Former U.S. President Bill Clinton on Tuesday launched a campaign to reduce Obesity among American children, warning that today’s youth could be the first U.S. generation to die younger than their parents.

Clinton, who has had two heart-related operations in the past year and was overweight as a child, blamed the problem on diets containing too much sugar and fat.

He told a news conference in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood that he would work with the American Heart Association to promote healthy eating habits in children and encourage them to exercise.

“We’ve got to change the eating habits of America’s young people,” said Clinton, who had quadruple Heart bypass surgery last year and another operation in March. “Children are consuming more sugar and fatty foods than ever before. We want to reverse the growth in childhood obesity.”

Looking trim, fit, and ruddy-faced, Clinton said his foundation and the AHA planned to work with the food and sporting-goods industry to stabilize childhood obesity in five years and reverse it in a decade.

One out of six U.S. children, or 16 percent, are obese, he said, and childhood obesity is growing at a rate of 20 percent a year. That rate would remain unchecked if current dietary and exercise practice were not changed.

“The truth is that children being born today could become part of the first generation in American history to live shorter lives than their parents because so many are eating too much of the wrong things and not exercising enough,” he said.

‘DIGGING MY GRAVE’

Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, joining Clinton at the event, said he battled chronic obesity. Having been told by doctors that he would die within a decade if he did not diet, he lost 110 pounds (50 kg) in one year.

“I realized that I was digging my grave with a knife and fork,” he said.

Huckabee has worked to get healthier food in school vending machines and cafeterias - something Clinton said he would like his campaign to do nationwide.

Clinton, who struggled with his weight as a child, said he ballooned to 210 pounds (95 kg) at age 15 when he was barely 5 feet 9 inches (1.75 metres) tall. He said he had lost 15 to 20 pounds (7 to 9 kg) recently, and now weighs about as much as he did when he graduated from high school.

The former president said the obesity problem - caused in part by a jump in snack food consumption - was stunting growth, affecting cognitive development and spawning type-2 diabetes, so-called adult onset diabetes, which is becoming increasingly common in children.

Another factor was that more parents are working longer hours, meaning more meals are eaten in restaurants, which tend to serve large portions, he said.

Clinton, 58, suggested that careful food preparation could reduce schoolchildren’s consumption of sugar and fat by 45 calories a day.

That change, he said, works out to 2 pounds (0.9 kg) of weight loss over a year, or 20 pounds (9 kg) by the time an early elementary schoolchild graduated from high school 10 years later.