Pokemon Go is making Michelle Obama look bad.
The popular new augmented reality game has managed to get millions of American off the couch and pursuing cartoon creatures with their smartphones, including a lot of teens walking miles in the outdoors to get to the next level.
According to FreedomWorks, “as of July 13, Pokemon Go has enjoyed 15 million downloads. Web-based surveyor Survey Monkey reported that the game had 21 million daily active users.
“That’s a lot of Americans out there potentially getting exercise.”
Private enterprise is driving change, FreedomWorks points out, and it’s far more effective than the government’s efforts in recent years to address the childhood obesity epidemic in America.
In 2010, Michelle Obama launched the “Let’s Move Initiative” as a way to fight obesity through bureaucracy, and despite attempts to goad children into participating through social media marketing and numerous other outreach efforts, it’s been a miserable failure.
#PokemonGO has done more to combat childhood obesity in 24 hours than Michelle Obama has in the past eight years.
— common white girl (@TypicalGlRL) July 10, 2016
As FreedomWorks put it: “Private enterprise produces winners. The ‘Let’s Move’ operation has proved just how truly negligible government’s returns really are.”
The Let’s Move initiative, coupled with federal restrictions on school food imposed in 2012, is showing virtually no movement in helping kids slim down and make healthier choices. And some data suggests Michelle Obama’s government mandated changes could be having the opposite effect.
In the years since the federal government imposed strict school food restrictions on calories, fat, sugar, sodium, whole grains, fruits and vegetables and other nutritional measures, more than 1 million students have dropped out of the National School Lunch Program, including 321 entire schools that ditched the program in the 2012-13 school year, according to a Government Accountability Office report.
A study released this spring on obesity among American children between 1999 and 2014 showed that during the first two years of the Let’s Move campaign, “none of the estimates” for any age group of children “decreased from 2012 to 2014.”
In fact, The Daily Caller points out, kids are actually getting fatter.
For 2- to 19-year-olds, those considered overweight “increased to 31.8 percent in the 2011-12 study and 33.2 percent in the 2013-14 cohort,” the news site reports.
And it’s not just one study.
Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences professor Wen You also published a study in the journal of Health Economics this month that shows the more government lunches or breakfasts students eat, the greater risk they are at becoming overweight.
“While well-intentioned, these government funded school meal programs that are aimed at making kids healthy are in fact making participating students more at risk of being overweight,” You said, according to EAGnews.
“We found that the longer children were in the programs, the higher their risk of being overweight,” she continued. “We also saw the most negative effect of the government-funded school meal programs in the South, the Northeast, and rural areas of the country.”
Compare those statements to what folks are saying about Pokemon Go.
“This is the first time I’ve gone out and walked for hours I a long time,” 16-year-old Dallas resident Joshua Loughren told USA Today of his recent jaunt to track down imaginary Pokemon creatures. “That’s good.”
Larry O’Connor, editor for Hotair.com, also wrote about the effect Pokemon Go has had on his 11-year-old son, who recently approached him about heading out for a 3-mile walk.
“A 3-mile walk has been inspired not by a government program. Not by congressional fiat. Not by Dear Leader’s command. Not by a PE teacher or even by the cajoling of a concerned parent,” O’Connor wrote last month. “No. My son was inspired to walk 3 miles because he wanted to do it so he could complete a task in a game that he wanted to win.”
Mackinac Center for Public Policy’s John Mozena relayed a similar story in a blog last month.
“My 11-year-old son normally approaches the idea of going for a walk with his father with the excitement otherwise reserved for visits to the orthodontist. But when I offered to walk with him around the neighborhood while he caught Pokémon, we ended up taking almost a two-mile walk together on a beautiful summer evening,” Mozena wrote.
“It wasn’t LetsMove.gov or Fatherhood.gov or any other government program that got us out there, but the promise of those little digital monsters.”
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