With two-thirds of American adults and one-third of our children either overweight or obese, it is clear that the regulations, strategies, and tactics deployed to reverse this albatross have been ineffective. What has dumbfounded me is that we rarely ask the following question: why has nothing worked?

So far, too much emphasis has been given to “being right” rather than fixing the problem. A “my way or the highway” mentality prevails. Many blame the food marketers for pushing junk foods. Others hold consumers responsible for not eating well or exercising. While each of these arguments has merit, neither camp has served up any lasting solutions.

We have spent countless years defending status quo positions or demonizing others for perpetuating obesity, but have overlooked the most basic aspect of the combatants—that is, their wiring. By this, I mean that we have not considered the core personality type of each entity that is a player in this ongoing obesity drama.

Why would this matter? Because each party involved in shaping America’s obesity problem views the situation through a different lens. This is why the one-size-fits-all approaches that have been prevalent fall flat. Once we finally unlock the psyches of grocers, restaurateurs, packaged goods marketers, health advocates and activists, nutritionists, and consumers, we become privy to their motivations and limitations. When we understand what makes each party tick, we gain the knowledge to effect real, constructive change.

A simple way of describing each actor’s behavior is by drawing a parallel to the elements: each player is either a solid, a liquid, or a gas.

Solids care about defending the status quo. They’re traditional, risk averse, dislike change, and take either/or positions. More often than not, they focus on short-term needs. However, when they do make up their minds, they are capable of sticking with the game plan and carrying through to the end.

Conversely, gases bring creativity and a forward-looking perspective to the dialogue. They openly embrace change. In fact, the process of change is often the goal. Gases typically chide solids for not seeing the future and are accused by their solid brethren of being impractical and ivory-towerish.

Liquids serve as the bridge between solids and gases in that they are more likely to see the big picture and think strategically. They bring more of a win-win mentality to situations and can serve as a conduit to lasting solutions.

In the ensuing weeks, I will dissect the personality of each of the key players in the obesity debate one at a time. You will be able to gain a better understanding of how food executives think; what grocers don’t want you to know; why restaurant chains promote combo meals and supersized beverages; why health advocates and activists push draconian solutions like soda taxes and ingredient bans; and why, with the exception of the most disciplined among us, consumers are doomed to fail with dieting and exercise.

More poignantly, you will see how barriers to progress have evolved when staunch solids like grocers and restaurant chains interact with the combustible food activist gases. I will also draw parallels to the behavior of political parties—care to guess which party is solid? Which one is more like gas? More importantly, at the end of this series of articles, you will understand how we got here and what viable solutions to the obesity epidemic can emerge that work for all invested parties.

Next time I will focus on the restaurant chains and provide a glimpse into who they are, how they think, and the real reasons behind larger portions.

Stay tuned.

I have just returned from participating in a landmark event. Kudos to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Food Trust for convening a first-of-its-kind symposium at the University of Pennsylvania to explore ways that grocers can help stem America’s obesity epidemic. Titled “Harnessing the Power of Supermarkets to Help Prevent Childhood Obesity,” the gathering brought together experts approaching the issue from all sides, including food marketing and grocery executives, obesity researchers, policy analysts, and representatives from non-profit organizations.

The real question is: why hasn’t anyone done this before?

The silence emanating from the grocery segment has been deafening. Yes, a handful of supermarkets have implemented nutritional labeling on packaged foods, such as the Guiding Stars program pioneered by Hannaford Brothers, but most of the attention has been focused on how to cajole food manufacturers into lowering the calories, fat, sugars, and sodium in their lineups. Despite being on the front lines with consumers, the grocery channel has been missing-in-action and overlooked as a potentially effective vehicle to fight obesity.

The fact is that most purchase decisions are made while in the act of shopping. A recent Booz & Company study [PDF] highlights that 59 percent of shoppers select the brands they buy when in the store. An overwhelming majority (77 percent) enter stores without detailed shopping lists. And when shoppers have lists, almost one third of them deviate significantly from them.

With so much indecision about what to buy, supermarkets are in a prime position to influence consumers to purchase healthier combinations of foods.

It’s time for grocer’s shelves and displays to trumpet brands that offer less calories and a better balance of nutrition. This does not mean that we shouldn’t enjoy our favorite indulgences. It’s just that we need to be reminded of healthier foodstuffs when we are in decision mode. As any Marketing 101 course teaches, it’s all about awareness.

