By:  Cheryl Tully Stoll

From 2006 Archives

Estimates suggest that diet industry revenues this year will be $40 billion as we continue to pile on the pounds. Just for comparison, McDonald’s only did $20 billion in revenue in 2005. That $40 billion figure does beg the questions: how effective is the diet industry, and are its players just taking advantage of a serious public health threat?

Candy company Nestle’s recent announcement of their intent to purchase Jenny Craig suggests Nestle is trying to have its cake and eat it too. The weight loss business has had an annual revenue growth rate of 14 percent over the last five years; it’s unfortunate that trend is directly opposite the movement Americans are seeing on their bathroom scales. As diet company profits continue to grow, so does America’s waistline. If these diets were truly effective, wouldn’t our belts be looser and our pant sizes smaller?

There are a plethora of diets and plans to choose from. They’ve been named after beaches, cities, people, foods, things that sound like chemical compounds and voyeurs. They come in the form of centers, meetings, books, on-line activities and you name it. You can’t open a women’s magazine without finding diet advice of one kind or other — even advice on how to look thinner without ever losing a pound.

The one name that seems to be missing however is the Yo-Yo Diet. That is what most people end up doing when they try to follow one of these plans. It means that many folks initially lose weight then gain most, all or more back.

There are plenty of people who achieve short-term success with diets and even some others who are able to manage it for the long haul. The problem is that going on “a diet,” implies an event, not a lifestyle change. It makes sense that if we reduce our caloric intake and increase our exercise level that we will lose weight. The problem is that many people, even when they do reach their goal weight, revert back to their former habits. After all, “the event” is over, how long can the average person afford to continue to pay fees for membership or to buy special foods? It’s expensive and very inconvenient.

Some physicians and nutrition professionals concede that out of the major diets and diet programs available Weight Watchers has one of the better models. Unfortunately, when researching this piece I learned something very troubling. On their financial information Internet home page Weight Watchers states that members “have historically demonstrated a consistent re-enrollment pattern across many years.” Their marketing page, on an entirely separate Web site coincidentally, only talks about successes. A quote from that page says, “Coaching and real-life insights to help you lose weight and keep it off.”

It’s interesting how they tell prospects one thing, but boast to potential investors that so many people fail to keep the weight off that those souls provide an annuity stream of repeat business. Given this fact, it should come as no surprise that the Weight Watchers brand had worldwide sales of over $3 billion in 2005 alone. I wonder what that equates to in the cost per pound that was permanently lost?

According to their 2005 annual report, NutriSystem had 52,000 new customer starts in 2004 and 347,000 in 2005. Note that they use the word “starts.” Sounds like some repeat business to me. And it obviously works for them. The company had total net revenues of $213 million in 2005, which was an increase of 459 percent from the previous year and net income of $21 million, which was almost 2000 percent higher than in 2004. Not too shabby for a brand that they just began “reawakening” in 2003; however I’m sure it was a rude awakening for some of their clients no doubt.

            If you look at NutriSystems advertising, it’s not hard to figure out how they garner new clientele. They run the famous before and after photo ads. What I want to see a diet program do is run a before photo, an after photo and then a three-years-after photo. That’s true testimony to lasting weight loss.

And speaking of true testimony, I was very interested to learn that after each of these tremendously motivational success vignettes, there was a small asterisk that appeared. When I went to the bottom of the two-page ad, I found that the asterisk meant, “Results not typical.” Translated into English, this phrase means, we’re only interested in clients who look at the pictures and can’t read. Yep, I’d be hot to hand over money to a company that prowls for customers with such mind-bending integrity.

Their ads also say, “Eat free for a week!” Obviously there are still people out there who haven’t realized that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. As a matter of fact, in 2005 NutriSystem found 347,000 of them.

Unfortunately going on a diet implies temporary behavior modification instead of permanent lifestyle change. Healthy eating and physical fitness shouldn’t be events, they should be the way we live our lives. If you read the medical literature on weight loss and fitness, the majority of it recommends lifestyle changes, not diets, for permanent success. This fact makes LA Weight Loss’s value statement on their home page, “With LA Weight Loss, you lose the weight, not the lifestyle,” just a little incongruous.

Privately held LA Weight Loss claims 700 centers worldwide. They also claim “easy, effective, affordable weight loss.” You’d think if it were that “easy” to lose weight their way, they’d have at least as many centers as McDonald’s has restaurants (30,000).

I’d be remiss if I concluded this piece without mentioning the fad diets that have been sweeping the nation for the last 35 plus years.

Diets of the past include Scarsdale, Grapefruit, Pritikin, Ice Cream, Stillman, the ghoulish Blood Type Diet and the Cabbage Soup Diet. I remember when I was in high school the whole neighborhood tried the Cabbage Soup Diet for a week. I don’t think anyone who lost weight actually kept it off, but the entire neighborhood is now located 50 feet north of where it was when the diet began.

