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Tune in to Friday’s White House Childhood Obesity Meeting

Summary: 
Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy Melody Barnes announces the upcoming Childhood Obesity meeting where experts and industry leaders from across the country will come to the White House to discuss this important issue.

As you know, on February 9th the President created a new interagency Childhood Obesity Task Force. The task force is working right now on an action plan for solving the problem of childhood obesity in a generation. (You can see the full Presidential Memorandum creating the Task Force and requesting the action plan within 90 days here.)

We want to receive the best ideas from around the country about what this action plan should look like and what the most important steps are that we can all take to achieve this goal.  That’s why we asked everyone to submit written comments a few weeks ago, and the response was overwhelming.  We received over 2500 comments not just from researchers and experts but also from parents, teachers, and people from all walks of life who have a stake in our children’s future. 

And now we want to hear from people in person.  This Friday we’ve invited a broad array of experts, industry leaders, and people who work on these issues every day in their communities to come to a meeting at the White House to share with us their specific ideas about how to empower parents to make healthy choices for their children, provide healthy food at schools, improve access to healthy, affordable food in local communities, and get kids more physically active.

You can watch tomorrow’s discussion live on WhiteHouse.gov/live. We’ll be meeting from 1:30-5:00PM EDT and we’d love for you to listen in. We need everybody thinking about what we can do together to solve this problem.

Melody Barnes is Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy