I don't know what it was about this summer. Perhaps it was the unfortunate intersection of an increasingly obese population with the fashion fads of skinny jeans and hoe wear. Whatever the reason, it wasn't pretty. I saw more guts hanging over jeans, more rolls in backs and more stretch marks in the past few months than I had seen in the last five years. And these are girls under 18.

It's actually quite scary. If these young women are this big and out of shape at 16, what will they look like at 30 or after they have children? These girls are a walking health care crisis. We are in danger of losing an entire generation to diabetes, heart disease and hypertension -- entirely preventable diseases that we allow to claim our young people while we sit idly by.

We all know that America as a whole has an obesity problem. Most of us could shed a few pounds, exercise more and eat better. But the fact that we have passed on our bad habits to our children and then allowed them to run wild in the candy aisle at Costco is inexcusable.

And African-American women have a particularly complicated problem.