Hello, my name's Hertling
and I'm a soldier and
-- you probably could tell that.
I've been in the military for 38 years.
I'm thinking of making it a career.
I have seen -- (Laughter) --
I have seen and studied and analysed
all types of security threats.
I've fought in several wars
but there's an emerging threat that we're seeing
and I'd like to talk a little bit about today
that I think will have an effect on our future,
our economy,
our youth
and our economic system.
It is an emerging threat
that concerns me significantly
and it's represented in this picture.
Now you might think,
why is a soldier talking about
a young man who is obviously inactive
and perhaps is a little bit overweight?
And it's because of some things I've seen
in the last several years
and I'd like to talk a little bit about those today
and related to how I believe
it could be a national security threat
within the next 20 to 30 years.
First of all, in 1983,
the Army sent me on something
called a broadening experience.
I was asked to go graduate school
at Indiana University.
I had studied as an undergraduate in International Relations
but they said, "Hey we want you to go
and get a Master's degree in Exercise Physiology
and then teach PE at West Point."
So I said, "Okay, sounds like a great idea.
It's broadening to be sure."
And I went out there -- (Laugther) --
I went to Indiana University
and my first class was an anatomy class
and I had an anatomy lab.
I walked into the classroom
and they issued me a cadaver.
As they did everyone else in the class.
And the cadaver I had, came with a medical history
The professor told us, "In order to respect
the people who have given their bodies to science
we'd ask you to respect them, too, and you perhaps
wanna name them to remind yourself
that they were once a person
although we don't wanna give you their real name."
So I named mine Charlie.
Charlie had a medical history.
He had been a two-pack-a-day smoker.
Charlie had not exercised in the last 20 years.
Charlie was extremely overweight
and Charlie had died of a cardiovascular disease
and he was 46 years old.
When we pulled him up and we began,
the various students in the room began
our disection of these bodies
I had a lot of a tougher time
than some of the other students
because I had to cut through
several layers of adipose.
When I got to the internal body cavities
it was amazing to me
comparing Charlie's organs
to some of the organs of the other students in the class.
The heart was surrounded by fat
several inches.
One of the tricks our instructors taught us was,
you know, we had to through these labs
where we had to name what vein was which
and what artery was which,
and the professor said, "If you pull
on an artery, it's like a rubber band.
If you pull on a vein, it's like a guitar string and it'll twang."
When I pulled on Charlie's arteries and veins
they broke off into my hand.
So I finished grad school
and went to teach at West Point for 3 years
from '83 to '86
and then after that assignment
I went back to the operational Army
and did things that all soldiers do:
commanded organizations,
trained, went into combat several times,
and then coming out of combat
as a Division Commander in 2009
the Army decided they wanted to promote me
to three-star General
I think because they wanted to prove
they have a sense of humor.
They then sent me to be the Commander of
Initial Military Training.
My job was to train the 160,000 or so soldiers
or correction: civilians,
that would come into the Army every year
and turn them into soldiers.
What I found when I reported to that assignment
disturbed me.
Several facts came to my attention.
First of all, 75% or more
a little bit more actually
of the civilians who wanted to join the Army
were not qualified to do so.
75% of the 17-24 year olds who wanted to join the Army
were not qualified
and the number one reason
was because they were obese.
Of the 25% that could join the Army
what we found on the first day of basic training
was that about 60% of them
could not pass the PT test
that we gave on the first day.
And that was: one minute of push-ups,
one minute of sit-ups and a one-mile run.
Now, that's not a difficult test.
But we were finding that
a great majority of our new soldiers
coming off the civilian environment,
could not pass that test.
I couldn't understand what had happened.
This was not what I had left
studying physical education in 1986.
As we did some analyses
I realized that a couple of things had changed.
First of all, number one and the primary reason was
starting in the late '90s
the majority of our elementary and high schools
stopped teaching PE,
and in fact, only five states
of the 50 of our country right now
have mandatory requirements for physical education
between K and 12th grade today.
Five out of 50.
Now, you say, "Okay, well that's interesting,
but what does the Army care about that?"
Well, we're getting the product of that
but in addition to second and third order effects
were young people that were joining our service
could not run, dodge, jump, tumble, roll
the kinds of things you expect soldiers to do
if they're in combat.
The second thing we found
or that I found or realized was
that our diet had changed radically
in the last 15 years.
We were supersizing everything.
Having been stationed overseas in Germany,
that's not the case there,
but they were supersizing --
if you want a large fries
you can get extra large and extra-extra large.
You couldn't just get a 16 oz drink,
you could get a 24, 42, 64 oz soda.
And that was having a deleterious effect.
It was fascinating to me
that we were also seeing,
a scientist told me,
that in the last 15 years
from the time I left West Point until today
Americans eat about 30% more calories a day
than they had in 1983
and about 15 lbs more of sugar a year.
Phenomenal statistics.
But the combination of a lack of physical education
and an increase of poor nutrition
was causing secondary effects.
This is the "O" food group, by the way.
I started calling it the "O" food group
because anything that ends in an "O"
is probably not good for you.
(Laugther)
I haven't found anything that ended in "O" yet
that was actually very nutritious in nature.
But what we started to do was
we saw some second and third order effects
and this is one of them
this is at one of our training bases
and we have five in the United States Army.
We were seeing a malady called
femoral neck stress injuries,
and what that means is that
the tip of the pelvis would crack
and it wouldn't be a clean break
but it would be a stress fracture
that would cause significant problems
and you can see starting in 2000 that we were beginning to see this
and this is because the people we were recruiting were just coming of age
and many of them had not had PE
and they had started to have the bad nutrition.
