Help for Generation XL

IT’S NOT EXACTLY CAMP DAVID, but Bill Clinton has achieved a diplomatic breakthrough in the obesity wars. The former president, who also is a former fat boy, has negotiated a welcome truce between health activists and three major soft-drink manufacturers that will end the sale of their syrupy products in the nation’s schools.

As part of the “voluntary” agreement -- we’ll explain the quotation marks in a minute -- the manufacturers of Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Dr. Pepper will phase out their school sales of sugary soft drinks over the next three years. By then vending machines and cafeterias in middle schools will dispense only water, low-fat and nonfat milk and 100% fruit juice. High school students also will be able to purchase diet sodas.

Once famous for his enormous appetite and fondness for unhealthy food, Clinton was born again as a fitness advocate after heart-bypass surgery in 2004. He defended the outcome of the “Soda Summit” with the same animation and attention to detail that he once expended in describing how Israelis and Palestinians could share the Holy Land. “If an 8-year-old child took in 45 less calories per day,” the former president noted, “by the time he reached high school, he would weigh 20 pounds less than he would have weighed otherwise.”

We’ll trust him on the math. And it’s no secret that the waistlines of America’s youngsters are expanding and that soft drinks are a contributing factor -- along with television, the Internet, videogames, suburbanization and probably a few other factors of which we’re not yet aware.

Childhood obesity often turns into adult obesity, with the attendant healthcare costs. That is reason enough for removing sugary drinks from the schools. As for accusations that such a policy is paternalistic -- well, schools often act in a parental role, and in this case it’s not inappropriate.

It would be nice to think that the manufacturers yielded to Clinton purely because they shared his concern about what some have called Generation XL. But one legal expert told the New York Times that the soft-speaking Southerner was carrying a stick behind his back: the threat of tobacco-style lawsuits.

We hope this expert is wrong, because allowing fat people to sue the makers of high-calorie foods would take a big bite out of the notion of personal responsibility. We’d prefer to think that the manufacturers were motivated by a more noble objective -- like prolonging the lives of the next generation so they’ll be around to buy Coke and Pepsi.