Recent diets include Atkins, South Beach, Dr. Phil, Slim-Fast, The Zone and lest me not forget the Kellogg’s Special K diet plan. It seems their pinching-an-inch diet didn’t work out as well as planned; so now that folks can grab a couple of fists full, they’re back at it.

So, if the diet industry wins $40 billion in revenue this year compared to McDonald’s $20 billion last year and people get even heavier next year, who loses?

Copyright Ó 2006, 2008 by Cheryl Tully Stoll

By:  Cheryl Tully Stoll

From 2006 Archives

We’ve all seen the attractive hard, tanned, sweaty bodies consuming sports drinks in television ads.

The image these ads try to project is that the consumption of these beverages can help everyone look buff. The reality, however, is that most of those wonderfully sculpted physiques are the result of years of hard exercise and healthy eating — like many other things, it’s not as easy as advertisers would have us believe.

As a matter of fact, these drinks aren’t necessarily as good for us as plain old water. A letter sent in April by a plethora of leading health professionals and organizations to The Institute of Medicine, outlined some warnings regarding the use of sports drinks in schools. These warnings are probably applicable to all of us, school-age or not.

The 44 professionals who signed this letter and the 37 well-known health organizations that endorsed the document stated that “since most students do not participate in 60-minute high-intensity workouts during school hours, we encourage your committee to recommend that sports drinks not be sold or served in schools during the school day.”

Unfortunately, the agreement between the Clinton Foundation and the soft drink industry that is supposed to remove sodas from school vending machines does not include the removal of sports drinks from high schools. Since sports drinks are the fastest growing category of beverages and the largest source of new profits for the soft drink industry, I can’t help but wonder if this omission is just a mere coincidence.

Looking closely at many of these drinks, the ingredients aren’t much healthier than those in soft drinks and in some cases even less so. They are for the most part lower in calories than regular sodas, but they still contain a significant number of calories in the form of sugar, and in many cases, much more sodium than found in the beverages proposed for removal. Additionally, the acids contained in these drinks have been proven by studies in multiple countries to erode tooth enamel.

When vending machine slots open up in schools as sodas are removed, administrators must be careful that the beverages they replace them with represent appropriate and better health choices, not just popular drinks. The consumption of excess sugar has been shown to lead to overweight and obese children with a higher chance of developing Type 2 Diabetes.

Type 2 Diabetes developed in childhood can break down the human body as badly as Type 1. This damage can include blindness, kidney failure and cardiovascular diseases. Unfortunately, one out of every three children born since the year 2000 are now projected to develop Type 2 Diabetes due to lifestyle, and we need to stem this tide.

Sports drinks were initially developed for high-endurance athletes who participated in consecutive hours of hard exercise and needed to replenish fluids and electrolytes. For these athletes, sports drinks can be helpful, but for the rest of the population they tend to be overkill or just a bad idea. Sure, we think we look cool swigging these drinks like the folks on television, but as teenage cigarette smoking has proven, cool isn’t necessarily healthy.

And before anyone overreacts and says that smokers and overweight and obese individuals are at different levels of risk, an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association in March 2004 projected that poor diet and physical inactivity may soon overtake smoking as the leading cause of death in this country. Two-thirds of American adults are overweight or obese, and we need to do everything we can do to prevent our children from continuing to add to this appalling statistic.

Sports drinks can’t be blamed for this trend, but like other sugar-laden foods and beverages, they certainly can be fairly viewed as a contributory factor.

Additionally, sodium is a known contributor to high blood pressure, which physicians are now seeing in younger and younger children. The long-term health consequences for these kids are very serious and can be tragic.

So, while advertising from the beverage industry would have us believe one thing, the medical community is rapidly learning otherwise. When people are trying to make a healthy choice, it’s only fair that the choice really be healthy. It’s rather unfair to lead someone to believe that consuming a particular product will help them in their quest for fitness when in fact that product could be negating the calories they just burned during a hard workout. No wonder so many dieters get discouraged.

Since Gatorade is the most well-known brand in this category, I looked at a bottle of their original formula in the 32-ounce size that the athletes in television advertisements are drinking. According to their Web site, the smallest size is a 12-ounce bottle; the 32-ounce bottle, however, says a single serving size is 8 ounces. There’s nothing like food and beverage manufacturers being straightforward on serving sizes. With some products it takes a degree in differential calculus to figure out what a small package actually contains nutritionally.

The caloric intake of the smallest bottle of Gatorade’s original formula was 75 calories. Doing the same calculations on the 32-ounce bottle that the studs and babes are swigging on television, I came up with 200 calories. What this means in plain English is that if you were to consume one bottle a day, each day for a year, you would gain nearly eight pounds from the 12-ounce version and almost 21 pounds from the sexy television version.

