The world is getting fatter, and public health experts don't know what to do about it. As we discussed in part one, a wide variety of interventions, everything from calorie labels to soda taxes, have failed to reduce obesity rates to any significant extent. Yet researchers working in this field can't bring themselves to give up on policies designed to “nudge” (or even coerce) consumers into making healthier food choices.
Here I want to examine why these interventions haven't worked and why many obesity experts seem to have such a hard time accepting this fact. Nobody knows how to rid the world of obesity, but the considerations below should at least point us in the right...