By Todd Staples | Published Sunday, October 4, 2009
While Washington jostles over proposed government health care legislation, simple truths are being ignored and overlooked. A great deal of the money spent on health care today is avoidable. A comptroller's report estimates Texas businesses alone are spending $1.3 billion in health care costs linked to obesity.
The truth is this: Taxpayers are picking up the tab for poor eating choices. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 72 million adults in our nation are overweight or obese. In Texas, 28 percent of adults and 32 percent of students fall into the overweight/obese category.
Why should we debate adding more debt to our debt-ridden nation or dismantling our private health care system when real savings can be found and resources freed up by individuals taking a little responsibility for their own actions?
That is why I introduced the 3E's of Healthy Living - Education, Exercise and Eating Right - patterned after the 3 R's that focused my generation and the one before. Living a healthy lifestyle requires comprehensive measures just like learning to read, write, add and subtract. To borrow from a well-known proverb, if we give our children a healthy meal, they will be healthier today; however if we teach our children how to make healthy choices, they will be healthy for a lifetime.
Education, exercise and eating right can solve many of today's obesity problems. Education helps us learn to live healthy; exercise helps make us stronger; and eating right helps us feel better. It takes all of us working together to battle obesity and reinvent our living, learning and work environments to encourage and reinforce healthy eating choices.
Why try to treat the symptoms when we ignore the illness? Obesity is preventable. Before we undergo a massive overhaul of our health care system that costs too much, imposes a new tax and fines businesses, let's first take a long look in the mirror and decide what each of us can do to solve this problem. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Todd Staples is Texas agriculture commissioner, the leader of the agency that administers the largest school lunch and breakfast programs in the nation. Staples is an advocate for healthy living.
