Our children are unhealthy. This is in part due to hunger and poverty. It is also due to poor diet and lack of exercise. Each day as I look at the students in our middle class school in the Maryland suburbs of the national capital city, I see the effect.

Obesity -

* Childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past 30 years. * The percentage of children aged 6–11 years in the United States who were obese increased from 7% in 1980 to nearly 20% in 2008. Similarly, the percentage of adolescents aged 12–19 years who were obese increased from 5% to 18% over the same period. * In 2008, more than one third of children and adolescents were overweight or obese.

The figures are from The Centers from Disease Control and the pattern has continued - the best estimate in 2011 is that about 25% of our children are obese, figures that put us shockingly behind many countries as you can see in the graph at this site

Hunger and poverty: Feeding America provides some additional powerful statistics:

Poverty [1] *In 2009, 43.6 million people (14.3 percent) were in poverty.

*In 2009, 8.8 million (11.1% percent) families were in poverty.

*In 2009, 24.7 million (12.9 percent) of people ages 18-64 were in poverty.

*In 2009, 15.5 million (20.7 percent) children under the age of 18 were in poverty.

*In 2009, 3.4 million (8.9 percent) seniors 65 and older were in poverty. Food Insecurity and Very Low Food Security[2] *In 2010, 48.8 million Americans lived in food insecure households, 32.6 million adults and 16.2 million children.

*In 2010, 14.5 percent of households (17.2 million households) were food insecure.

*In 2010, 5.4 percent of households (6.4 million households) experienced very low food security.

*In 2010, households with children reported food insecurity at a significantly higher rate than those without children, 20.2 percent compared to 11.7 percent.

*In 2010, households that had higher rates of food insecurity than the national average included households with children (20.2 percent), especially households with children headed by single women (35.1 percent) or single men (25.4 percent), Black non-Hispanic households (25.1 percent) and Hispanic households (26.2 percent).

*In 2009, 8.0 percent of seniors living alone (925,000 households) were food insecure.

*Food insecurity exists in every county in America, ranging from a low of 5 percent in Steele County, ND to a high of 38 percent in Wilcox County, AL

The national level of Food Insecurity is 14.6%, with seven states being significantly higher, the top two being Mississippi at 19.4% and Texas at 18.8%.

This is despite various government assistance programs, to which increasingly Americans have been turning. According to this Wall Street Journal blog Post,

Nearly half, 48.5%, of the population lived in a household that received some type of government benefit in the first quarter of 2010, according to Census data. Those numbers have risen since the middle of the recession when 44.4% lived households receiving benefits in the third quarter of 2008.

In December 2008, when Daily Kos hosted its first ever Feeding America blog-a-thon, one in eight Americans faced hunger.

The number now is 1 in 6, and this weekend, we ask for your support again.

And remember - for children the figure may now be 1 in 4.

Please keep reading.