Somehow, after learning that, the products didn’t seem that sexy after all.

Copyright Ó 2006, 2008 by Cheryl Tully Stoll

By:  Cheryl Tully Stoll

From 2006 Archives

Two of every three American adults are overweight or obese according to The Centers for Disease Control, and another study claims that a double-digit percentage of these people believe that they are at a healthy weight. While the overall statistics regarding the epidemic sweeping this nation are frightening, the denial associated with problem is very disconcerting and comes in all forms.

            We have overweight individuals not believing they are, and various causes being cited that are all someone else’s problem. Blame is being thrown all over: the fast food industry, the soft drink industry, the general food industry, school lunches, school fundraisers, television advertising, sedentary lifestyles, lack of time, lack of physical exercise, the diet industry, cultural mores, self-indulgence, poor parenting and believe it or not, wealth and poverty simultaneously.

            No matter where we look there is a finger being pointed, but rarely will you find anyone taking any real responsibility for the problem or making a sincere effort to solve it. There are groups working to solve the problem, but there are not nearly enough of them. Some would say that the explosion of the diet and fitness industry during the last 20 years is an attempt at a solution, but as diet industry revenues continue to grow, so do waistlines.

Estimates suggest that diet industry revenues this year will be $40 billion as Americans continue to pile on the pounds. That does beg the question: how effective is this industry and is it just taking financial advantage of a very serious health problem?

Candy company Nestle’s recent announcement of their intent to purchase Jenny Craig, the last privately-held diet giant, suggests Nestle is trying to have its cake and eat it too. The weight loss business has had an annual revenue growth rate of 14 percent each of the last five years; it’s unfortunate that trend is directly opposite the trend Americans have seen on their bathroom scales. Both sets of numbers are growing rapidly, but if the first were truly effective, the second would be declining.

While childhood obesity statistics are making headlines of their own, obesity doesn’t just affect our children; it is an epidemic ravaging our society as a whole and it’s a war we are losing. A study, quoted in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in March of 2004, predicted that poor diet and physical inactivity might soon overtake tobacco as the leading cause of death in this country. This same article quoted various studies that estimated that between 400,000 and 600,000 deaths each year are caused by these same preventable factors.

It’s not much of a leap to guess just how many illnesses and injuries exist in our population today, that are caused by these preventable behaviors. Among them are heart disease, diabetes, strokes, high blood pressure, joint ailments, cancers and many others. As a matter of fact, each of the few conditions listed here generates further serious health complications.

Instead of taking steps to properly address a public health issue that left unchecked could lead to the collapse of our medical system, government leaders have chosen to enlarge the size of uniforms to accommodate extra girth instead of stopping the spread of the spread.

            Most of our schools continue to serve lunch and breakfast items that by most definitions barely qualify as nutrition; physical education has become an afterthought due to increased academic requirements; and our governments fail to fund adequate after school programs that encourage physical activity to compensate for the loss of gym time.

Parents refuse to police what their children eat, and the mindless box that is called television conspires with home computers and video games to keep America’s children from playing outside and getting the fresh air and physical exercise their growing bodies need.

Sometimes folks claim they are taking some responsibility to stem the rising tide, but when we look closely they’re really not doing what they want us to believe they are.

The beverage industry’s agreement recently to remove sugar-laden soft drinks and other unhealthy beverages from our schools is a good first step in what needs to be a national initiative to improve the health and weight of our nation’s children. Unfortunately that ban doesn’t go far enough, because it still allows sugar-filled sport drinks, which studies have shown erode tooth enamel and contain a lot of sodium, to be distributed in high schools. The variety and flavors of these drinks may even increase in schools, as slots in vending machines become available when the sodas are removed.

Conveniently, the sport drink category is the fastest growing for the beverage industry and is responsible for tremendous profits. Is the fact that these drinks weren’t included in the ban a mere coincidence? I don’t think so. There is also some skepticism among experts about whether the plan will actually be implemented at all – time will tell.

Wendy’s is eliminating the Biggie and Great Biggie size soft drinks from their menu, according to news reports. This is being done because Wendy’s says customers were confused by the sizes (after nearly 15 years). However, they won’t be downsizing the beverages. They will just now call the Great Biggie a Large. The new Large size will be the equivalent of over three cans of soda (approximately 42 ounces). And what’s worse is that the size that was a medium will in the future be labeled a small. Wendy’s made this “clarification” by burying it after they announced they would switch to healthier frying oils.

Their public relations gamble paid off; most news outlets picked up the healthy frying oils story and neglected the other. The chain will also be doing similar re-labeling to avoid “confusion” with their fries as well. I’m sure this will go a long way toward helping Americans right-size their thighs.

While sodas will hopefully be removed from schools and Wendy’s will switch to healthier frying oils, these are very small steps in what is an extended marathon to improve health and dietary habits in this nation. Medical researchers clearly see disaster on the horizon, but much of the general public and many of our elected leaders fail to give more than lip service to the public health threat this country is facing.

