Z.E.R.O.: Zero Paid Media as the New Marketing Model

PREFACE THE OBESITY EPIDEMIC

More than one-third of U.S. adults (35.7 percent) are obese. By 2030, this number will have risen to 51 percent of the adult population.¹ Childhood obesity is even more alarming; the incidence has doubled in children and tripled in adolescents in the past 30 years, increasing to 18 percent for both groups.²

Many studies attempt to shed light on what causes obesity—or certainly what exacerbates or accelerates the propensity to put on enough weight over enough time to qualify as being obese. One of these causes is most certainly one's gene pool. As an overweight person my whole life, I can testify to my lifelong battle with the bulge from my childhood years through adulthood. In 2012, I shed 40 pounds in an attempt to (for the final time . . . yeah, that's what I said the previous ten times) take back my life. Weight gain is like a ninja. It quietly stalks you, studies up on you, waits patiently for the right time to strike, and then sneaks up on you until—pop—that pants' button is liberated from its safe house at the expense of your dignity.

Weight gain is almost certainly a cultural phenomenon as well.

In a country and culture where more is more—where supersizing and Big Gulps are as American as apple pie and chants of U-S-A, U-S-A—it is hip (literally) to go big or go home. Entire television shows, such as Man v. Food, were created to embrace gluttony.

And today it is an epidemic. It is estimated that the cost of treating those additional obese people ...