(Thumbnail Image: The Sunday Mail)

Oliver: "How's your pizza for breakfast?"
Kids: "Good."
Oliver: "In all of my years I've never seen pizza given for breakfast in any country."
Kids: "Ewww!"
Oliver: "The fat consumed by your entire school for one year"

(ABC)

Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution on ABC has spent the past five weeks showing American television audiences the lack of quality and excess quantity of school lunches. Now a non-profit group called Mission: Readiness has even more startling news about America's school lunch program.

"A new report out today shows that 9 million young adults or 27 percent of all Americans ages 17 to 24 are too overweight to join the military."
"They say childhood obesity is a threat to national security because it narrows the pool of eligible candidates to serve in the U.S. military."
(MSNBC)

Mission: Readiness says school lunches are the main culprit and Med City News says seeing this connection is important.

"While referring to lunches as a 'national security threat' may be a bit of a rhetorical stretch, anything that helps people focus on the enormous economic and social costs that obesity will impose on the U.S. in the coming decades is OK by me."

Mission: Readiness is urging the passage of a pending Senate bill that would spend $4.5 billion more over 10 years for nutrition programs. In a press conference, a Mission: Readiness spokesperson explained the group's push for the legislation.

"This is not about looking good in a uniform. It is about being healthy and fit to do the work of the nation."
(MSNBC)

But Fox Providence's Rhodes Show thinks targeting school lunches will not fix the primary problem.

"At school its only one meal a day, of that day, and it's only five days a week and they are not going to school 12 months a year. And it starts at home eating healthy."

Obesity affecting America's military is not just a future threat. The blog Frum Forum notes Since 2005, 48,000 recruits had been rejected for military service solely because of obesity.

"Their enlistment would have been worth a dozen heavy brigades of additional capability, when capacity was urgently needed. But because those rejected recruits couldn't even maintain an acceptable diet before enlisting, they never saw wars they were volunteering to fight."
(Frum Forum)

The Village Voice predicts Mission: Readiness's new report may cause enough discussion about this to spark action.

"If they get their way, then Jamie Oliver's war on Chicken McNuggets may have some more unintentionally literal long-term consequences."

Will this effort to slim down America work or is it an oversimplification of a bigger issue?

Writer: Amanda Klohmann

Producer: Newsy Staff