JFK's warning of fat kids

Do you have any kids?

JFK of course wasn’t very bright. If he had been smarter, he would have realized that there are many things more unfortunate than fat, soft, chubby looking children, including but not limited to starving children.

Great point. JFK felt he needed to bring navy frogmen ashore, Se.A.L.s., 1961. 50 yard dash, 400 yard run for kids in early elementary school, 6th through 9th grades, 600 yard run. All this before LBJ's war on poverty. There were no w.i.c., s.n.a.p. programs. U.S. citizens were starving and JFK was worried about 50 yard dash and 600 yard run.

I was great at those contests and it has stayed with me my whole life. Always be fit by habit.

I thought it was Jimmy Carter who invented the President's Challenge though.

Only problem with it was the proto-finisher-medal, the "achievement" patch for not getting presidential or merit. Not achieving anything.

Yeah what an a$$hole. All those poor starving b*stards trying to stumble through another round of King Kennedy’s forced marches. My gosh he made them suffer. Probably laughed and lit another cigar while grabbing Marilyn’s a$$. Yeah, I’m sure it went down that way.

Damn him for prioritizing physical fitness. He should have been out there handing out cheeseburgers

Stay focused, Sparky.

At the very least, it would be great if the next president put substantial resources into identifying why kids have gotten so fat in the last 30 years, and then worked to reverse that trend. Fat kids are unhappy, less productive, and costly to taxpayers.

Yes, main causes are bad diets and lack of movement. But the problems go deeper than that and the reverse engineering will require sustained effort and investment.

Obama put an end to the Presidential Fitness test but I think it was the orangeman that put an end to the Presidential Fitness program since Arnold Schwarzenegger was the head in charge.

Nope. Presidential Fitness ... JFK. We were doing Presidential Fitness ... (I don't recall official name of program) when Carter was still Governor of Georgia.

I am right there with you. There were 3 awards: Presidential Fitness Award, National Fitness Award, and Achievement Award. This was in the mid-90s.

I loved it because I could do everything at the Presidential level and was the only kid in my class that could ace the pull-ups. I remember we got a heads up from the PE teacher at the beginning to the year in 5th grade and I had realized that I was having a tough time with pull-ups. So my dad put a bar in the door frame of my room to practice. I held the school record for years with 46.

You'll sympathize with me on this story: I got downgraded to National one year because the PE teacher left and we had an interim mom handling the events. She held the shuttle run on the wet grass instead of in the gym and the whole class was slipping all over the place. We begged her to move it inside but she wouldn't, so I was like 1.5 seconds slow in the shuttle and didn't get my Presidential mark in all the events. Absolute travesty that still bothers me to this day.

You did better than me…I stunk at pull-ups but decent at others. I could only get the National award. In middle school pull-ups were highly dependent on who had gone through puberty first.

As far as I know they’ve brought back the presidential fitness ‘challenge’ but it’s more of a participation thing now

Years ago I told my class I could save trillions in fraudulent insurance charges and set a pattern to greatly reduce America's obesity and diabetes numbers within a year. All we have to simply do is have weigh ins at schools every 2-3 months. If a kid weighs to much or does not show improvements after 6 months....parents get charged for child abuse. You see...there used to be 1 fat kid in every class. Now they are everywhere. Some FAT mom that looked like Shrek complained to my principal who laughed her ass off.

I have two elementary age kids, middle class area, red state in the south. It’s really sad to see the shape and state most of these young kids are in.

The school gym teacher is amazing, has cost free physical activities 3 days a week (4 during winter with BBall, run club and soccer). But most kids don’t take advantage of these teams.

Most kids sit on screens all day at school and go home to the same. By the time they are in high school it’s too late.

Id say 35-40 percent of the 5th graders are significantly overweight

Do you think you are some type of comedian? Late 1940-something, England figured out how to establish single payer government sponsored healthcare for all, N.H.S. 1961, when JFK came into office and by the time, you know ... no effort on single payer government sponsored healthcare for all. You think you are funny. Unemployed people were suffering from malnutrition during Kennedy administration.

When I was a little kid in the 1970s, we had a short recess in the morning, PE in the afternoon and a long recess after lunch. When school was out, we went home and went right back out the door to play with other kids in the neighborhood. Only rain and darkness would cut in on outdoor activity time.

My wife teaches at public school. The elementary kids get 15 minutes of recess everyday and only have PE twice a week. Attempts to get the legislature to mandate just 20 minutes a day have failed. The main reason for such small amounts of time for recess is meeting school instruction hours requirements and lots and lots and lots of time dedicated to high stakes standardized test preparation.

Also, most kids after school are in some sort of after care program and they are often kept inside, watching videos or playing with toys. Since the missing a murdered children of the late 70s early 80s (serial killer in Atlanta), parents do not let their kids wander the neighborhood alone or go to the playground/park alone. Add to that video games, ipads, etc. an screen time is keeping kids from going out and playing. All of this means that kids today are simply not out playing and moving around.

It gets much worse as kids get into late elementary and middle school. Kids who are active and like playing different sports are often shut out due to the extremely high amount of specialization and stratification in youth sports. Kids who are just average or below average see very little playing time or are forced to play positions that are not as challenging as priority is on winning and developing top players for elite teams. By high school, the opportunities to play sports are almost entirely limited to only the top few kids, and in schools with 2,500+ kids, that is a very tiny percentage of the school population. My high school had 800 kids and most anyone who had some ability at a sport could be on a JV team. And in High School, academics are given a priority over PE, with most schools requiring only a year of PE in high school, which students can get out of if they take other extracurriculars and keep a full academic schedule. Then, PE just becomes a class where the jocks beat the crap out of the other kids in sports.

The Presidential Fitness stuff is a cold war relic that was really intended as a pre-draft preparedness for a war with the Soviets. We do not need any sort of special program from the federal government to fix childhood obesity. Elementary age kids need at least an hour of free play time outside and about 30 minutes of structure PE to help build coordination and skills in sports. Middle school and high school then transitions into learning how to have your own exercise program that you can do for the rest of your life to stay active and fit without having to be on a sports team.

An inept Conservative government and Brexit are the biggest issues when it comes to falling standards in the NHS.