Contingencies Online - January/February 2013

Prevalence of obesity among adults aged 20 and older,
by sex and age: united states, 2009–2010

Percent 50

42 . 3
35 . 7
32 . 6
36 . 6
39 . 7
35 . 5
33 . 2
37 . 2 36 . 6

35 . 8
31 . 9
36 .0

all1

Men
women2

1significant increasing linear trend by age (p < 0.01)

2significant increasing linear trend by age (p<0.001) note: estimates were age adjusted by the direct method to the 2000 u.s. Census population using the age groups 20–39, 40–59, and 60 and older. source: CDC/nCHs, national Health and nutrition examination survey, 2009–2010

A growing number of employers recognize this and are making an attempt to encourage their workers to choose a healthier lifestyle by:

■ ■ Promoting regular physical activity and publishing fitness newsletters;

■ ■ Encouraging preventive health care through flu shots and on-site health screenings;

■ ■ Establishing online wellness portals and offering discounted wellness services and coaches such as personal trainers or nutritional consultants;

■ ■ Offering fitness classes or partially funding gym memberships, the purchase of exercise equipment, or vitamin supplements;

■ ■ Focusing on healthy vendor and cafeteria options;

■ ■ Offering smoker cessation programs and establishing smoke-free work environments;

■ ■ Providing nurse help-line services for employee questions;

■ ■ Sponsoring health fairs, offering awards such as cash or time off for choosing healthier lifestyle options, and promoting healthy activities through employeewide competitions.

Knowing and Doing Two of today’s most important intellectual and cultural trends, behavioral economics and the widespread use of data analysis to guide effective decisions, suggest further avenues toward promoting a healthier population. A major theme of modern cognitive science (recently popularized in such books as nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, and Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman) is that people’s choices are influenced to a surprising extent by their environments and by systematic cognitive biases. Thaler and Sunstein famously wrote that ordinary humans more closely resemble Homer Simpson from The Simpsons than Mr. Spock from Star Trek (who is a good exemplar of the ideally rational homo eco-nomicus from classical economics). When we decide what to buy, what to eat, or how much to save, we tend not to rationally evaluate the alternatives and choose the most sensible one. Rather, we are systematically influenced by the order in which the choices are arranged, habits and a bias toward the status quo, short-term pleasures and pains, and social effects. Borrowing a phrase from the behavioral economist Dan Ariely, we are “predictably irrational.”