Some years ago I was at a symposium where many officials from the FDA Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN) were speaking. There they identified Obesity as the #1 food-related public health risk in the United States. This came as a shock to me as it was soon after 9/11 and, surely, the terrorists were on their way to throw anthrax powder into our ground beef and defile our dairy products in ways I can’t easily speculate on.

So here we are, 6 years later, and my opinion is that the federal government isn’t really taking any effective steps to curb the epidemic. Today I came across this article while browsing through digg.com.

Obesity ads aim to jolt parents

The article is a little too long to paste here but here’s a snippet:

One billboard shows an overweight child’s lower legs and feet on a scale next to the words, “Fat Chance,” along with a list of the health risks of obesity. A second billboard shows the back of an overweight child and asks, “If that’s your kid, what are you waiting for?”

This is the type of effort that we should be seeing nationwide to start dealing with this problem. Chicago is one of the fattest cities in the United States and I’ve seen exactly zero billboards of any kind advocating increased responsibility on the part of the parent. This is a shame considering that a billboard is in a prime location to reach the target audience at precisely the right time. Maybe if mom or dad saw a shame-inducing message along the interstate during their drive home in the evening they would be less inclined to serve their kids fast food or some disgusting 5 minute meal in a box from the supermarket.