Doctors Urge Obama to Stop Eating Junk

The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine wants President Barack Obama to stop chowing down on junk food in public.

"As role model to millions of Americans, the president has a responsibility to watch what he eats in public," Susan Levin, nutrition education director for the group, said in a statement, The Hill reports.

The media eats up Obama's occasional visits to Washington, D.C.-area burger restaurants. Last August, for example, he took his staff to lunch at the Good Stuff Eatery on Capitol Hill. The president scarfed down a hot dog while watching a basketball game in March with British Prime Minister David Cameron.

Processed meats such as hot dogs "kill more Americans every year than tobacco does, and they cost taxpayers billions of dollars in healthcare," Levin said. "The White House would never set up a photo op showing the president buying cigarettes, so why is it OK to show him eating a hot dog?"

The doctors' group is sending a petition to the White House asking it to issue an executive order forbidding the president, the first family, the vice president, and all members of the Obama Cabinet from publicly consuming food "that can cause cancer and obesity."