eat less

And she wanted to use the heavy hand of the federal government to make it happen

But yes, republicans took advantage of that politically

 

i agree, pe should be mandatory.

 

no that is not even close. one can alwayd change the meals for variety.

 

The kids did not like the choices that she offered

 

again, the meals can be varied, and almost every child has to eat and do chores whether or not they liked it. i do remember being poor and learning to like foods that i didnt care for.

 

If fat recruits must be accepted they should go to a shock incarceration program like the 1960's correctional training programs before being accepted into regular basic training.

FORCE them to be combat ready and able to endure the deprivations of war.

 

Exactly

The Army knows how to run the pounds off of fat boys and girls

But its questionable how long the ACLU would stay out of it

 

Black ops on ACLU headquarters and personnel.

 

No we cant do that

But sometimes I wish we could

 

If there was vodka I would be shocked. But it sounded good to a bunch of privates....LOL

 

Delta Dragons, men are we.
Airborne, Ranger, Infantry
We breathe fire
We breathe gas
Delta Dragons
We Kick Ass!

Dco 1/50, 3rd platoon July-November 1999

 

Was your dad killed in Vietnam?

 

I'm not sure I'm concerned, much less should be concerned.

As for whether or not taxpayers should have a say in what public schools are feeding kids, I don't see why not. We're paying for it, right?

 

What's the big deal about recruits being overweight? Aren't they going to run them and work them like dogs in basic anyway? They'll lose weight then one way or the other.

 

You can't do that and have a halfway sane or halfway safe world. You throw around nuclear weapons and people might get scared but they won't stay scared. Instead they'll start throwing around nuclear weapons of their own in any kind of potential conflict.

No good can come of this idea.

 

Kind of ironic that the school lunch programs were created for the opposite reason. During WWII, it was found that too many draftees were malnourished, so we began school lunch programs. Now, we have the opposite. Personally, I'm not too worried. All they need to do is go back to harsher boot camps, and add a couple of weeks for weight loss for the fat ones, and they will thin down quickly. My son, while not in the military, marches in a college marching band. He lost about 30 pounds in two and a half weeks of band camp. He was a bit pudgy, but he's pretty lean now. That's much easier to fix than decades of malnourishment.

 

Well, back in the 1950s, the feds thought that looking back at WWII draftee records, we lost too many due to malnourishment. They had a lot of excess food in the different farm subsidies, so they created the school lunch program. It used to be, though, that the menus were more local and creative. Now, it's the big food contractors (sysco, etc.) producing it, and it's processed crap for the most part.

 

In many of the poor schools around here, the only meals the kids get are at school--breakfast and lunch. Local charities have "fill the backpack" food drives, so that the kids in the middle class schools bring non-perishable/easy to make foods to give to the students at the poor schools. If the schools stopped providing breakfast/lunch, we would have kids in schools with almost no food. (and yes, the parents are getting food stamps, etc.)

 

I find it's all related to age. When I was 18-30, increased exercise was all I needed to lose weight. Now at 53, exercise and diet are required.

 

Most school lunches are not paid for by parents, at least not in the local schools system.

 

A little extra weight can be carried and lost in basic. At some point too much fat is going to hinder the mission and all suffer. A chain is only as strong as the weakest link. There should be medical criteria for sending some to fat camp before they can go into normal basic with everyone else.

Everyone should graduate as a lean, mean killing machine.

 

Actually, the new trend in schools is that if more than 55% or so of the school's population gets free/reduced lunch, the whole school gets it. I think it ends up being cheaper to just feed more crap to the kids than to monitor who has paid and who hasn't. My local school system started doing this about two years ago. My nephew's system (another city and state) has been doing it that way for about 5 years.