Santa Claus Is Too Fat For 5-Year-Olds

When I was a high school junior in Ohio, I had to debate a classmate on a topic of our choice for a course on public speaking. I was always obnoxiously political, so my peers had no interest in hearing me drone on and on about ISIS, Social Security, or how bad President Barack Obama was and why Mitt Romney lost a winnable election just two years prior. They’d heard enough of my adolescent commentary on whatever I listened to on cable news that morning while everybody else recapped highlights from “SportsCenter.” So when it came time to settle on a subject, my classmate and I chose something a little more lighthearted to quibble about in front of the entire class: the obesity of Santa Claus.

I argued the longtime Christmas mascot was an unfit role model for American children to admire. I also argued that teaching kids to lay out a gourmet spread of cookies and milk for a likely diabetic Santa to consume in the middle of the night encouraged a lifestyle of apathy toward personal health. I can’t remember much else from the brief discussion, and my notes are buried away 1,100 miles from where I’m living now in Colorado, but I distinctly remember the eruption of laughter when I called jolly old St. Nicholas a “walking heart attack.”

It was all a joke at the time. Being a high schooler in 2014, my partisanship was so strong that I would even mock First Lady Michelle Obama’s efforts to tackle childhood obesity through her “Let’s Move” campaign, complete with an overhaul of school lunch programs. I went on to publish a column in The Federalist last year begging for that level of activism to return.

Childhood obesity seemed like a joke to us in school, but it shouldn’t have been. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 17 percent of Americans aged 2 to 19 were considered categorically obese in 2014. In 2020, that number reached nearly 20 percent, or 1 in 5 people in the same age range. According to a study from the University of Southern California and the University of Michigan out last year, nearly half the nation’s children ages 5 to 11 reached a body mass index that qualifies them as medically obese. Pandemic lockdowns accelerated childhood weight gain from an already high baseline.

In December 2019, a team of academics published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that projected nearly 60 percent of those aged 2 to 19 will be obese by the time they’re 35. The authors’ prophecy will likely come to fruition far sooner after lockdowns incentivized sedentary lifestyles.

Make no mistake, America is facing a crisis of obesity — a real problem when you consider obesity is a prime comorbidity to seemingly every other major health problem in the country. With children adopting the toxic habits of their parents in a country where 77 percent of adults qualify as,