Several days ago I posted a link to an impassioned Jamie Oliver TED talk on the Presentation Zen website. I'm right behind Jamie on this one. This topic — nutrition, health, & fitness — is one I feel very strongly about. I feel quite sad and even angry at the steady rise in obesity and diet and sedentary lifestyle-related diseases that I have seen in my life. Yes, there is an enormous economic cost to obesity-related complications — hundreds of billions of dollars globally in fact — but what concerns me too are the emotional consequences of chronically poor eating habits and poor fitness that impacts millions of actual people in the USA, UK, etc. We humans were not meant to be sedentary and eat such rubbish. Poor diet and poor fitness influences one's emotional well-being and even cognitive abilities. It does not have to be this way.

Of course, many will push back and say that hotdogs and chips and Twinkies, etc. taste good and are fun to eat. I hear you -- I grew up on that stuff too. I still crave much of it sometimes. But the deal is, once I was exposed consistently to simply-prepared fresh foods and healthy snacks years ago, I discovered that the simple foods -- like many found in a traditional Japanese diet -- actually taste better *and* are better for you. Sadly, what I found in the few years I lived back in the States is that eating healthy (at least for a busy and slightly lazy guy like me) was actually more expensive and more difficult. Eating junk was easy and cheap. There were some good stores like WholeFoods (though they are not perfect and are not cheap), but most neighborhoods don't have such a store.

There are no panaceas and government can't fix the problem, but I am happy to see nutrition and fitness starting to get a lot more attention again. Ultimately it comes down to each individual, but we can do a much better job of at least educating young people and setting good examples. This is not a trivial thing; this is a major issue. I'm right behind Jamie Oliver and Arnold Schwarzenegger on this topic. Below is a good informal presentation by Schwarzenegger -- no teleprompter, just a good emotional appeal from the heart. And if you have not seen the Jamie Oliver TED talk, please watch it and share it with all your friends, co-workers, etc. Every school administrator too may consider sharing these videos with teachers and then thinking together of ways they can do better in their local area.

Obesity Summit - weekly address 02/26/10

Jamie Oliver's TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/765