Illustration by Janice Wu
Last month, I visited the southern New Jersey plant of the Robard Corporation, a company that makes meal-replacement products for dieters. Robard's president, Robert Schwartz, took me to the factory floor, where huge vats of powders — proteins, flavoring ingredients, vitamins — are poured into a 450-gallon V-shaped industrial mixer. The ingredients are then spun together and turned into protein shakes that sell for around $3.50 a serving. As I watched this process, it seemed as if Robard were in the world's easiest business: take dirt-cheap raw materials, mix them together and sell them at a huge markup to America's tens of millions of desperate dieters, like me.
Deep thoughts this week:
1. Doctors can't tell you exactly how to lose weight.
2. Maybe economists can help.
3. The weight-loss industry pales in comparison to the one that helps people not lose weight.
It's the Economy
Adam Davidson translates often confusing and sometimes terrifying economic and financial news.
I have spent much of my adulthood overweight, often obese and fruitlessly following all sorts of diet programs. Last year, however, I decided to try a new approach. I purposely didn't apply the latest in nutritional science. (Over the years, many experts have told me that we still don't have enough data to know definitively which diets work best.) Instead, I used economics to pick a diet that would work best for me. More specifically, I used the game theory that economists applied during the cold war.
The idea first came to me a few years ago when I was talking to the economist Thomas Schelling, who is best known for formalizing the logic behind the mutually-assured-destruction strategy. His work showed that combatants in a conflict can actually strengthen their position by restricting their choices. During the cold war, Schelling wrote, the United States placed a calculated number of soldiers in Western Europe — not enough to directly repel a Soviet attack but enough to make clear that it was committed to military action if one occurred. Schelling referred to this strategy as "commitment," and he told me that the idea dated back to the ancient Greek philosopher and soldier Xenophon, whose writings guided Alexander the Great in his conquests. Xenophon argued that a general can strengthen his army's position, perhaps counterintuitively, by doing battle next to a dangerous cliff. His soldiers, after all, would only have two choices: fight or die. The army farther from the cliff had a third option: to flee. This extra option, he said, made it less likely to persevere.
During our conversation, Schelling said that he eventually applied this theory to his struggle to quit smoking. He wanted to think of it as a battle with two choices — quit or die of cancer — but his nicotine-addled brain kept coming up with a third option: sneak one more cigarette and quit later. Of course, later never came. ("I was quitting for 20 years," he said.) This theory also applies to weight loss. For years, I've known that the only way to lose weight was to permanently change my diet and exercise habits. But I was awfully good at coming up with third options, like buying diet books or eating Atkins bars that made me feel as if I were on the verge of weight loss even if I never jogged or ordered salads.
As I surveyed all my dieting options this time around, I realized that many companies based their entire business models on the impulse to believe in a magical third option. (Their marketing materials usually include the words "miracle," "easy" or "suggested by Dr. Oz.") I found it easy to dismiss the idea that a few capsules of capsicum powder or some green-coffee-bean extract would allow me to continue to eat my favorite poppy-seed poundcake and still lose weight, but I was susceptible to other products that marketed the same option in a different way. I ate two big cups of "fat free" frozen yogurt almost every day. Whenever I ate a huge beef burrito, I ordered a Diet Coke.
There is another class of products, I noticed, that have a related business model. They were not preying on my impulses to find a third way, but they still made money whether I lost weight or not. All those Slim-Fast shakes, Atkins bars and meal replacements may help some people lose weight, but much of the companies' revenue comes from people who try and fail continuously or people who only want to create the illusion they are dieting. My desk was filled with books written by experts from the Mayo Clinic and Harvard. They contained useful information, but, for me, they acted like a miracle totem. I felt good about myself for buying them, but I never lost a pound.
Adam Davidson is co-founder of NPR's "Planet Money," a podcast and blog.
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