Our first lady, Michelle Obama, is on a roll. Her signature campaign against childhood obesity, “Let’s Move!”, is celebrating its first anniversary. In the meantime, she and her team of advisers have been quietly pressing both industry and government to do their part and do it better than either of them have done in the past.

Her various initiatives have helped to persuade Congress to pass legislation for the improvement of school lunch programs in public schools. She has been instrumental in the writing of new requirements for restaurants to disclose nutritional information on their menus. She has called on food manufacturers to update the traditional nutrition- and ingredients labels and replace them with easy-to-read, front-of the-package panels that include warnings about unhealthy ingredients, like salt, fat and sugar content. She was even more successful with her efforts to engage food sellers, like the retail giant, Wal-Mart, to make healthier food choices more available and affordable.

In her latest pursuit, Mrs. Obama has honed in on the nutritional quality of restaurant fares. In informal meetings with representatives of the National Restaurant Association, an influential trade group working on behalf of restaurant businesses nationwide, she has reportedly pleaded for smaller portion sizes and healthier ingredients, especially on children menus.

It is a well-known fact that the first lady has embarked on her mission out of very personal concerns. Even before she moved into the White House, Mrs. Obama had come face to face with problems many parents struggle with every day. As a hard-working professional, wife of an aspiring politician and mother of two young daughters, she was often too busy or too tired to make meals from scratch. So she chose the easy way out, eating at restaurants or bringing some ready-to-eat meals home. It was not before long that she had a wake-up call when her pediatrician expressed concerns about weight issues.

Today, Mrs. Obama is committed to using her new-found influence in her role as the first lady to promote healthy eating habits not only for her own family but for all children in America. Her stated goal is “to eliminate childhood obesity in a generation.”

This first lady is not just taking on a worthy cause to keep herself busy with a less than controversial hobby. Her project is serious business. The threat of childhood obesity to our public health is grave indeed. For the first time in history, many children in the United States grow up less healthy and with a lower life expectancy than their parents. Since 1980, the obesity rates among children have tripled. More than 13 million kids are obese, 14 percent of all 6 to 11 year olds and 17 percent of adolescents. There is no change of this trend in sight. The impact on our health care system, as uneven as it already is, will be ever more devastating.

Mrs. Obama has her work cut out for her. Her campaign has already taken on many multi-faceted features and her influence is growing. With the “Let’s Move” campaign, she aims to get kids of all ages interested in healthy eating and physical exercise. Her ultimate goal, she says, is to change how people think about their health. Undoubtedly, her voice is being heard.

Observers say she’s come a long way from her first, largely symbolic, efforts when she began digging up the lawn in the White House garden to plant a few vegetables. Even skeptics admit that she has clearly grown into her role as the nutritionist-in-chief.

Although she has privileged access to the highest echelons of government, she does not favor a top-down approach. Yes, there has been the appointment of a federal task force and meetings and conferences with governors, superintendents and business leaders of various industries. But the feel of her campaigning remains in many ways grass-root style. She says that making gradually small changes to her own girl’s diets and lifestyles was enough to get them back on track. Being a mother, she is obviously aware of the limitations parents typically face when trying to influence their kid’s behavior.

So, when she laid out her strategy for “Let’s Move,” she made it her first priority to “empower parents and caregivers” to make better choices on behalf of their children. That means raising awareness where it is most needed, in the home where eating habits are formed and lifestyle choices are made. Parents are the first line of defense of their kids’ well-being, but they must also be able to find support and guidance in their task.

In its mission statement, the “Let’s Move” campaign is described as a “comprehensive, collaborative and community-oriented initiative that addresses all the various factors that lead to childhood obesity.” As such, it attempts to “engage every sector of society that impacts the health of children,” like schools, families, communities and so forth, to give them “the simple tools they need to help kids be more active, eat better and get healthy.”

These are highly ambitious goals, of course. The from-the bottom-up approach can also prove to be the Achilles heel of the entire enterprise. Changes on the individual level are the hardest to implement.

Kids today don’t grow up the way their parents did. Physical activities are limited for many reasons. Walking to and from school is often out of the question and not only because of long distances. Many neighborhoods are simply not safe enough to let children go out on their own. For similar reasons, parents want their kids to stay at home after school to keep them out of harms way. If that’s the situation, kids don’t really have many other options than watching TV or playing video games. Working moms and dads will not have more time to spend on grocery shopping and home-cooking, even if they know how beneficial that would be for everyone.

Schools cannot make up for these deficiencies. School lunches are notoriously lacking in nutritional quality. Physical education (PE) remains chronically underfunded in many school districts. Severe budget short falls make improvements next to impossible. And as long as PE is not made mandatory by law in all states, like math, science and reading, there is little hope that this will change any time soon.

Another grave problem is the easy availability of cheap food items, like snacks, sweets and sodas, which typically contain high amounts of salt, fat or sugar. Especially the sheer universal use of synthetic sugar substitutes in processed foods, like high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), is a major cause for concern.

Yet, the production of corn and sugar continues to be heavily subsidized by the government, while no subsidies are paid to fruit- and vegetable farmers. It is precisely because of these subsidies that the costs of junk food and soda drinks have remained low while prices for fresh produce keep rising to the point where they are out of reach for average middle-class families.

In other words, we have to find ways to stop subsidizing obesity with taxpayer’s money. Only government can do that. It is unconscionable to think that we are spending astronomical amounts of money on battling the catastrophic health consequences of obesity while supporting industries that help causing it.

If we are to succeed in the fight against childhood obesity within a generation, we need to take decisive steps that must take place on many levels. Nutrition- and health education for parents, promotion of physical exercise for all children, mandatory PE in all public schools, public funding for after-school programs, playgrounds, parks and sports facilities, improvement of the dietary quality of school lunches, financial incentives for food outlets to set up shop in so-called “food deserts,” support for local fruit- and vegetable growers and a radical re-examination of our existing agricultural policies must all be included. Yes, we are talking about a Manhattan-style project.

To achieve at least a few of her goals, Mrs. Obama is well-advised not to rely too heavily on policies and legislative measures. Attempting to change our eating habits will in many ways resemble the efforts we made to reduce smoking. Banning smoking in public areas was only possible because the public became gradually more aware of the serious health risks from tobacco use and welcomed restrictions. The fight against childhood obesity will have to follow a similar path. Once it is no longer considered acceptable to let our kids eat themselves sick and destroy their future, things will begin to change, perhaps not noticeably at first, but eventually a shift will take place. It will be, at least in part, Michelle Obama’s legacy.

Timi Gustafson R.D. is a clinical dietitian and author of the book “The Healthy Diner – How to Eat Right and Still Have Fun.”