Marketers and merchandisers know that the more visible an item is, the more it will sell. Studies have confirmed that sales for items on display often increase by a factor of four-fold or more. And as noted in my chapter from Stuffed: An Insider’s Look at Who’s (Really) Making America Fat titled What Grocers Don’t Want You to Know, “eye level means buy level.”

While we know visibility is critical, too often stores do not display enough better-for-you foods. My own store surveys have illustrated that over 60 percent of stand-alone displays carry items that nutritionists would decry as unhealthy.

We find ourselves at that watershed moment when it is time to rethink the supermarket. How can we turn grocers’ considerable merchandising skills to help slim us down? With supermarkets’ arrays of sampling programs, displays, interactive shopping carts, and shelf signage, can we not more easily capture shoppers’ attention to purchase healthier foods?

Ultimately, the real question to engage supermarkets is: can they make more money pushing better-for-you foods? Right now those answers are undetermined. It will take a few adventurous supermarket chains to serve as “pilots” to assess what can work. I will have more to say on this in a future article.

Please share your ideas on how you think supermarkets can help make a difference in the fight against obesity.

The 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee just issued its findings and recommendations to encourage healthier eating. Containing no surprises, the Committee’s suggestions included four major steps required to help Americans adopt better nutrition and physical activity behaviors, namely:

• Reducing calorie intakes and increasing physical activity
• Shifting to a more plant-based diet
• Reducing the consumption of added sugars, solid fats, sodium, and refined grains, and
• Meeting the 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans.

First published in “pre-obesity” 1980, these reports are issued every five years to provide direction about how dietary intake can reduce risk for major chronic diseases. Since that time, obesity, a diet-related condition, has climbed to become our country’s number-one health issue. Rates in this country have skyrocketed to the point where two-thirds of all American adults are now either overweight or obese. Hardly a successful track record.

We must face the music. It’s time to drop the Guidelines.

Why have the Guidelines failed? I can think of several reasons:

Prescriptions are difficult to follow. Consumers don’t eat carbohydrates, trans fats, and high fructose corn syrup. They eat FOOD. Driving attention to what’s in food rather than the end product is an abstraction. Most people do not relate. We would be better informed if communications were presented in a “real world” fashion. Let us know the dietary impact of French fries, hamburgers, and soft drinks, not just what’s in them. It’s like listing all the parts inside your car without describing the driving experience, ambiance, and color.

They’re in a different language. Our country’s conversion to the metric system was attempted back in the 1970s. Americans never adapted, and the experiment was abandoned. The food bureaucracy didn’t get the memo. The amounts of ingredients in foods are still given in grams. With many in our country challenged by math, it is too much to expect the public to know what a gram represents. (For posterity, there are 454 grams per pound. RIP.)

The Guidelines take a one-size-fits-all approach. The Guidelines assume that all of us learn the same way and that once we obtain nutritional knowledge we will change our eating behaviors accordingly. “If they hear it, they will come.” Works fine for the Food Illuminati, but don’t hold your breath for the rest of us. Most analyses suggest that from two-thirds to three-quarters of Americans either struggle to walk their nutritional talk or simply don’t care. Debating the chemistry of trans fats or the pedigree of their cheeseburger offers no interest.

They offer a micro approach to a macro problem. Addressing obesity and securing our long-term health requires a Big Picture purview. While the Guidelines drill down on the nutritional details, Rome burns. It is no longer of import to learn all the nutritional facts; it’s imperative that workable solutions be offered.

As I have shared here on the Atlantic Food Channel, the best approach to making Americans healthier and ameliorating obesity is to prioritize and keep it simple. Instead of memorizing a laundry list of rogue ingredients, go after the biggest factor affecting America’s health: calories.

It sure beats learning the metric system.

Recent pieces by Corby Kummer on this website and Michael Moss in the New York Times have highlighted a pattern of “delay and divert” tactics employed by certain food companies to resist calls to lower sodium in their products. The articles suggest that corporations are highly motivated to maintain levels of salt for taste, texture, and cost reasons, and that these tactics have historically proven to be quite effective.

But public health advocates and activists have adopted a new strategy of their own patterned after the 10th-Century Chinese practice of Ling Chi—or “death by a thousand cuts”—in which individual small cuts, non-fatal in and of themselves, add up to a slow and painful demise. Sodium represents just the latest ingredient “cut.” This new strategy is designed to force change in the foods marketed to the American public—ingredient by ingredient—and is turning out to be quite effective.

