 We are facing an epidemic in our country. It's an epidemic of childhood obesity. At present, one in three of our children in the United States of America is either overweight or obese. And in order to understand how this is happening to our children, I'd like to build you a model. So at the center of the model we have our child, and obviously the genetic makeup of the child is going to contribute to whether or not this child is going to suffer from overweight or obesity. But there are other factors that are going to contribute. And those are the environmental factors. If we look at the immediate environment in which this child is living, we see a few things that we're pretty sure are contributing to our current state of affairs. They are things like increases in the portion sizes of just about everything, especially foods that are processed or fast foods. These increased portion sizes usually lead to increased consumption. The second thing, and this is probably the most critical factor, is the fact that our children are just eating more processed, fast or convenience foods. Compared to other countries in the world, our children drink more of their calories in the form of sugary drinks and sodas, and our children are less physically active than they should be. So physical in activity, I'll put here. If we move out a layer and look at the local environment, and what I'm talking about there is, for example, the neighborhood, the home, and maybe the school we'll put in that shell. What we see here is that the habits of the family play a big part, or the culture of eating in the home. Many families feel they don't have time to cook, and so food is often brought in from outside the home, and that leads to the likelihood of increased portion sizes and increased amounts of processed foods and also sodas. We live in a society where processed foods are becoming increasingly available to our children, and they're on every corner. It's very hard for our children to avoid seeing these foods, being exposed to these kinds of foods. So that's a major factor, contributing obviously to increased intake of these kinds of foods. If the school lunch programs are not well thought out or well funded, then the school lunch programs can also contribute to the increase in processed foods and can sort of foster the false idea that these are appropriate foods for our children. The amount of screen time that our children are allowed every day has increased dramatically over the past 30 years, and that screen time leads to both an increased exposure to advertising for food and also an increased likelihood that the child will be physically inactive. If we move out further and we look at the society in which we're living and which factors in our society might be contributing to these trends that we're seeing, we live in a culture that values convenience and value for money. So you can see that by definition that's a culture that will be predisposed to eating convenience foods and to eating those foods in larger quantities because there's perceived value in larger quantities of food. We're also a society on the run, and that sometimes leaves little time for us to sit down and have a meal together as a family. As a society, we've also adopted a sedentary lifestyle. We use our cars to get from A to B. Schools are very far away from homes sometimes, and we tend to drive when we could potentially use other means of getting there that would double as physical activity. The availability of screens has also contributed to this, and all of these things contribute to physical inactivity, which just aggravates the problem. Every year, our government spends billions of dollars subsidizing crops like corn feed, and the great majority of these crops end up in fast or processed foods, making fast food cheaper on a calorie per calorie basis, even though these foods are very poor in nutrients, large food corporations that control both the production and distribution of heavily processed foods, many of them created from animal remnants and other inexpensive ingredients like refined sugars, fats, and starches. These foods are engineered to be intensely palatable and to have a long shelf life. They can be consumed anywhere, and in our culture it's become socially acceptable to consume them at any time with no need for dishes and cutlery. You don't even need a table and chairs. Big food corporations are protected by watchdogs that are called special interest lobbyists, and these are groups like the Sugar Association, the Corn Refiners Association, or the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. What they do is they exert influence on the food regulators, and USDA stands for the United States Department of Agriculture, but the food regulators are influenced by the special interest lobbyists who hold quite a bit of power in Washington, and the special interest lobbyists also influence the labeling regulators. Those are the people who decide whether pink slime can be called lean, finely textured beef, or whether high fructose corn syrup is the same thing as corn sugar. Finally, we have a food marketing industry in this country that spends $2 billion a year marketing junk food to our children, and all of these factors that are external to the child but have a very real influence on that child's health have created a situation in which one in three of our children is either overweight or obese at present in the United States of America.