New York, NY - The Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association (AHA) are joining forces to help combat the rising tide of childhood obesity.

President Bill Clinton

"We are teaming up with the AHA to fight for healthier lifestyles for young people," former President Bill Clinton told an audience of schoolchildren and journalists at an elementary school in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan yesterday.

Clinton said his interest in this area was fueled by the events of last year when he underwent bypass surgery. "When the AHA approached me about working together to combat heart disease, I wanted to do more than just tape a public-service announcement because of what had been done to me and because frankly I had dodged a very big bullet. I felt an obligation to do something substantial with my foundation, because health security is one of the four missions that I adopted when I left the White House."

The joint alliance between the AHA and the Clinton Foundation will initially focus on three areas, said Clinton. "First we want to work with restaurants, food chains, and food producers to encourage them to offer healthier food alternatives for children. . . . Next, we will work with schools and community programs to encourage healthier foods in cafeterias and vending machines and to encourage more active exercise efforts both during the school day and in organized after-school programs."

Also at the media event were Dr Robert Eckel (University of Colorado, Denver), president-elect of the AHA, Dr Alice Jacobs (University Medical Center, Boston, MA), the current president of the AHA, and Mike Huckabee, governor of Arkansas.

Clinton observed that Huckabee was an ideal partner for this initiative: "Gov Huckabee . . . is about half the size he was when I first met him, and while I'm always trying to shrink the ranks of Republicans, I never really thought this was the way to do it. I'm really proud of not only his personal example but of the astonishing work he has done in Arkansas to measure the BMI of every single public-school student and change what's in the vending machines."

"The best way to prevent heart disease in adults is to cultivate healthy lifestyle habits in children," said Gov Huckabee. "I hope that this effort will help American families, and especially children, to eat better, be more active, and live longer lives."

"Our goals in this initiative are easy to state and hard to achieve," said Clinton. "Working with all the other interested parties, we want to reverse the growth of childhood obesity that has been occurring over the past 20 to 30 years."

Clinton told the audience that when he was a teenager he struggled with being overweight. As an adult, however, he remained in good shape except for a period during his presidency.

In addition to the initiative with the Clinton Foundation, the AHA announced that it was releasing, in partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, A Nation at Risk: Obesity in the United States, a statistical sourcebook of facts about obesity, including specific information on childhood obesity. The free sourcebook is now available by calling
1-800-AHA-USA1 or emailing inquiries@heart.org.