Government action is only part of the solution however. Personal responsibility is the most critical component in dodging the tsunami that is heading our way. A National Institute for Health study estimates that if trends continue, average life expectancy could decline by five years because of obesity. Are we going to be the first generation whose children who don’t live longer than we do?

Children develop their eating habits at home. When this includes balanced meals and healthy snacks in moderation, children tend to have healthier weights. When family lifestyles lean toward activities that get children up and moving instead of sitting in front of one video terminal or another, children tend to weigh less.

We all know the teenage years are a crapshoot where diet is concerned. During this period, teens’ eating and exercise habits are excessively influenced by peers and peer-involved activities. Keeping healthy foods handy at home for teens on the run is one way to help mitigate this lack of dietary control. Saving a plate with a healthy meal for a teen who misses dinner gives that hungry teenager an opportunity for a balanced meal that might otherwise be satiated by anything they can put their hands on when they come home “starving.”

While we can’t control teenage eating habits as we’d like to, we can control those of younger children and eventually, those children will revert back to these habits later in life. These are basic fundamentals, but they are critically important to the future of this generation.

Type 2 diabetes, commonly known as adult-onset diabetes, is a very serious disease, and lack of proper nutrition and exercise is a major contributor. Developed at young age, this disease will destroy the human body just as Type 1 will. Taking a pill does not make it go away.

Studies now predict that one out of every three children born since the year 2000 is expected to develop Type 2 diabetes. This fact alone should be enough to scare society into taking serious action. If you are the parent of three children, which one will get diabetes? If you have six grandchildren, which two will become diabetic? We are sitting on a time bomb that only we can diffuse, and the clock is ticking. One out of three – there’s not much room for margin of error, is there?

Copyright Ó 2006, 2008 by Cheryl Tully Stoll

By:  Cheryl Tully Stoll

What a distorted world we live in.

My husband and I recently went out for dinner and left the restaurant feeling very guilty.  The guilt wasn’t from the excessive calories consumed; though it should have been.  It wasn’t from the extravagance of dining out in a bad economy; we’re among the fortunate who are blessed that we can still do so.  Our guilt was from something far more serious.

We left the restaurant horrified by the amount of food that was thrown away after our simple meal—one appetizer—a shared salad and a shared entree.

We’ve been to dining establishments with large portions before.  These days, that’s nothing new.  The bigger is better philosophy seems to go directly from our plates to our waist lines.  However, we have never been to a restaurant with portions so genuinely disgusting in size that villages in third-world countries could have been fed for days from one dish.  A restaurant with tables for two where many guests do not have the option of bringing food home with them should not serve a side order of ziti that is a full TWO POUNDS in weight. 

The order of chicken parmesan that we shared was hideously large and enough to feed a family of four comfortably and our mixed greens salad could have satisfied grazing cows for more than a week.

The sheer waste of food was appalling.  My husband ordered a fried calamari appetizer that was so large that an entire family of squid must have sacrificed their lives for that one dish.  When it rapidly became apparent that the majority of calamari would go to waste and was still warm, we gave it to a table of ten women sitting next to us.  During the brief time we were there, the table of ladies next to us had offers of several pasta dishes and an additional calamari order from other guilt-laden patrons.

When we inquired if we could have half an order explaining that we were willing to pay the full price, we were rebuffed.  Additionally, according to health rules, the kitchen staff isn’t allowed to eat food from serving platters that have been untouched by patrons.  Then again if they were, after what we saw in that establishment that evening, the kitchen crew would be so morbidly obese they wouldn’t be able to fit into the kitchen.

It’s no wonder that European tourists who visit the United States are disgusted by our food portion sizes.

In a day-and-age when people have to choose between putting gas in their cars or buying food for their families, this type of business practice is utterly obscene.  This one restaurant must literally waste TONS of food on any given day.  Food that could help children who during summer months have no access to Federally subsidized school lunches or breakfasts and don’t get even one balanced meal most days of the week.  The excess could also feed senior citizens, who; having worked, sacrificed and saved their entire lives for a modicum of security in their older years now find themselves in the unconscionable situation of having to decide whether to fill their prescriptions, gas tanks or grocery baskets.

There is no way that we will be able to mandate a social conscience for business owners.  However, each of us can use our own conscience and stop frequenting establishments that encourage life-threatening obesity with their portion sizes or blatantly waste a precious commodity that is so desperately needed by so many of our fellow human beings.

In this country money talks and if we speak with our dollars and have discussions with the staff of these establishments telling them why we will not be returning, it could be a first step in reigning in the avarice of excess.  It doesn’t matter how good the meal is when most of it ends up in the trash.

Copyright Ó 2008 by Cheryl Tully Stoll