WASHINGTON, Feb. 26, 2015 — Michelle Obama, in her keynote address to the Partnership for a Healthier America 2015 Summit today, celebrated the successes of her Let’s Move! campaign and vowed to continue advocating for healthy living well after her husband leaves office.
“Over the last five years, we have truly changed the culture around healthy eating and living in this country,” the first lady said. “We are celebrating how far we’ve come, we’re challenging ourselves to do even more and we are committed to being true champions of this issue for the next five years and beyond.”
Mrs. Obama provided a litany of statistics to back up her claim:
--1.6 million children in daycare now eat fruits and vegetables for snacks instead of “cookies and juice.”
--30 million older children have healthier school lunches, with 2 million having Let’s Move! salad bars available in their lunch rooms.
--5 million children can attend healthier after-school programs and 9 million “are getting 60 minutes of physical activity a day” in Let’s Move! Active Schools.
In the five years since the program started, Let’s Move! has inspired several new initiatives, including Let’s Move! Faith and Communities, Let’s Move! City, Towns or Counties and nearly 700 Let’s Move! Museums and Gardens, said Obama.
Addressing criticism that her healthy living initiatives are too expensive, she said that healthier standards for school lunches have already been incorporated in 90 percent of schools and that there was an economic imperative to reduce childhood obesity in America.
“We can’t afford NOT to give our kids nutritious food, when we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars treating obesity-related diseases,” said Mrs. Obama, without mentioning the disagreements she’s had with congressional Republicans’ changes to school lunch standards.
The first lady said she had “no intention of slowing down” when her husband finishes his final term in January 2017 and pledged to continue her work to improve the health of America’s children.
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