Dr. Mark Hyman, author of “The Sugar Solution: The Ultra Healthy Program for Losing Weight, Preventing Disease and Feeling Great Now!”, points out that 2 million kids are now morbidly obese.

Diabetes and pre-diabetes are just around the corner and the treatments are failing.

Hyman noted the the average child in the U.S. has 34 teaspoons of sugar a day. He said, “The food industry have hijacked our brain chemistry, our taste buds, our homes, our kitchens, our schools, and we need to take them back. We need to do things like have soda taxes, change food marketing practices to kids because this is not a problem solved in the doctor’s office.”

The overall cost of diabetes on society is greater than the dollars and cents spent to treat and care for patients.

A new study from researchers at Yale suggests that the disease, which currently affects nearly 8 percent of the U.S. population, could have significant nonmedical costs to society as well.

The study, which appears in the January issue of the policy journal Health Affairs, suggests that young people diagnosed with the disease are more likely to drop out of high school and to forgo or fail to finish college. As a result, they’re likely to earn less than those without diabetes.

Americans are fat and getting fatter.

And the solutions to the problem are a pretty tall order.

“Altering the way society is organized” may be effective in addressing the problem but is it a viable solution?

Consider all the special interests benefitting from the system as it is now, from factory farms to tobacco companies, who is willing to be “re-organized”?

First lady Michelle Obama has made healthy eating her special project and hopefully she can bring national attention to growing problem.

The problem for the country echoes the problem for individuals: Willpower is not enough. “(It’s a) basic instinct, even stronger than the sexual instinct, to store calories to survive the next period of starvation. And we live in an environment where there’s food every half mile. It’s tasty, cheap, convenient, and you can eat it with one hand.”
Thus says Martijn Katan of the Institute of Health Sciences at VU University in Amsterdam, author of one of the many studies on the limits of dieting, quoted in U.S. News & World Report.
If you as an individual want to change your weight, you must change your whole life. Likewise, to reduce obesity in modern society, we will have to alter the way society is organized.

The first Ronald was the TV weatherman Willard Scott in his younger years.

Scott had been doing Bozo the Clown on local television.

When the show was canceled, an enterprising McDonald’s franchise asked him to come up with a clown figure that would lure the kids into the restaurant.

Ray Kroc, owner of McDonald’s, saw the clown, liked the idea and extended it to the whole country.

Adults bear an enormous responsibility for the obesity epidemic among children.

Yet there’s also no question that even conscientious parents and guardians, who really do try to do well by kids and teach them healthy life choices, are not playing on a level field.

They’re going up against billions of dollars spent every year in corporate marketing, all aimed at teaching kids to make exactly the opposite sorts of choices

The fast-food giant hit back at a group of 550 doctors and health-care professionals who took out ads in U.S. newspapers demanding that the company do away with its redheaded clown mascot and its other marketing towards kids.

“Stop making the next generation sick — retire Ronald and the rest of your junk-food marketing to kids,” said Dr. Steven Rothschild, an associate professor of preventative medicine at Rush Medical College in a release on Wednesday.