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Brainstorming Session Produces Unconventional Ideas For Fighting Obesity


An interesting and possibly unique brainstorming session with experts and non-experts in nutrition targeted at uncovering new ways to fight childhood obesity was sponsored and held recently at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The event was organized by a consulting firm called The Greatest Good. The only rule for the session was that no idea was off limits.

The Catastrophe

There was quick agreement among the group that obesity is a serious problem illustrated vividly by the prevalence of childhood obesity which has tripled in 40 years. Currently, 17% of children and adolescents are obese, and 66% of adults are overweight or obese, according to the participants. The situation was characterized as “catastrophic” and also expensive. Some 20% of health care spending can be accounted for by obesity, and that health care spending is itself 20% of the Gross Domestic Product. In short, the participants found “lots of reasons to address obesity.”

Some of the more unusual solutions brought forth included:

1. Restrict unhealthy foods to certain designated sections or locations in supermarkets.

2. Abolish sucrose and fructose. The idea is to simply take these ingredients “off the face of the earth,” said the contributor.

3. Eliminate tax deductions for the portion of food company expenses that do marketing to children

4. Create a national campaign that focuses on how soft drinks kill people. This will  create pressure on the companies that make these products to change their ways. In short, shame the companies into making changes.

5. Eliminate all marketing such as that on billboards and television. Sequester the marketing to certain places so that people would have to opt-in to access marketing messages rather than have them disseminated without consent. According to this idea, persons would have to actively go out to get the information they wanted for various products or items.

6. Incentivize parents to create a more healthy home environment for eating by altering work-based health insurance or welfare benefits.

7. Hold the educational system accountable for making progress in educating about nutrition and providing physical activity.

8. Shift the paradigm and terminology from “obesity” to “malnutrition” because the term obesity carries too much negative baggage at this time.

9. Create a public awareness campaign focused on the wide variety of negative outcomes that all derive from one thing---obesity. Show how 1 thing causes 100 bad things.

10. Send notices to all the homes of parents telling them about the prevalence and dangers of “metabolic derangement”, another substitute term for obesity with potentially more traction than the current term.

11. Focus on “healthy eating” and fostering positive behaviors instead of “obesity” since the obesity focus also produces eating disorders.

12. Conduct a community trial in which unhealthy food is taxed and healthy food is not to see how much it would cost to nudge people away from unhealthy choices.

13. Create a piece of “caloric monitoring jewelry” such as a bracelet that persons could wear and while eating would register in real time how many calories they are consuming. Since people learn better when the response to an action is more immediate, this real time feedback would help modify eating behavior. As it is, the negative consequences of overeating are not immediately apparent.

14. Introduce non-reproducing parasites into the body such as tapeworms which could consume any excess calories people ingested. People could continue to eat, companies could continue to sell food, and the tapeworm would prevent weight gain.

15. Create revolting smelling matter such as dried vomit that could be placed in jars. People could take a whiff and lose their desire to eat.

Final Note

In a thought-provoking observation at the end of the podcast, the hosts noted that the non-nutrition experts who participated in the session tended to be more sympathetic to solutions which require more individual self-control or exercise of personal responsibility, while the experts in nutrition seemed to favor more environmental or macro level changes. No one could describe what the mechanism might be that would explain this dichotomy if indeed it was real.

To listen to the 37-minute podcast on freakonomics radio, visit : http://tinyurl.com/cdpaysu

According to the site, the participants in the brainstorming session were:

Peter Attia, a former surgeon who now runs a nonprofit focused on nutrition; Kelly Brownell from the Rudd Center For Food Policy & Obesity at Yale; Geoffrey Canada of Harlem Children’s Zone; Bill Dietz, the former director of the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity at the CDC: Chris Economos, who studies obesity and childhood nutrition at Tufts ; Steven Gortmaker of the Harvard School of Public Health; Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman; Harvard economist David Laibson; RWJF Health Group senior vice president Jim Marks; Brian Mullaney, co-founder of Smile Train and WonderWork; Eric Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has written a book about obesity; and Mary Story from the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota.  ■
 


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