But by 2009 when our new recruits
were 18 or 19 years old
they had gone through their entire life
without having a PE class and dependent on bad nutrition.
Those 135 that we had at one training base
are significant injuries because
in order to fix it
it costs anywhere between USD 100,000 and USD 300,000.
So this is an economic issue.
This isn't just a soldier health issue.
For me this was an economic issue.
The third reason, and I'll say this
then move quickly on.
The third reason we saw
was an increase in technology.
Now, I'm a big fan of technology,
but the researchers had told me
that we now watch as a nation
about 150 hours of television a month.
That's five hours a day.
In 2009, when we started this study
we were seeing anywhere from 30 to 40 on average
hours of internet searches
by adult male Americans per month.
That's between one and two hours a day.
Gaming was off the charts.
In 2009, and it's increased since then
the average teenager was playing
thirteen hours of video games per week.
Now all those hours in front of a tube
were replacing the play time
and that's significant.
In addition to that,
the final one, number four:
We're terrible examples to our children.
We're in too much of a rush.
We're eating poorly
we're eating fast foods
we're relaxing in front of the television at the end of the day.
We also are relying on technology
instead of play
and we're not balancing our lives.
My wife has a stitchery in our house
as we've raised two children
and now a couple of grandchildren
that says, "Your children are watching you."
What you do speaks louder than anything you can say.
We were not doing the right things for our children.
So in typical army fashion
I said, "We've got to address these issues with our new recruits."
And we changed several things.
We began something we called
the Soldier Athlete Initiative
because you can't just say to a bunch of 18 year olds,
"We're going to get you all in shape
and stop feeding you cheeseburgers."
You have to give kind of a sexy title
to it so we called it
Soldier Athlete Initiative.
If you're going to perform on the battle field,
you have got to train like a champion.
And what we did was, we completely changed
well, it's a three-legged stool
we completely changed the way we were training
to compensate for things that were not going on
in grade school and high school.
We assigned physical terapists
and athletic trainers to every organization
because we wanted to prevent the injuries
and treat them before they turned into
those USD 100,000 bone stress fractures.
We wanted to fix them as they became visible.
And then the third thing and probably the most important was
we changed the way we feed food in the mess halls
the dining facilities.
We called it "Fueling the Soldier."
You can't just say, "Hey, have a salad."
We instead say -- (Laugther) --
you've got to advertise with soldiers
so we said, "Hey, we're going to fuel you
for maximum performance."
This is what sports teams are doing.
This is what NFL, major league baseball
they know they've got to eat right
in order to perform at their maximum.
Okay, I'm not going to dwell...
Within the first year, we saw
some unbelievably strong statistics
that shows this was working:
reduction in injuries,
we saved about USD 30 million the first year
just in treatment of injuries.
30 million in the army.
Just on injury prevention
And we began to see weight loss
and improved... or we reduced the number of
overweight soldiers we have in the Army.
We still have a way to go.
We've advanced this "Fueling the Soldier"
to "Fueling the Teams"
and in fact we've redirected
to the Department of Defense Schools
for our young people and we're calling it
"Fueling the future."
So we fixed it! Or we're on our way to fix it.
What's interesting about this
is your Army combined with your Navy, your Marine Corps
you Air Force and your Coast Guard
makes up less than 1% of the American population.
So my concern is:
What's going on with the other 99%?
And this gets me back to my issue of this
being a national security concern.
I'm going to show you
one area and that's just levels of obesity.
This was a chart that represents
the number of states in the Union
that were below 20% obesity rates
on average from a child of 14 to 19 years old.
This was in 1985.
Watch what happens.
As you can see
in 2009, it's significantly worse.
The predictions for 2030
are these:
You can see the number of states
that have greater than 65% children obese.
This is not overweight, this is obese.
Now, the related issues
that I told you the issue with our injury rates
and how much we were paying to fix people
is significant.
We spend estimated
the Department of Health and Education
both determined that we spend
on average today between USD 150 to USD 200 billion per year
treating the results of childhood obesity.
We're seeing an increase in diabetes.
We estimate that we will have
a 40% cardiovascular disease rate by the year 2030.
This is significant.
This is a health care issue.
An economic issue.
A readiness issue for me because
I've seen my pool of recruits deplete
based on this.
I can't pull them in in order to fix them.
And it's just a competition issue.
There's other studies that show what obesity
and lack of activity do to young people.
So I believe this is certainly
a national security concern.
There are several organizations who are attempting to approach this.
You may have heard of Mayor Bloomberg in New York
who has banned all sugary drinks
above 16 oz in schools and public restaurants in New York City
and he took a lot of heat for that.
Nike, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Subway
are all using overweight actors in their adds
to pattern behavior
and perhaps to turn this thing around.
Nickelodeon in last year's Worldwide Day of Play
decided to put their screens black
as opposed to showing programming
in order to get children outside and play.
And of course our First Lady
over the last several years
has been attempting to do "Let's Move!"
and the counter obesity measures.
This concerns me.
This concerns me greatly.
Again as I said
my name is Hertling, I am a soldier.
I've been a soldier for 38 years.
This is not something the Army can fix.
This is not something you can put a yellow ribbon on
and say, "Let somebody else take care of it".
This is not something
that we can rely on governments
or organizations to do.
Be fearless in terms of writing your schools.
Be fearless in trying to get nutrition
back in restaurants.
Be fearless in balancing your lives
and getting out to exercise.
Be fearless in modelling your behavior
for young people.
That will prevent
a whole lot of Charlies in the future.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)