A road map for tackling childhood obesity

WASHINGTON - First lady Michelle Obama's campaign against childhood obesity received a boost yesterday when the government issued its road map for tackling the problem, including encouraging more women to breast-feed.

The report recommends 70 steps all levels of government, the private sector, schools, parents and others can take. Obama has said her goal is to solve the problem within a generation so babies born today can come of age at a healthy weight.

One in three American children is overweight or obese, increasing their risk of developing diabetes, heart disease and other illnesses, and contributing to high health care costs.

The recommendations touch on all parts of the "Let's Move" anti-obesity campaign Obama launched this year, including giving information to caregivers, serving healthier food in schools, making healthy food cheaper and more available, and getting children to exercise more.

The report set 2030 as a benchmark, saying her goal of reversing the epidemic could be achieved if rates fall back to 5 percent by then.

Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, applauded the administration for making childhood obesity a national priority. The report includes benchmarks to help measure progress.

Here are some recommendations of a government report on tackling childhood obesity:

Encouraging women to breast-feed their children.

• Women should be at a healthy weight at conception and avoid excess weight gain during pregnancy.

• Re-authorizing and expanding the Child Nutrition Act so that more children participate in its summer meals programs.

• Rethinking public housing construction so that sidewalks and bike paths are included in the planning and street-facing porches are incorporated as a way of increasing neighborhood safety.

• Restaurants should consider portion sizes and begin posting calorie information as the new health care law requires.

• Updating federal nutrition standards for meals served at schools and more school-based nutrition education.

• Incentives to lure supermarkets to underserved rural and urban areas.

• Pediatricians to get in the habit of checking their patients' body mass index, a height-weight calculation used to measure body fat.

• A standard nutrition label on the front of packaged foods.

• The food industry and beverage industry to limit the marketing of unhealthy products to children, with government regulation as a last resort.