08 April 2013

Fight Obesity: Freakonomics way

For you who haven't read Freakonomics, it is a book by an economist that look at how the world works from different angle. Like how two decades after "row v wade" US have lower crime rate. Anyway, on their recent podcast, Steve Levitt (the economist) was hired by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to brainstorm of ways to fight childhood obesity. He got dozen participants to explore the biological, behavioral, political and economic angles of obesity.

The participants are: 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.

And on this discussion, no idea is out of the table, even the outlandish one. Go check it out.