Michelle Obama: Foodmakers Need to Produce Health Food, Fight Childhood Obesity
First Lady Michelle Obama wants corporate food giants to step up and produce more healthy food choices for children. Michelle Obama is calling for food makers to be on the front lines in the initiative to tackle Childhood Obesity.
The First Lady spoke today at a meeting of the Grocery Manufacturers Association and told giant brands such as Coca-Cola, General Mills and Kraft Foods to increase efforts to produce more healthful food rather than junk food.
According to the Washington Post, Michelle Obama hopes to see things change soon:
We need you not just to tweak around the edges, but to entirely rethink the products that you’re offering, the information that you provide about these products and how you market those products to our children.
We can build shiny new supermarkets on every block, but we need those supermarkets to actually provide healthy options at prices people can afford. And we can insist that our schools serve better food, but we need to actually produce that food. And we can give parents all the information in the world, but they still won’t have time to untangle labels filled with 10-syllable words or do long division with these portion sizes. And that’s really where you come in.
Michelle Obama has put the fight against childhood obesity at the top of her priority list. Last month, she launched Let’s Move, a federal initiative designed to end the epidemic within a generation. Today was her first public appeal to the food industry.
