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Why are kids being inundated with food that is not good for them, when we're suffering from an obesity crisis? Is the U.S. government talking out of both sides of its mouth, promoting bad food while telling us not to eat it?

With the chronic obesity in America, it's more important than ever to not only feed kids healthy foods but to teach them how to make healthy choices on their own.

Hunger and malnutrition have devastating consequences for children and have been linked to low birth weight and birth defects, obesity, mental and physical health problems, and poorer educational outcomes.

Tackling childhood obesity is key.

Our children are obese, either have or being threatened by diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and not socially adjusting properly to others because of a lack of fitness.

Fixing obesity is going to require a change in our modern relationship with food. I'm hopeful that we begin to see a turnaround in this childhood obesity epidemic.

Nutrition isn't the only problem; our children also aren't getting enough exercise.

I believe that parents need to make nutrition education a priority in their home environment. It's crucial for good health and longevity to instill in your children sound eating habits from an early age.

Chronic malnutrition, or the lack of proper nutrition over time directly contributes to three times as many child deaths as food scarcity. Yet surprisingly, you don't really hear about this hidden crisis through the morning news, Twitter or headlines of major newspapers.

Paradoxically Americans are becoming both more obese and more nutrient deficient at the same time. Obese children eating processed foods are nutrient depleted and increasingly get scurvy and rickets, diseases we thought were left behind in the 19th and 20th centuries.