There are wars in the Middle East. Future battles with China. Covert missions in Latin America. And Elon Musk wants to build a Mars colony. All of these require one, simple biological necessity: human beings.
Unfortunately, Americans are fat. And the obesity problem with our children has only ballooned. To protect our sovereignty, secure our liberties, and return to the stars, we must have the courage to mold our bodies with the same seriousness we reserve for our minds by restoring physical education as a disciplined practice and an enduring virtue.
Despite a slight drop from a record high in 2022, 37 percent of adults are obese. All the while 16 percent of youth ages 6 to 17 are overweight.
Our species faces an existential crisis of our own making. Spacious skies, amber waves of grain, and shining seas have been succeeded by golden arches, purple-neon bells, and flashing coupon codes for dollar-menu meal deals.
Yes, the food we eat is part of the problem.
The “Make America Healthy Again” or MAHA movement has successfully added some kale-fuel virtue to Big Gulp conservatism in the past year. Recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. followed up his promise to root out “the poison” in our modern American diet with a new protein-powered food pyramid.
“As secretary of Health and Human Services, my message is clear: Eat real food,” Kennedy said, calling the new nourishment notions the “most significant reset of federal nutrition policy in history.”
And states across the country, have rolled back SNAP users’ sugar habits by removing the ability to purchase unhealthy, highly processed food from the federal food stamp program.
But even as the entire menu of health influencers in the White House wage war on everything from seed oils to zombifying LED bulbs, another big hurdle remains: the decline of physical activity.
Almost 60 percent of American children have unhealthy cardiorespiratory fitness. More than 70 percent of children aged 6-17 (rising to 85% in teens) did not meet the 2024 federal minimum recommendation of daily moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. And U.S. kids rank 47th out of 50 in an international study ranking aerobic fitness.
Our Gen Z and Millenials also dominate the food delivery market — consuming 40 percent of all app orders on a weekly basis.
But Kennedy’s shirtless workout montages and proposals to put pull-up bars in airports have done little to deter America’s youth from gobbling up golden wrappers.
Our kids are becoming fat, slow, and atrophied. They are at increasing risk for future health problems. All this puts America on the bench when it comes gametime for our international, and interplanetary, ambitions.
Even our U.S. Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, has warned about our “fat troops” being not just a “bad look” for the history’s most powerful military, but our waning fitness standards have created “weak men.”
In 1960, Kennedy’s uncle called America “soft” and urged us to forge our bodies, like our minds, if we are to maintain our great nation:
“All of us must consider our own responsibilities for the physical vigor of our children and of the young men and women of our community,” JFK said. “We do not want our children to become a generation of spectators. Rather, we want each of them to be a participant in the vigorous life.”
We find ourselves at a crossroads.
America can remain seated on the couch of comfort: a phone in one hand furiously tapping through meal delivery apps while the other is tightly clenched around a remote control.
Or we can choose courage.
That means making deliberate, informed choices about what we eat, guided by serious nutritional standards such as those advanced by the MAHA coalition. It also requires schools to treat physical education as a central obligation by implementing strict, rigorous, and targeted fitness programs that cultivate strength, endurance, and self-control.
America, and most importantly its children, must have their habits formed early, reinforced daily, and regarded as an essential dimension of responsible citizenship.