School courses aren't going to help. School courses aren't raising your child. Parents raise children.
Quit blaming unfit education in school and blame incompetent parents.
You wouldn't buy a pet if you didn't know how to take care of it. Why would you make a life if you didn't know how to take care of the body it came with?
Why is it the job of the school to teach your kids how to survive? Quit relying on other people to fulfill the most basic functions of a parent? You think all that parenting means is providing food, clothes, and shelter? Hell no. Parenting means you raise the child by teaching them how to live so they can someday take care of themselves. This includes diet and exercise.
If you don't know proper diet, you shouldn't be allowed to have kids, because you aren't going to feed the kid properly. If you don't know how to have an active lifestyle, you shouldn't be having kids because you sure aren't going to know how to teach them to live an active lifestyle, and you aren't going to encourage them much.
A child's health is a parent's responsibility. As a parent you bring the food into the house, and you place the food in front of the child to eat. You're also the one who's letting them sit around the house all day not doing anything. Until the kid is around 13, they have very little power to influence any of this, and they don't really have the wisdom to take control of it for themselves or see it as a problem yet.
Don't sit there complaining that your kid is fat because the school hasn't taught him well enough. Complain that your kid's fat because you overfeed them unhealthy food at home, and you allow them to sit around doing nothing all day. If this is the case and you're not in parental education courses to teach you how to teach this to your child, and ways to motivate them, you are an unfit parent, you're abusing your child, and you shouldn't be allowed to have that child living with you.
Personal health is not a lesson for school to teach, and teaching it to the children will never be enough to give them a healthy life. It's the job of the parents as parents. From the beginning of time this has been the job of every parenting mammal. Don't expect your 8 year old to create a healthy lifestyle for themselves, they aren't self-reliant and learned enough, they still need you to create a lifestyle for them and teach them how to live it. This is what "parenting" is. If you can't do it, you're an unfit parent. If you wont learn how to do it, you're a neglectful parent.
Sounds harsh, but it's your kid's health, and this is how it's laid out once you boil everything down. You have no right to bring life into the world and then destroy the quality of that life by abusing the body it comes with. Fact is, parents play such a large role in a child's life and lifestyle that it's retarded to consider that child's health anything but the parents' responsibility.
No school courses will ever be enough. Parents need to start realizing that yes, it is their fault, and yes, they are neglectful parents for allowing it to happen. If they aren't willing to improve themselves as parents to a point where they will be able to raise a child without dangerous health risks as a result of lifestyle, they should not be allowed to have a child.
You hold your kid's life in your hands. You have power and control that they simply can't match. No excuse in the world will trump the fact that you're making crucial life-changing decisions for your child, and that if you don't do what's necessary, your kid will not grow up healthy.
The country isn't fat because our schools aren't good. Our country is so abundantly fat because our families aren't fit to raise the kids to be healthy. They want someone else (ie. school) to do it for them so the kid just magically one day decides to live a lifestyle that's completely different from anything they've ever been taught or adapted to at home because they've reached a level of knowledge that will trump their entire upbringing. Simple as that. Unfortunately, that's just not how the life of a child can ever work.
Nobody else can raise your kid for you. Furthermore, they can't magically raise themselves.
More to the direct topic of this thread. Waist circumference, BMI, and body/height ratio is a load of bull****. Pure and simple. According to these methods of measurement, most, if not all of the world's top NFL players register as dangerously overweight. In fact in almost 100% of cases, an obese active person will be able to physically outperform a thin and inactive person. The only way to determine how healthy someone is is by seeing what their body can do, and knowing how they treat their body on a daily basis. The only thing the width of your waist can reliably tell you is how you look.
