JFK's warning of fat kids

All true for me as well, then again my high school in the 70s had an outdoor smoking area for the students. :)

JFK should have just advocated his personal method of keeping slim: take amphetamines and bang the KGB spies that are infiltrating the white house.

Also, dare I say, your brain is mostly made of fat...

Lame. Mods took down a joke X poll showing 95% of respondents think JFK had more brains at this point in his presidency than Biden.

No sense of humor? Biden dead ender? Probably both

I enjoy the humor from both sides.

He was unsmart for trying to prop up the recently still pro slavery party that spawed the KKK.
Making sure kids don't become diabetic fatties from poor lifestyle choices...pretty smart.
Guess who's against that? Back then the tobacco lobby, which has become the sugar lobby.

Why is it even allowed for an unattended child to buy any refined sugar holding product, but NOT alcohol, drugs, pron etc? Are those somehow more damaging? I'd say screentime and sugar are NOT for children.

Some individuals close to FDR said FDR had a Post-WW2 plan for government sponsored healthcare for all. As we know, FDR died before end of war. If JFK were more disciplined he would have tried to write a healthcare Bill with Congresspersons and Senators from both major political parties.

I remember doing the Presidential fitness tests in the 60s. I was the second fastest kid in the 600 (or was it 660) yard run in our school in 6th grade. The fastest was a girl who was one second faster than me in the girls race. I think she was sort of an 'age cheat' as she was one of the taller kids in the school. She also had some decent breast development rare for a sixth grader. But she was fast.

Every child was active. No internet, no video games, limited tv channels to choose from. sugary foods were not easily available. (we could only choose chocolate milk in the cafeteria in association with a few holidays). Kids walked up to a mile one way to school. Very few parents drove their kids to school. Even if you took the bus to school you had to walk up to four blocks to get to the school bus stop.

There were a couple outside recess breaks, PE class was still a thing, plus lunch break which were all outdoor play times. After getting home from school we would be outside playing so often that my mom got a special bell she would ring to signal that we would have to come home for dinner.

There were few overweight kids then, and those that were at least tried to be active. There were few specialty sport teams or clubs, and no school sport teams until high school, so all the kids were participating in free form group play.

Yeah I know damnit! Kennedy should have put on a chefs hat and whipped up some baked beans and New England chowder for all the malnourished kiddies. He had that sort of God-like power you know. Instead he decided to help them all stay fit. Damn him!

In addition, start sports teams on the elementary school level in the public schools, which would be good for working parents as well. Create multiple lower level intramural sports teams in middle school and high school so that anyone who wants to participate can, and have pathways to rise up to jv and varsity teams if they're good enough. No travel teams (to local schools) if that's too expensive. But you would also have economies of scale and they could just go along on full buses for each sport to other local high schools to play their corresponding teams. Have the three or four teams at each school play each other. Plenty would join.

Help them stay fit because of lack of special forces ready young men in U.S. military, 1961. He was into expanding special forces. JFK wanted a larger pool of men entering U.S.N. capable to be special forces in U.S.N. If he cared about overall health ... I have already stated.

Attended public schools in Kenosha during the sixties/seventies. I can count on one hand the number of fat kids I ever came across, and it's not like any of us were starving.

Showed up for army boot camp during the shattered economy of the Carter years. Two guys and one chick in my company had some fat to melt off, the rest of us were in decent to exceptional shape upon arrival.

boy, considering most of you posting here, weren't even alive in the 60's, sure have it all figured out.

High school and college track times are faster than ever. Instagram models are fitter than anyone was in 1960.

I don't know about actual kids but Gen Z seem incredibly focussed on health, fitness and appearance. The effect everything being photographed and on Instagram.

Yeah if he cared about health he definitely would have snapped his fingers and come up with a national health care program, cause that’s the one test for whether someone CARES. Another bureaucracy! This time, one that has life and death powers over everyone! Damn Kennedy for not following your dream of simultaneous free, high quality, instantly available healthcare! He just suggested the kids exercise! DAMN HIM

Both things can be true - the extremes are more extreme. Breaking the 4 minute mile by a high schooler didn't happen for 35 years before Alan Webb, and now it's happened like a dozen times in the last four years.

At the same time, high schoolers have gotten shockingly fat in the last 30 years. The hockey stick inflection point for childhood obesity starts in the mid-1990s.

What are these deeper problems?

Man this just really blows my mind. Makes my head explode.

Correct. conservative governments defund and destabilize publicly funded health care services at every possible opportunity while in office to intentionally let them fail. so as to trick ignorant voters into believing that the private Healthcare run by their capitalist buddy would be a far better solution for them. which is infuriating, because mathematically how is giving a profit to a bunch of rich asholes a better investment than literally using ALL of that money to provide my Healthcare service? invest in it, and agree to invest in continually managing and improving it. one group of rich pricks don't get to just fcuk everything up intentionally and trick uneducated and unempathetic boomers.

I'm sick of selfish asholes self sabotaging themselves and all the rest of us with them falling for this crap.