On Thursday, the Presidential Commission to Make America Healthy Again released its Make Our Children Healthy Again Assessment report on the root causes driving childhood illness. The report found four possible contributing factors behind the rise in childhood chronic diseases: poor diet, the aggregation of environmental chemicals, lack of physical activity coupled with stress, and overmedicalization.
According to the executive order that created it, the commission now has less than three months to come up with a strategy to address these challenges.
One strategy the commission could implement is encouraging parents to make their children’s snacks healthy again.
When I played softball as a child, I fondly remember orange slices and grapes as snacks. Biting into an orange slice after a sweaty game tasted delicious.
Fast forward a few decades, and the sports are the same, but the snacks are wildly different.
Each Saturday this spring, my preschooler goes to T-ball. He loves running the bases, getting outs, and batting. Why does my preschooler (yes, preschooler!) need Cheetos and red Gatorade after a game? That is the snack a family brought after the game last week. The answer is that he doesn’t. And neither do other young children.
The report found that, “Most American children’s diets are dominated by ultra-processed foods high in added sugars, chemical additives, and saturated fats, while lacking sufficient intakes of fruits and vegetables. This modern diet has been linked to a range of chronic diseases, including obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and certain cancers. The excessive consumption of UPFs has led to a depletion of essential micronutrients and dietary fiber, while increasing the consumption of sugars and carbohydrates, which negatively affects overall health.” And that “nearly 70% of an American child’s calories today comes from ultra-processed foods.”
Seventy percent. That’s huge.
Many parents recognize both the intense pressure to give their children smartphones and the negative effects smartphones have on children. As a result, some have coalesced around the idea of waiting to give their children smartphones. There is a “Wait Until 8th” online pledge that parents can sign to band together to delay giving children smartphones until at least the end of 8th grade. This parent teamwork takes a little of the pressure off each individual parent and makes it easier to be a smartphone-free child.
It can be difficult being the only parent not to give your child something that all the other children have, whether that be a smartphone or an unhealthy snack.
It would be beneficial to parents and children alike if this pledge approach were taken into other areas of parenting. Parents working together to make healthier choices for their children. Take T-ball. If all the parents on a preschool T-ball team bring fruit, that becomes what the children expect. But if all the other parents bring sugary snacks, for example, that makes the healthy snacks stand out, and not in a good way.
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As a mom of young children who are offered all kinds of unhealthy snacks at sports games, I’d love to see parents unite on healthy snacks or, quite frankly, no snacks at all, and just let us bring our own. We need to end unhealthy snack culture among children as the norm.
During the 2024 election, lots of mothers embraced the idea of Making America Healthy Again and voting for Trump to make that happen. For many, it is because they have seen the results of unhealthy eating and lifestyles in their own children. To make children healthy again, let’s start with healthy snacking.
Karin Lips (@klips) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is the founder and president of the Network of Enlightened Women and a senior fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum.