I apologize for being tardy up here but i was in the back, i didnt get the memo about where i could stand and listen and show. I really admire dr. Gal vin, i wished he talked for another half hour, i might have learned something. Im grateful to all of you for the work that you do. I also want to say since ive been working on this Childhood Obesity issue for more than a decade now, i want to thank all of the privatesector companies and ive listened backstage to trishs remarks, i have been to the middle east and to asia to participate with efforts against Public Health problems there and im very grateful that there are companies that at least are trying to work themselves out of part of their jobs, giving children a healthier future. I want to thank Robert Wood Foundation for working with us and i will say more about president and ceo of pha and my good friend howard, ceo for healthier generation. But im im very glad that all of you are here and glad that in this sort of how should i say it, unusual time. [laughter] you recognize that this is no place for alternative facts and i dont mean to be funny, this is still a major Public Health crisis, the lives of millions of young people are riding on decisions we and they make and your commitment to help people live their healthiest best lives is profoundly important. I also want to say that tomorrow you all know youre going to hear from phas Michelle Obama and i just want to thank her for what shes done in that position and what she did in the white house. I will never forget [applause] when we started the alliance for a healthy generation in 2005 after my heart surgery there werent all that many groups working on the Childhood Obesity issue. There werent that many people saying, you know, we are about to have epidemic levels of type 2 diabetes and the consequences and heart troubles, stroke, some cancers and premature among other things explosive healthcare costs and human heartbreak is going to be staggering and, i have to say, i was amazed that we couldnt generate more interest for it. But when she got involved and she spoke to a whole generation, Younger Generation of people, i just know grayhaired white guy in a suit, boring [laughter] and then she asked our group to help with the lets move campaign. You should just see the whole landscape open up. More people willing to write about it, talk about it, educate people about it. Im glad that when she left the white house she didnt leave the cause. I wanted to do it because i felt i had been given an incredible gift by dodging a massive bullet which i continued to have the bob and weave around for a while. I had two more procedures. I was one of the 1 of the people who had that surgery who have fluid built up on the lung or 10 of them but only 10 of that 10 , the fluid build up doesnt go away on its own and it was like they had to go in and spread your ribs across and its like peeling an orange away from your lung area and then a lost a vein which happens to a lot of people who have quadruple bypass surgery and took one of my arteries which they had given for dead because it had a double curve in it and two stints in. I got to watch that on television. [laughter] the doctor said, are you sure you want to watch it and i said am i going to live through this, he said, yeah, i said, you bet i do. I was saved by modern medicine. The bad news i had no business being in an operating table if i had the right style and diet over the course of my life i wouldnt have been and not everybody can be as lucky as i was to get to the table on time to have no damage and a lot of people dont have the annual checkups, but everybody should have access to a decent healthy diet, to reasonable exercise program and to fundamental checkups. So when they asked me to help, i said, look, i would be happy to help but i dont want to just do Public Service announcements. I said lets do something to try to come to grips with this Childhood Obesity program because others we will have terrible problems. You can already see it in parts of the population when the when the heartbreaking stories came out in 2016 about noneducated White Working Class people where Life Expectancy was going down. We learned a lot. We learned that even then their economic circumstances were objectively better than that of african americans, hispanic americans and native americans. So that there was a deep emotional psychological component to what was going on and their Life Expectancy was going down. I have been doing a lot of work in another part of my life with our Health Matters initiative try to help with the Opioid Crisis but there is no question that there is a convergence between all of these things and rising rates of type two diabetes and all the consequences that are going to flow from that. So i said, lets try to get these people through their lives better shape, you know, Second Chances and Public Health is about giving people Second Chances. So we did it. In march of this year when i was 70 years, i became the longest oldest person in my family for three generations. I come from a family where the men dont live long and the woman havent either, if you go back to my maternal great grandparents. They looked something straight out of american gothic, they they lived out in the country, they went to bed up with the sun , got up with the sun. A little late for the rest of us on that. And they were wonderful but we got to do better and im so grateful for the opportunity weve had to do this work and we tried very hard to actually stop and reverse the tie to Childhood Obesity. First time i started talking about this, there were two groups of people, there was those that didnt realize it was a big problem so they had no clue what i was talking about and those that knew it was a big unreveal Public Health crisis in america who thought i was tipsy that thought we could reverse it. A goal like lets stop Childhood Obesity for all of you that work in this area know its easy to state and hard to do. Its like changing a culture and this is about not just a dietary, its about the whole way our societies organize and the economics of Food Production and consumption and lots of other things. Its like trying to turn the titanic around before it hits the iceberg. The problem is every person you deal with is a potential titanic so you have to do over again and some things work in some areas and dont in others. Children spend much of the time outside the home there. Our Healthy School program in 2006 which seems like a lifetime ago was launched in 2030 schools in 13 states, it sense grown to become the largest effort to prevent Childhood Obesity in schools and now has help today build Better School environments for more than 20 Million Students in more than 35,000 schools. Now we have 2600 out of school sites in every state, the district of colombia and puerto rico. Then we started worrying about the food itself and before the new food guidelines came into place we worked on replacing unhealthy food largely bought by contractors with different kinds of food that would be healthier. And we did this work with the Beverage Industry which is now fairly well known that we met with American Beverage Association coke, pepsi and dr. Pepper, snapple and some other people who produce processed food juice joined us. There are now more than 120 of the nation food fen Companies Involved with us in some form or face. So what youre doing is really important to me. I think its never interested as knock down fight but the truth is that in the world we live in creative cooperation involving diverse partnerships of people who both have lived different lives and know Different Things are the best mechanisms for solving conflictsocial problems. Was but it is a dumb way to run a railroad. It maybe emotionally satisfying in a way eating bad food gives you a sugar high and then leaves you hungry shortly after ward. It doesnt work. What works is what you are doing here. And the reason that people who are here with me are rolling their eyes is they know what im about to tell you, you know what the exhibit is at the president ial center right now . Extreme bugs. [laughter] thats the most important political book that nobody read or read for a political book written in the last ten years that would have made us all much healthier as citizens less than 250 pages long and hes a pulitzer winning biologist and taught me that the combined weight of all aunts is greater than the combined weight of all the people. Thats quite a number number of ants. Why do i give you this . The conclusion is that out of all the species that ever inhabited on earth, and we know that there are hundreds of thousands of them, right, they are sadly disappearing now at the most rapid rate in 10,000 years. He says the most successful species that ever lived, if you define success as we had repeated chances to be wiped out but they failed, here we are, we are still around. Most successful species are ants, termites, bees and people, not the biggest, not the strongest and he says, what do they have in common . These evolve and are the greatest cooperators, they found ways to Work Together to solve common problems and build stronger futures and he says people are the greatest cooperators but their great strength is our great curse, we have a conscious and consciousness and we know it and it makes us arrogant and we toned slice and dice ourselves in ways that in the end threaten our ability to escape one more existing threatening challenge. This Climate Change things gives me a kick. No one doubts the questions that more than 90 of the science signists say this is an existential threat to our climate. We just had the coldest march in new york, i was pleading for Global Warming to come back, i get it, we can make all of the jokes, you name me one other threat every parent in this audience, name me one threat that you wouldnt take seriously that the odds of doing this was 90 than 90 of doing that. Theres a 100 chance your child will survive a car unless the car completely collapses. 5 of the people, no, thats crazy. Theyre just about just throw the kid in the back seat and let him roll around. Nobody would do that, right . Thats what we are doing on Climate Change, throwing the kid in the backseat and letting them roll around and thats what i want to say about this Public Health issue, the reason this is working is because of the cooperation of complex groups of people who were different, its an inclusive cooperative network. I remember how he admitted after coming to work for allegiance generation. Im in Public Health and you expect me to believe that coke, pepsi,snapple actually agreed to cut all of the sugar from drinks and schools . This is unsanitized version of the message. Look, i know you dont want to give people diabetes because you dont want people sitting in wheelchairs can amputations and i know that you dont want that but thats necessary for kids going to school and getting calories from heavilysugared drinks. Surely theres a way to make money in a different way. I never ask anybody. We cut the price of aids drugs. I never ask anybody to lose money because its not sustainable. Can you find a way to make money a different way, they basically got all the sugared drinks out of the schools and went to fruit flavored waters and smaller portions of milk, smaller portions of juice and two independent surveys have concluded that n the last few years that this alliance for healthy generation brokered agreement has reduced calories from drinks in schools by 90 . I mean, thats a bigtime number, right . Why . Because it turns out if you really have people working in good faith and they share the same goal, we would like our children to live as long and well as possible, and if youre totally cynical, we would like them to buy soda pop in 30s and 40s as well as today when presumably theyll have more money and by then we will solve this problem. It just makes sense, so the larger point i want to make is we can do this in a big way, we are now working with the berch industry to reduce total consumption of berchl calories nationally by people of all ages everywhere by 20 , by 2025. We have negotiated with food manufacturers, Food Purchasing organizations and we have seen total health of products have increased about 130 million. 70 increase of when we started. We actually got involved in Health Insurance and got employers and insurers to offer at no extra cost the coverage of trips to the doctor and the dietitian by children of covered workers who had obesity problems and there are almost 3 million kids now who were covered by more than 50,000 networks that are actually able to go to the doctor and to a dietitian and become part of an organized and part of the Health Insurance model so that there is a cash flow reimbursement scheme. We made an agreement with mcdonalds to srve serve healthier food and there were 21 million fatfree milk jugs and apple juice boxes. All the other fastfood people started improving too. We can do it together and this work and that of partnership of healthier america. Again, i will say both of them show that network of cooperation undertaken in good faith by people who share the same goal will work in most places and if you have to regulate then you can regulate and figure out how to reach goal faster and better. So and its not just in this phase. Coming up to the tenth Global Initiative when we were meeting every year, we got a big independent data form that have been kept over ten years, when we started twothirds of them involved partnerships, onethird were going alone, by the end, well over 90 of the commitsments commitments not only met their goals but exceeded their goals. I will give you just two examples because they kind of relate to what we are talking about with children. President obama gave a speech and said, the country needed 100,000 more trained stem teachers and obviously given the politics of washington that it he wasnt going to get a federal appropriation to pay for it. We will do 20 , we will train and fund teachers, that was well after the president asked for it in 2011, 2012. Last week in new york i went to their latest meeting, there are now 280 partners and they are going to have more than 100 stem teachers that they train and doesnt cost the taxpayers anything and they [applause] when the ebola epidemic broke out we got others interested in getting adequate medical supplies because all of you who remember seeing it know that you have to change you have to change your clothing constantly and burn it and do all that, so to kick off the cgi we had a dozen partners send a hundred tons of medical equipment, didnt cost us any taxpayers anything. Within a couple of months they had sent 500 tons, just 24 to 30 partners got together and said, i can do this, i can do that and i can do the other thing all committed to the same goal. We shouldnt have to have a colamty to do the right thing. Those should be able to get more partners to do more positive things. And i want to thank all the companies that are doing this knowing full well that the better job they do depending on the business they are in may cause themselves some business and in the meanwhile they will meet nothing but skeptics who will try to find some example where they didnt achieve what they said they were going to and they are doing the right thing anyway, but this is really important, this is a Major Economic issue for america. If this works, if we keep doing it and make more and more progress, we will have a healthier workforce. We will have Lower Health Care costs than would otherwise be the case, we would have higher productivity than would otherwise be the case. That would generate more profits, higher incomes, more new business, more everything by taking what is arguably from an economic point of view the biggest Public Health problem, if we dont get ahold of the epidemic of the Opioid Epidemic and heroin and concentrated impact is worst because more people buy it quicker. It impairs the learning capacity and growth capacity of a large number of our children. So i came here more than anything else to say thanks and to say that i believe more strongly than i did ten years ago at partnerships between diverse partners are still the best problemsolvers. Several years ago a distinguished journalist named james wrote a book called wisdom of crowd in which he basically said you can fill the room with social science study proving that diverse groups make better decisions than ameans of the person in the room with highest iq would appear and we push in a little suite and gave them whatever they wanted for two days and made them very happy and the rest of us here drinking stale coffee and cold roast and you fed the same ten questions into genius and us in two days, we wowed make better decisions. Its proved over and over and over again. We need to develop better example of corporate engagement. Our two organizations have involved 400 plus companies in making some sort of commitment to Childrens Health and the robert woodonson Found Foundation and i want to thank them has we came up with this idea of a Business Fund which would give every company a chance to pr