Help trim obesity

America, you're fat.\nSorry, we mean no offense, but it's just true. Obesity is on the rise, and it's affecting every age group, every race, both genders and every state of the union. (To find out whether you are at risk for obesity, use the government standard: start with your height in inches, square it and take 4.25 percent of the result. If you weigh more than that, you're obese, according to Slate Online Magazine.)\nThe percentage of children who are overweight is higher than ever before. Nationally, approximately 30 percent of children aged six to 11 are overweight, and 15 percent are obese.\nTo help combat this obesity epidemic, the Texas Agriculture Department is revamping its rules on what food public schools can serve to their 4.2 million students in the state. \nThe changes range from requiring canned fruits be packed in only natural juices or light syrups to limiting potato chips to reduced-fat or baked varieties. Deep fat frying will be banned, limitations will be placed on how often french fries can be served and only certain kinds of milk (2 percent, 1 percent and skim) will be offered.\nThough about 20 states have already implemented restrictions on students' access to junk food, two dozen more states are considering total bans or limits on vending machine products. The focus on elementary school lunches and limiting access to vending machines to help fight obesity is not without due reason. The U.S. surgeon general has said the high incidence of overweight and obesity issues among young people is a great threat to public health, implicating a generation of high blood pressure, heart disease and complications of diabetes.\nWe support similar restrictions on lunchtime junk food in elementary and junior high schools, but we don't see the immediate need to reconstruct the lunch menus for high school students. High school students should be aware of health concerns and should be able to choose what they eat while taking those health concerns into consideration.\nThe vending machine issue would be more difficult to address. Bills submitted to help make Indiana's school lunches healthier have been met with mixed reactions by legislators unwilling to pull money-making vending machines out of schools. According to the The Associated Press, in Indiana, some school districts make up to $300,000 a year from vending machine contracts, money that would sorely be missed if taken out of the budget.\nSome Texas school officials say the cost of implementing the healthier food program remains unclear. They are wondering why costly changes in food services may be imminently important at a time when, across the country, many school districts are suffering from budget cuts and loss of essential programs and staff.\nBut as an effort to help reduce the troubling issue of obesity, the immediate costs of changing the menus seem shadowed by the future value of a healthier population.