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.