Please, America: Throw away the scales and stop focusing only on calories. Yes, calories are of extreme importance for weight management. But they are only of equal, or perhaps even lesser, significance than food quality.

As a single father of 3-year-old twin girls and the founder and owner of the Madison Square Club and David Kirsch Wellness Co., staying fit and healthy is at the top of my list. I have always believed that nutrition plays a major part in one's overall wellness quotient.

When it comes to nutrition and the monumental influence it has on our health, the rubber hits the road wherever people and food come together. Kitchens and cafeterias. Schools and workplaces. Supermarkets and restaurants.

As education reformers consider health, the vast resources and capacity dedicated to educating our children can also become a vehicle to make them healthier. Childhood obesity advocates must take heed and seize this opportunity.

Children need to eat more vegetables, and we should push for increased intake of conventional vegetables and not look toward pizza as providing a satisfactory substitute.

While Oscar Mayer's non-ironic slogan states, "It doesn't get any better than this," one is tempted to substitute the word "grosser" for "better."

To comply with the recommended vegetable portion, my boys would have to get up at dawn and eat green beans nonstop until dusk. What fiends had devised this guilt-inducing polyhedron?