Despite Huckabee's effort to get the states' young people to lose weight and a state law that requires students in public school to be screened for obesity, numbers released Thursday show that 38 percent of children remain overweight or at risk of becoming overweight.

Amy Rossi, associate director for the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement, said officials are optimistic about their state's numbers because while other states' obesity rates were increasing, Arkansas' rates held steady.

Data that show "that our children are not getting worse, is, at least momentarily, promising," Rossi said.

In Arkansas, and the South in general, fried foods are consumed in vast quantities because they are cheap and poverty levels are high, Huckabee said.

Growing up in the South, Huckabee said, anything tasted good if it could "first be battered and fried."

Huckabee said changing America's bad eating habits will take a generation.

But the nation has changed its habits before, Huckabee said. Americans stopped littering and started wearing seat belts, two things that would have been largely unimaginable in the 1960s, he said.

Huckabee also said politicians can't win an election running on an obesity platform.

"If any person thinks that his or her political career is going to be established on the idea of a Healthy America initiative or launch, I got to tell you, it probably won't because we're not going to have the kind of demonstrable, measurable results in a single election cycle," he said.

When asked if he was planning on running for the White House in 2008, Huckabee replied, "Right now the only thing I am running for is a marathon I am working on."

But he said he is keeping all options open.