Michelle Obama’s Childhood Obesity Summit Addresses Importance of Outdoors

Last week, First Lady Michelle Obama hosted the White House Childhood Obesity Summit as part of her work with the newly formed Childhood Obesity Task Force and its accompanying Let’s Move campaign. The Summit was attended by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, and Martin LeBlanc, Vice President and co-founder of C&NN and National Youth Education Director of the Sierra Club, along with many educators, health experts, business leaders, food-industry representatives, and others.

The Let’s Move campaign has four distinct planks that involve health, nutrition and physical activity. The one involving physical activity reads, “We can get our children physically active by building that opportunity into the structure of the school day; through better land use planning so that children have safe routes to a playgrounds and parks; and by putting the fun back in physical activity for all of us, parents and children.”

C&NN is advocating that outdoor play in nature be included as part of Let’s Move’s Physical Activity plank, because it has been shown to have tremendous benefits on children’s health and well-being. Read C&NN’s comments here.

The outdoors was far from ignored at the Childhood Obesity Summit and that, along with the upcoming White House Conference on America’s Great Outdoors, provides reason to cheer. During the Summit’s Opening Remarks, Education Secretary Duncan noted:

If you want our students to be much more successful academically, they have to be active.

He continued, “The First Lady talked about food deserts, but we have recreation deserts. We have to create playgrounds, we have to create cultures, we have to create time, and we have to demonstrate that students who are … physically active are going to do much better in class.” “We’re going to work very hard at creating more well-rounded educations for children” and those, he noted, include P.E. and recess.

According to Interior Secretary Salazar:

We need to get our young people and our society as a whole more connected to the outdoors than they have been.

He continued, “We have about 400 million visitors a year to our national parks and our Bureau of Land Management properties .. but when you look across the spectrum of outdoor opportunities, we think about the great urban parks of America and the riverways that we have in places like Chicago and St. Louis and Denver .. How we (can) provide opportunities for young people to ride their bikes along the riverways or along the parks … That is a huge opportunity for us. How we work with local communities and schools to try to locate some of our parks close to schools … so that when the kids are getting out for recess or after school, instead of playing on the hard-top or places that may not be as safe as playing in the outdoors in the woods, or close by, we ought to figure out (alternatives.)”