Does poor nutrition endanger our security?
CHICAGO >> My 17-year-old son and I lock horns nightly when bedtime approaches and he hasn’t consumed his pre-negotiated 7 ounces of milk for the day.
The Army fell short of its recruiting goal because it couldn’t find enough people in good enough shape.
It’s the same battle that comes up at dinner if he didn’t eat his daytime serving of fruit. Our meal then becomes a slog of cramming the bare minimum of fruit and vegetables down him to aid his growing skeleton.
“You don’t want to be like your brother, do you?” I ask, referencing his older sibling who was raised under the influence of early-2000s parenting books that said to ignore how our own parents did things and not force toddlers and young children to clean their plates or eat foods they didn’t care for until their palates matured. “He had two broken bones by the time he was your age!”
So my younger son powers through dinners garnished with his short list of tolerated green vegetables, a multivitamin and vitamin C supplement, and a dose of fish oil since he’d sooner saw off his own leg than let fish pass through his lips.
He’s a young adult who spent his formative years in a daycare setting and then a public school system that made him believe that Frenchtoast sticks drenched in pancake syrup with fruit-flavored sugar-water mislabeled as juice was a proper breakfast. He was habituated to cheese crackers as a “snack” and to pizza and chocolate milk as daily lunch options.
At least he’s trim and fit. But I fear that the day he moves out, his nutrition will start suffering.
Hey, we tried -- in no small part because my husband and I had the privilege of going to college, where we learned about nutrition and the importance of physical fitness. In that sense, we breathe the same rarified air as the policymaking elites. Yet these influential power players fail to recognize that America’s obesity crisis is not only a health emergency, but also a national security risk.
“I talk a lot about this in Washington, D.C., where people look at each other in disbelief when I say obesity is a national security threat,” said Tom Spoehr, a retired lieutenant general who served in the Army for 36 years and is a member of “Mission: Readiness,” a bipartisan coalition of more than 700 top retired military leaders who advocate for children’s wellness. “They say, ‘How can this be? Everyone I see is healthy, they’re out running, I see everyone at SoulCycle; this doesn’t resonate.’ That’s especially how the media outlets on the coasts see it.’”
Spoehr told me it’s a constant struggle to get people to understand that millions all over the country are overweight and suffer from malnutrition (a seemingly oxymoronic state that occurs when people take in too many highcalorie, low-nutrient foods) to the point that the military can’t fully staff its ranks.
Nationwide, 71 percent of young people between the ages of 17 and 24 don’t qualify for military service. And out of that group, obesity disqualifies 31 percent of them from serving, according to “Unhealthy and Unprepared: National security depends on promoting healthy lifestyles from an early age,” the third and latest health report from Mission Readiness.
This past year, the Army fell short of its recruiting goal by 6,500 people because they couldn’t find young people who wanted to serve and were in good enough shape to pull it off.
What’s more, even those who do make it fare worse in the field than previous generations.
“While not all injury can be traced to obesity, one study found that there were 72 percent more medical evacuations from Iraq and Afghanistan for stress fractures, serious sprains, and other similar injuries -- injuries associated with poor fitness and nutrition -- than for combat wounds,” noted the report.
Spoehr underscores that there are no easy fixes: “We’re going to need a web of solutions -- there’s no one federal law that is going to change this.”
It’s going to take everything from more recess and gym classes in schools to enabling a culture of cooking real, healthful food at home, better food consumer education and many other changes to modern life.
Most of all, our citizenry must recognize how truly unwell the 40 percent of adults and 20 percent of kids ages 6 to 19 who are obese are. And then they must understand that countless political, economic and sociocultural factors like the interests of bigfood corporations and our fetishization of junk food will need to be upended in order to restore a bare minimum of health to vast numbers of Americans.
He’s a young adult who spent his formative years in a daycare setting and then a public school system that made him believe that Frenchtoast sticks drenched in pancake syrup with fruit-flavored sugar-water mislabeled as juice was a proper breakfast. He was habituated to cheese crackers as a “snack” and to pizza and chocolate milk as daily lunch options.