Outsider's view:

As a Norwegian, when I visited Boston in 1999 for an Allaire dev conference I saw more grossly fat / obese people in the _hour_ spent switching flights at Newark airport than I had in my (then) home country in the preceding year. I was really taken aback.

There's clearly a lot of things the US is not doing right on many, many levels. This could help chip (sorry) away at that.