There has been an new question posed by the pentagon recently. This question was of an interesting prospect of the future for our military. The question was strange, it did not deal with army growth, or the number of recruits, but on the nutrition of the recruits, and they are wondering how it effects them. The pentagon wants to know, will we at a near point in time have soliders that have such poor nutrition that they will have soldiers that are to overweight to fight?
The military is not passivliy asking this, they are actively getting involved in this. They released a report that was made by several retired military leaders, the report was aptly named, "too fat to fight".
They along with releasing this report are also getting involved with different legislatures trying to reinitiate the "child nutrition act" which would regulate and remove a large portion of the junk food from school cafeterias.
This is almost the exact opposite of what the act was originally designed for, as it was designed to help children get enough to eat and keep them healthy and well fed.
This was looked at heavily when they studied the data from the center of disease control and prevention stating that over %27 of young adults are to overweight to join the military.
The reports stated that in 1998 only Kentucky had a population with more than %40 overweight. Now it is only 10 states that are under %40 and three states that have over % 50 overweight populations.
One thing that bothers me here is that one would think that being the military, they could have a program for overweight people. Mandatory calisthenics for starters, I know the military has basic standards but I would think that this would be a basic one.
They can't really eat all they want to in the military, and I doubt that even the most stubborn of men would be able to keep up their fatty diet with two sets of PT.
I really don't see this as too much of a problem for our military, however they do, and it is their show, so they really should be able to have a say in what is and what is not fit to join.
For links to other articles I've written
http://rlwoodsiii.blogspot.com/For the original report.
http://cdn.missionreadiness.org/MR_Too_F...