Profiting From The Obesity Trend...

We are a tad disgusting as a nation with respect to food, myself included. I feel hooked at times. I can’t escape the clutches of empty calorie consumption. I know better but seem helpless.

Are we being duped by the FDA and Food Companies, depressed, lazy and/or all of the above and more. Will we beat this thing?

I doubt it! As the world shrinks and becomes flatter, our culture will win out and with the good will come the bad…global obesity. It won’t happen overnight and that’s good if you are a trend investor like me. It will creep.

My friend ‘The Chairman’ was back in America visiting from China and the obesity problem really hit him .

Some amazing excerpts from the bestselling book ‘Fast Food Nation’:

Over the past forty years in the United States, per capita consumption of carbonated soft drinks has more than quadrupled. During the late 1950s the typical soft drink order at a fast food restaurant contained about eight ounces of soda; today a ‘Child’ order of Coke at McDonald’s is twelve ounces. A ‘Large’ Coke is thirty-two ounces-and about 310 calories. In 1972, McDonald’s added Large French Fries to its menu; twenty years later, the chain added Super Size Fries, a serving three times larger than what McDonald’s offered a generation ago. Super Size Fries have 610 calories and 29 grams of fat.

Obesity is now second only to smoking as a cause of mortality in the United States. The CDC estimates that about 280,000 Americans die every year as a direct result of being overweight. The annual health care costs in the United States stemming from obesity now approach $240 billion; on top of that Americans spend more than $33 billion on various weight-loss schemes and diet products. Obesity has been linked to heart disease, colon cancer, stomach cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, infertility, and strokes. A 1999 study by the American Cancer Society found that overweight people had a much higher rate of premature death. Severely overweight people were four times more likely to die young than people of normal weight. Moderately overweight people were twice as likely to die young.

During thousands of years marked by food scarcity, human beings developed efficient physiological mechanisms to store energy as fat. Until recently, societies rarely enjoyed an overabundance of cheap food. As a result, our bodies are far more efficient at gaining weight than at losing it. Health officials have concluded that prevention, not treatment, offers the best hope of halting the worldwide obesity epidemic.”

I am skeptical of the prevention movement in our generation and therefore would expect companies like WeightWatchers (WTW) to exploit the marketplace and therefore profit and outperform. We recently covered them on Wallstrip as well . I do not own the stock, but after a recent visit to Mayo Clinic for the ‘Executive Physical’, my doctor said that I should avoid ideas like NutriSystems (NTRI) , which just so happened to have recently blown up, but sign up for Weightwatchers online, which I have not done but might.

I like to be involved with the trends that I am riding so if the stock breaks out, I will buy it and than sign-up. This is one break-out I am conflicted about happening…booyah!