It comes up in the news on a regular basis. And the numbers don’t lie.¹

People just keep getting fatter.

Why is this happening? How can this trend be reversed?

Whenever this topic comes up, there is talk about how our ancestors lived and how they ate, and I have to admit, it is something I really enjoy thinking about.

Everyday we have to make choices about what to eat, but this is radically different to how our ancestors lived. They weren’t faced with the sheer amount of choice we have. They didn’t have to contend with that level of freedom.

So I came up with this: surrender that freedom by hiring someone to make choices for you. You let that person know what you like to eat for breakfast, lunch, dinner and then that person will make healthy choices for you, freeing you of the burden of choice.

The problem with this idea is that you need to be wealthy enough to hire someone like that. This is probably unafforable for most people. I wanted to come up with something that would work for the average person.

What I have in mind is not a temporary diet, but rather a permanent change in eating behavior. It means it wouldn’t stop until a person is healthier. It’s supposed to be a new way of eating. For life. That’s why it has to be affordable.

Even though I started thinking about this because people are getting fatter, it could work for other groups of people, such as people who struggle to gain or maintain weight, or those who are already healthy and would like to be healthier.

Take One

With cost as the main issue, I came up with the following idea. It went like this: you surrender freedom to choose what to eat but only for a particular time of day. Let’s say dinner. To spread out the cost of hiring someone to make choices for you, you do it together with people who also wish to defer those choices to someone else. This means you’ll have to eat together as a group.

Doing this everyday may still be too expensive, but maybe it could be done only on workdays, i.e. five days a week.

Let’s say a group agrees with such an arrangement. Would this lead to an improvement in health for the individuals of that group?

I can’t speak for everyone, but very often when I think about what I’m going to have for dinner, I sometimes end up making an unhealthy choice due to personal circumstances. Even though I am thin and healthy, I have noticed that there are periods in my life where it’s hard to maintain healthy eating habits.

If I want to eat healthy, I have to make healthy choices. But there are things that influence my choices. If I end up making a choice that is unhealthy, it’s not because I insist, no matter what, on eating that particular dish. It’s more like I was pulled in that direction due to certain factors, like stress.

The idea of the arrangement is that the participants are being nudged in the right direction by this new circumstance, a circumstance where you don’t have to choose. The person who will be making the choices instead is someone who understands nutrition and also knows what the participants like to eat.

If the arrangement is only for dinner, it means the participants will continue to have to make their own choices for what they’ll eat at other times of the day. Yet it’s possible that because of the experience of the arrangement, they may be positively influenced at those other times, leading them to make healthier choices on their own.

Take Two

At the time, I was also thinking a little bit about another problem, loneliness, and the potential for the arrangement to kill two birds with one stone. After thinking about it for a few more days, though, I felt that the above proposal was too convoluted and inconvenient. And the fact that it would only really work for one moment of the day made it lackluster.

Another question that began to bother me was: when exactly are choices being made? Assuming food is bought at a supermarket, is the choice made when writing down a list of things to get? When putting the items in the shopping cart? When purcashing the items? When coming home and unpacking the bags?

I would say the choices are made when the items are purchased.

With supermarkets still in my mind, I came up with better idea.

The question I had was: who can provide the service that lets you defer choice to someone else? If you’re a paying customer, the supermarket could provide you with this service. Supermarkets already provide all kinds of services, so why not this as well?

A potential flaw with this plan is that something is needed to make sure that choices are being made to benefit the customer, not the supermarket. Even so, it’s possible that having supermarkets make choices for customers could benefit supermarkets enough that they can offer this service free of charge. This would solve the cost issue I had in mind.

I don’t know exactly how supermarkets go about their business, but I was thinking that the benefit could have something to do with how they stock and sell their goods. If there’s a whole bunch of customers that choose to let the supermarket choose, it could allow for some kind of streamlining of their business. That way, both parties will benefit.

Customers would have to create some sort of profile for themselves, and maybe talk to someone about what they like and don’t like to eat, and whether they have any particular desires, such as wanting healthier choices. Then, rather than write down a list of things to get before going to the supermarket, you would only have to choose for how many days of the week you’d like groceries, through a smartphone app perhaps.

Range of Choices

Very often when I get groceries, I find myself staring a little bit at all the things they have to offer. I see people do the same thing. Hovering over an area of the aisle, not being particularly resolute in their decision making. I think when people make choices, it’s not like a point, but like a range, and within this range a choice is made. It’s only when you go outside of that range that people will be unhappy.

I will tend to make an unhealthier choice within this range of choices if I’m stressed out. If I would let someone else make the choice, with that someone being aware that my goal is to make healthier choices, the choice would differ from mine. But I will not be dissastisfied if that choice stays within the margins. The point being that if this happens over the long term, I will be better off.

I think what I’ve described would make for an interesting experiment. I would be very curious to see whether deferring choice affects people’s diets in a positive way.

Lastly, I am very curious to know what sort of choices people had available to them decades ago, when people were thinner. I’ve speculated that the choice was much more limited back then, and that there has been an explosion of choice in countries with unhealthy weight gains. But it’s hard to find information about this.

Summary

• More problematic than the abundance of food is the abundance of choice

• People struggle to make healthy choices

• Deferring choice to someone else could lead to healthier choices

• Supermarkets could potentially offer this as a service free of charge