Food marketers now appear to be on the defensive, if not in full retreat. Let’s look at the scorecard:

Trans fats. Typically found in partially hydrogenated oils used for frying and baking, trans fats deliver the double whammy of raising bad cholesterol levels while lowering good cholesterol. The restaurant industry initially resisted calls to ban these oils due to cost and availability reasons. Today, bans have been implemented in several cities, including New York City and Philadelphia, as well as California and parts of Maryland. Other states and cities have advanced similar proposals.

Listing calories on menus. As part of the recent health care legislation, calories are now required to be posted nationally on menus of restaurant chains consisting of more than 20 units. Industry capitulated when it recognized that multiple municipalities and states would have imposed their own labeling criteria, thus making implementation costly.

Soda taxes. Local and state governments are thirsty for revenue and several are considering the imposition of soda and/or “fat” taxes. New York is perhaps the most aggressive in pursuing such a tax, with California, Colorado, Philadelphia and Washington in the mix.

Sodium reduction. Both New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and Michelle Obama have been most vociferous in admonishing food companies to lower the amount of salt in their products. Expect additional legislative proposals and lower sodium standards to be issued in the near future.

The trend is obvious. Food marketers are facing the slow Ling Chi-like death of their product portfolios unless they change their mindsets. The old playbook doesn’t work anymore. They must recognize that there will always be the next sodium … the next “cut.”

Instead of “delay and divert,” it is time to get ahead of the situation. With a new cohort of consumers demanding corporate responsibility for their health, advocates pushing for radical change in the food supply, and governments receptive to regulation, a smarter course of action by food marketers is to embrace that they are custodians of their customers’ well-being and to re-align their products, marketing practices, and business models accordingly.

Otherwise, a slow death awaits.

The tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico offers a management lesson to food marketers on how not to deal with a crisis. Specifically, I refer to the obesity epidemic. Here’s what I mean.

First, there’s the blame game. No one is taking responsibility for the Gulf disaster. BP points its fingers at Transocean who throws a hot potato to Halliburton who points back to BP as having ultimate responsibility. A similar dynamic persists in the obesity debate. Activists blame corporations for spewing excessive fuel (i.e., calories) on the consuming public; food corporations counter that they offer healthy options and decry that regulators are unfairly trying to tax them; and all the while consumers continue to chomp away at anything put in front of them.

Then there’s this sticky matter of the unintended consequences of the spill on the health and wellbeing of all those affected: wildlife, the environment, the food supply, local economies, and laborers. It appears that none of the parties planned for this eventuality. So too with obesity. Food marketers did not intend that Americans get fat. Clever marketers simply discovered the formula for providing excellent value for their customers. And in turn consumers complied. Now two-thirds of Americans are either overweight or obese.

Finally, neither BP nor the food companies have put the genie back in the bottle. By this I mean that the causes for concern (oil and calories) still run rampant. For BP, this not only means a public relations nightmare but also likely criminal proceedings. It will also pave the way for new, more draconian regulations and a radical shift in energy policies, to the detriment of the petroleum companies. With minor exceptions, food marketers also have not put the lid on calories and will continue to feel the heat of regulators, activists, and consumers until they do.

So what can food marketers do?

(more…)

Despite skepticism surrounding the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation pledge that its food industry members will sell 1.5 trillion fewer calories in the next five years, there is an emerging track record that suggests that food marketers are recognizing that they must deal with the spiraling-out-of-control obesity crisis … or else. Witness the recent announcement by the American Heart Association- and Clinton Foundation-run Alliance for a Healthier Generation that soft drink giants Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Dr Pepper Snapple Group have reduced the number of calories shipped to schools by 88 percent since 2004. PepsiCo has gone one step further by unilaterally declaring that it will halt the sale of full-sugar soft drinks in primary and secondary schools globally.

With companies like Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, and Campbell Soup participating in the Foundation’s pledge, here’s a preview of what’s coming on grocery shelves. Don’t expect traditional Coca-Cola to change (again), but readers are likely to see more visible displays of lower-calorie beverages like Coca-Cola Zero and Vitaminwater. Kraft will pull even more calories out of its Lunchables or reduce the size of Kraft cheese slices. And those Milano cookies from Pepperidge Farm may be just a wee bit less fatty. Anticipate that a plethora of packages will be “downsized,” with a whole array of smaller portioned boxes, mini-packs, cans, and bottles to choose from. Even the food inside will be smaller.

