Izzy didn't get that way munching on rabbit food.

You might want to be a little careful about beating a moral drum here. This ain't smoking and we're talking about millions of children.

They should try salad too.

Yes, they should. They should also exercise every day, brush their teeth every night and get lots of sleep. But I'm not sure we should be laying moral opproprium on them for being the result of two generations of a feckless self-indulgence that they can't understand or compare with. Especially when their peers will be delighted to drive them to drugs or despair. If we're going to talk morality, the sin is gluttony, not obesity, and even at that I don't think it was ever directed at children.

Yes, the parents and schools and the rest of us share the blame, but it is a moral failing.

Gross overeating may be a moral failing, but being fat isn't. Moral failings relate to our actions, not our conditions. I hope you aren't going to read morality into all those doctors' optimal body mass/weight charts and tell all the kids their advice to diet is a moral imperative.

Seriously, if you start talking about turning down double Big Macs in the same terms as saving Terri Schiavo, the word isn't going to mean much to most.

So you're going to teach kids to be selfish and indisciplined right up until it's a life or death matter and then expect them to control their impulses? Good luck.

What does whether the teacher is fat have to do with teaching an academic subject? My father was a highly successful high school math teacher(his students have the Regents awards, SAT scores and AP scores to prove it) in NYC for almost 4 decades, as well as being about 70-90 lbs overweight and a 3 pack a day smoker. What did any of that have to do with his teaching ability?

It's tough enough to find people who can teach halfway decently. And in Hawaii they pay them like crap, because the state's educational bureaucracy tries to do things on the cheap and hire kids from the Mainland fresh out of ed departments who want to live near the beach.

The species has survived quite nicely for at least 250,000 years without the educrats telling us what to eat. It will survive quite nicely for another 250,000 years if they leave well enough alone.

It survived well when there wasn't much caloric intake available cheap.

Then the educrats should stop serving high-fat, high-carb, high-calorie school lunches(go to any school lunch page in America and see what I mean), but that would cost money they could better spend on junkets, fancy clothes, and bigger offices and cars.

Obviously we should.

Oj,

I guess those God hating, secular materialist heathen Euporeans don't have access to cheap carbs, other wise they'ed be fat too eh? Has nothing to do with the culture I'm sure.

Americans are fat for the same reason they drive large SUV's, they are stupid and lazy

Perry:

They're fatter.

Perry,

I guess the fact that we are fat and lazy goes a long way to explaining our dominance in matters economic, scientific and military throughout the globe in a manner unparalleled in human history. We just can't match the dilligence of those zero-growth, svelte Euros with their 8 weeks paid vacation and 35 hour government mandated work weeks.

bart:

They're fatter though.