During his term, NBC’s Saturday Night Live had a field day satirizing then-President Bill Clinton’s love affair with junk food — portraying him campaigning in a McDonald’s, grabbing food from patrons plates and shoving it in his mouth and talking with his mouth full.
Indeed, some press reports suggested that Bill Clinton never met a piece of junk food that he didn’t like. But then came his serious heart problems. So now Clinton is using his own lifetime weight problems and lousy eating habits to try and battle a formidable, growing foe: childhood obesity.
And, honestly: in this age of “high concept” shows and ads, what better symbol than a man who was overweight as a teenager, waged the Battle of the Bulge as President, then ran into health problems and now realizes he should have made wiser — and healthier — choices?? The New York Times:
In a presentation at Public School 128 in Manhattan, Mr. Clinton told students that at age 15, he stood 5 feet 91/2 inches and weighed 210 pounds. (As a presidential candidate and president, Mr. Clinton’s weight ranged from a high of 226 in 1991 to a low of 196 in 1997.)
The school, which has a program to encourage healthier lifestyles, is a few hundred yards from NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital, where Mr. Clinton underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery last September. In March, Mr. Clinton underwent a second chest operation for a complication of the surgery.
Yesterday, appearing trim and vigorous, Mr. Clinton said he was moved by his medical experience to join his William J. Clinton Foundation with the heart association in a program to stop the increasing prevalence of childhood obesity in the United States by 2010.
The idea is to encourage kids, especially between those between 9 and 13 years old, to make better, healthier choices. It’s in fitting with a trend in the U.S. of a new kind of “downsizing”: FOOD downsizing. Restuarants — under attack from health experts and hauled into court by customers whose argument is almost “The Devil Made Me Eat It” — are starting to serve smaller meals. It also wants to work in cooperation with health care groups and other pros to come up with better obesity prevention education and treatment.
What the Times article doesn’t mention, though, is that along with this there is also something of a backlash to this trend. So some restaurants are now offering nearly obscene super-super-super sized products for those (especially teens) who detest being told what they should or should not eat. The Times again:
Appearing with three officials of the heart association, Mr. Clinton said he blamed his penchant for high-fat, high-sugar foods for “clogging my arteries and creating my heart disease..If young children ate 45 fewer calories a day…they would lose two pounds a year and be 20 pounds lighter when they graduated from high school.”
BOTTOM LINE: Clinton is a high-profile figure (perhaps a not quite as high as when he was overweight), a good speaker, and always seemed to relate well with young people. He’ll help bring special focus on a problem that is HIGHLY serious due to the links between obesity and diabetes. Indeed, Clinton’s co-chair is once obese Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee who lost 110 pounds after being diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.