More enlightened food marketers are getting the message that doing the right thing is in their best interests. Why are they lowering calories, fats, and sodium? The simple answer is: impending regulations. Smart packaged goods firms have taken a lesson from their restaurant brethren after watching how the restaurant lobby resisted the move to place calories on menu boards. Once the light bulb went off that several states and multiple municipalities beyond New York City might pass legislation requiring different formats for listing calories, agreement to a national standard as proposed by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) became a no-brainer. And it has not been lost on marketers that health advocates and activists are reading from a new playbook published by the Urban Institute titled “Reducing Obesity: Policy Strategies from the Tobacco Wars” (PDF).

So is a 1.5 trillion calorie reduction over five years enough to make a difference? Clearly, focusing on lowering calories to deal with the obesity problem is the right call, and the Foundation should be applauded for taking a stand, but this is a drop in the bucket and represents only a 0.5 percent reduction in the 300 trillion calories available for Americans to consume each year. That translates to less than 1.5 pounds of added weight per person. Hardly enough to resolve an obesity crisis.

To fix obesity, we must reverse what got us here in the first place. Daily calories supplied are up 30 percent per person since 1970, and returning to that “pre-obesity” level requires a discharge of 69 trillion calories.

It’s time to be bold. REALLY BOLD. “Put a man on the moon” bold.

With all the tools available to food marketers to lower the calories they sell while maintaining profits—introducing low-calorie alternatives and high-profit-margin 100-calorie portion packages, and putting marketing support behind lower-calorie brands—it is time to step up and “tear down this wall” of obesity by committing to eliminating those excess 69 trillion calories. This 20-percent or more reduction in calories is what’s really needed to take back American’s health and waistlines. So declare this goal for the end of the decade and we’ll all be better for it … consumers as well as corporate bottom lines.

Or else?

“If we are to believe, as one Tea Partier from Toledo, Ohio proclaimed, that ‘being obese is one of our American core values,’ then heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes must also be inalienable rights.  Obesity is now a national burden with a cost of $147 billion, and two-thirds of the nation’s adults either overweight or obese.  And while many attempts have been made to thwart the expansion of America’s collective girth, no regulatory measure or consumer prodding has proven effective.  It’s time to change the playbook and look to the food marketers as our last, best hope.” (read more)

Check out Hank’s column on The Atlantic magazine’s website for perspectives on how the food industry can solve the obesity crisis.

U.S. News and World Report recently featured ‘Stuffed’ and interviewed Hank on solving the obesity crisis:

“In more than 30 years of working in the food industry, Hank Cardello didn’t think much about the health consequences of the products he promoted, whether Betty Crocker cake mixes, a proposed new malt liquor, or Diet Coke. He thinks about them plenty now, though. After a cancer scare in 1995, Cardello switched gears and started to look more critically at how his industry might help combat obesity. He’s now CEO of 27 Degrees North, a consulting firm that helps companies marry profit and social responsibility. In Stuffed: An Insider’s Look at Who’s (Really) Making America Fat (Ecco), just released in paperback, Cardello lays out his views on why consumers are not entirely to blame for their own girth, why well-meaning government regulations often fail, and how the food industry might put its marketing oomph behind better alternatives to some of the high-calorie packaged foods that Americans snarf down. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation…”

Focusing on food package labels as a panacea for the nation’s overweight and obesity crisis is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic: lots of activity, but no real impact. Too much emphasis is placed on micromanaging acceptable levels of trans fats, sodium or the type of sugar used rather than focusing on the big picture. We need to engage the food corporations to lower the calories.

Labels alone cannot change the fact that for Americans there are 29 percent more calories available to eat than 50 years ago. Obesity is a supply problem and must be dealt with at the source.

A better way to start reducing America’s collective girth is to give food corporations incentives to sell less calories in a way that does not damage their bottom lines. One novel approach would be to adjust the deductions food corporations receive for their advertising expenditures based on their willingness to cut back on calories.

I applaud Michelle Obama for targeting childhood obesity as a priority and advocating for programs that improve the well-being of our youth. But I challenge her approach as it does not go far enough.

While efforts to increase the number of “healthy schools,” encourage more exercise, and improve the availability of more nutritious food in low-income neighborhoods are noble, they do not attack the real enemy in the battle of the bulge: the number of excess calories available to eat. This is the missing link.

Rather than looking at the food industry as a pariah, it’s time to reach out to them.

Putting into effect tax incentives that entice food companies to sell fewer calories will yield more tangible results than pushing for more consumer behavioral change. These incentives can be structured to reward companies that cut their calories. Conversely, if marketers continue to spew excess calories on the public, they would risk losing favorable tax treatments.

An Obama program fueled by an energized food industry would be a strong one-two punch to knockout obesity. Our children’s health depends on it.