San Francisco Bike Blog

San Mateo is tackling childhood obesity:

A 2005 study found that 25 percent of San Mateo County’s youth are overweight, prompting the Get Healthy San Mateo County Task Force — a collection of teachers, health department officials and community groups — to find ways to reduce the problem.

On Monday, the group launched two information-filled Web sites — one for educators and parents and one for children — that they hope will curb childhood obesity.

The plan of attack is trapped in a PDF file format - safe from prying eyes - but we can still manage to pull out some useful information. With the involvement of groups like the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition (SVBC) and the Peninsula Bicycle and Pedestrian Coalition (which, oddly, just redirects to the SVBC website; commenter Scott says PBPC is a chapter of SVBC), the plan attempts to give kids a chance at life, but it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Here are couple of quick excerpts:

Determine locations where physical activity opportunities are available through regional mapping project and other assessment activities.

Identify local, regional, and state organizations and individuals who can assist communities in expanding access to physical activity (both intentional and unintentional).

Really? This is how we’re going to fix the childhood obesity epidemic? That’s like saying we’re going to fix the oil epidemic by drilling in Alaska.

Some of the participants’ observations are interesting. Again, they are trapped in a PDF document, where they are sure not to see the light of day:

We’re not going to solve the problem alone with soda. [The childhood overweight and obesity epidemic] is a long time in the making. There are a variety of sources: poor eating habits, tv, lack of activity, lack of access to fresh and healthy foods, poor access to health care, parents not willing to ride bikes.

Fear of letting your child walk to school. There are so many cars on the road now, fear of letting them ride bikes or go to the park and play by themselves or with friends. What you have is the child staying at home and sitting there and eating instead of going out and playing.

Not being able to walk or bike to school

Traffic zoning to allow kids to more easily and safely walk and bike to school

Another idea was to team up with the California Highway Patrol or a traffic safety group in order to address improving roads and sidewalks so that children can walk and ride their bikes to school.

Everybody walks to school or rides their bike to school five days a week.

I’m not sure how we went from these key observations to a plan which, to me, seems to suggest a very minute, incremental plan for allowing humans to walk around and ride their bikes in relative safety - as long as they don’t get in the way of auto traffic.

It does seem like there are myriad causes to the obesity epidemic (corn subsidies!), but one aspect seems clear - physical activity needs to be integrated into daily life, and that means getting kids walking and bicycling. The only way that is going to happen is if we make some drastic changes. We can no longer allow the automobile to dominate our cities and towns. Building a real bicycle infrastructure, like Davis, California has, can allow children to integrate physical activity into their daily lives. No ‘Stop Your Son or Daughter From Getting Really Really Fat’ boot camp — that feature article which appears in every Sunday paper across America once a month - is going to save your son or daughter from a life of health complications.

If there is one constituency of people who can push for the welfare of their families, it’s….families. And rapid change can happen, but that requires that parents buy into the concept. We need a complete overhaul of our planning policies, but that can’t happen until we convince ourselves that these patchwork, band-aid ’solutions’ are not going to save us and our children from the realities of car-choked, dangerous streets.

Yahuda Moon knows what children face when they try to ride to school.

No Impact Man asks, ‘Do cars make us fat?‘ The answer, in a word, is ‘yes’.

New guidelines from HHS say, ‘Get moving‘. To which I would repeat - movement (i.e. ‘exercise’) has to be built-into daily activity. Find the full report here.

…Yehuda Moon does a follow-up.

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