A report on childhood obesity released Wednesday by the Institute of Medicine paints a super-sized picture of tomorrow and claims that a third of America's youth are already obese or overweight.
The Institute of Medicine, an advisory group affiliated with the government-created National Academy of Sciences, also stated in its report that obesity has tripled in the last 30 years among teenagers and children ages 2 to 5 years and quadrupled among kids ages 6 to 11 years.
"There is a substantial underinvestment of resources to adequately address the scope of the obesity crisis," the report warned.
While the report offers ideas for confronting the obesity epidemic, there are no feasible solutions that stand a chance against 99-cent value menus, the Playstation or the current priorities of our capitalist society.
Fast food is a multibillion dollar industry, and each fast food company wants to stake claim to the largest chunk of revenue it possibly can.
The result is an escalating culinary-arms race in which each franchise strives to create a menu more indulgent and budget-minded than that of its competitors.
Giant, cheap and absurdly unhealthy meals are the result.
These cheese-dripping, deep-fried monstrosities are then validated in the court of public opinion by hundreds of millions of dollars in advertisements which use cynical humor, slender celebrities and old-fashioned "edginess" to glamorize overeating.
Our eating habits are passed on over generations, so we might as well get used to fat people and their medical bills, because neither are going away anytime soon.
It will be a white Christmas in hell before there is a tax on junk food or any limitations on its availability, and there just isn't a way that nutritionists can compete with the culture of excess that has been allowed to develop in this country.
Legislators may be able to fund nutrition curriculums in classrooms and public service announcements on TV, but they can't contribute the kind of financing that is necessary to undo the damage of fast food ad campaigns.
Nor should they.
Here in America, making money has been and always will be more important than protecting fat kids from triple cheeseburgers.
Another obstacle in the battle of the bulge is the growing role that technology and electronic entertainment play in the lives of children and teenagers.
Kids just aren't as active as they used to be.
Instead of running around with their friends or playing ball, kids these days are plugging into their Xboxes, watching hundreds of channels of television or updating their MySpace.com pages after school.
Fat camps and pee wee football programs may sound like good ways to curb obesity to the Institute of Medicine, but they probably don't excite too many tubby, Halo-addicted adolescents.
As consumers spend their way out of reality, they ought to realize that they sometimes sacrifice the health of their children in the process.
This situation begs for parental responsibility, but unfortunately, the parents are often even more unhealthy and entertainment-obsessed than their children.
It takes a village to raise a child, but if our village is too busy watching reality television, Ronald McDonald might just step in and do the job for us.
Daniel Raven never met a cheeseburger he didn't like. He is a junior majoring in journalism and his columns run on Fridays. Send hate mail to: daniel.raven@asu.edu.
