Addressing Childhood Obesity: "We Are Going to Need All of You"

The White House held a Child Obesity Summit this afternoon, attended by food experts, industry leaders, and people from different communities to share and discuss ideas on how to create a healthier environment to combat childhood obesity. The First Lady, who launched her Let’s Move campaign to address the growing epidemic, gave the opening remarks at the summit , saying that “we all need to do our parts as well, because the fact is, is that our kids didn’t do this to themselves.” At the summit, the First Lady discussed the goals of her childhood obesity initiative and the significance of getting everyone’s input to create a nationwide response to the problem: We’re working with the private sector to reach a very ambitious goal, and that is to completely eliminate food deserts in this country. And finally, there is much, much more that we can do to help kids stay physically active, not just in school but outside of school as well. And if we can make real progress in these four areas, then there’s so much more else we can do.