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(Photo Credit:  Billboard, Georgia  Childrens Health Alliance, via Body Impolitic)

No one could argue that efforts to promote healthy eating and exercise among school children, such as Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" campaign, aren't well-intentioned.  But as Paul Campos argues in this recent Daily Beast article, too often anti-obesity campaigns focused on children stigmatize the very individuals they are supposedly trying to help.  The image above, a billboard produced by the Georgia Childrens Health Alliance, is a case in point.  These scowling children with warning labels slapped across their stomachs seem to have crossed the line from being victims of genetics, environment, lack of opportunities for healthy exertion, and inavailability of affordable healthy meal choices to, I guess, being perpetrators.  Something has clearly gone wrong here.  Seriously, how would you like to be one of the kids in these pictures with your body held up as a symbol of a national crisis?  

Image Credit: screen shot of http://www.ers.usda.gov/FoodAtlas/

Last week, First Lady Michelle Obama introduced Let's Move, a new government initiative aimed at ending the childhood obesity epidemic within one generation. After attending the signing of a Presidential memorandum forming a special task force on childhood obesity, Mrs. Obama officially launched the Let's Move campaign at a press conference with reporters, cabinet-level secretaries and local school children. During the press conference, the First Lady introduced the Food Environment Atlas, a new website for locating "food deserts" and otherwise visualizing the availability of healthy food to households around the country. More about the Food Atlas after the jump.