The New Wellness Revolution

How to Make a Fortune in the Next Trillion Dollar Industry

Paul Zane Pilzer

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118428634
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Read the Preface, Introduction, and Chapter 1 at thewellnessrevolution.paulzanepilzer.com.

Five years ago, Paul Zane Pilzer outlined the future of an industry he called "wellness" and showed readers how they could get in on the profitable bottom floor. The New Wellness Revolution, Second Edition includes more guidance and business advice for entrepreneurs, product distributors, physicians, and other wellness professionals. It's an industry that will only grow, so get in while you can.

CHAPTER 1

Why We Need a Revolution

First, let’s check out the definition: rev·o·lu·tion1

1 a: a sudden, radical, or complete change

b: a fundamental change in political organization

c: activity or movement designed to effect fundamental changes in the socioeconomic situation

d: a fundamental change in the way of thinking about or visualizing something: a change of paradigm <the Copernican revolution>

e: a changeover in use or preference esp. in technology <the computer revolution> <the foreign car revolution>

The seventeenth-century English writer John Milton saw revolution as the right of society to defend itself against abusive tyrants—creating a new order that reflected the needs of the people. To Milton, revolution was the means of accomplishing freedom.2

The eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant believed in revolution as a force for the advancement of humankind—a natural step in the realization of a higher ethical foundation for society.3

The nineteenth-century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel saw revolutions as the fulfillment of human destiny, and he saw revolutionary leaders as necessary to instigate and implement reforms.4

These insights aptly apply to the wellness revolution.

Entrepreneurs and revolutionaries are really the same kinds of people born into different circumstances. Both see the status quo in need of change, and both are willing to take the risks, and reap the rewards, of changing it.

The emerging wellness industry is as much a reaction to the tyranny of the sickness and the food industries as it is to every person’s desire for the freedom wellness offers. Wellness is the next natural step forward in our destiny and in the advancement of humankind. By extending your years of strength and wellness, you can accomplish those things you want to accomplish.

The revolutionary leaders in wellness are the entrepreneurs who grow and procreate wellness, the inventors who instigate wellness services and products, and the practitioners and distributors who carry the wellness message throughout society. Take your pick of how you want to be a leader of this new industry.

Revolutions and entrepreneurial journeys often begin with an epiphany—an illuminating discovery by an individual that typically sets him or her out on a quest. For everyone, this trigger will be different. For you, it could be what you learn from this book, or it could be a sickness experience—your own or that of a loved one—that could have been prevented. My epiphany occurred during a speech I was giving in 1996.

How Wellness Became My Cause

When I was growing up in the 1950s, economic issues seemed to dominate 95 percent of our waking lives. My father left for work at 5:30 A.M. and returned home after dinner, just as my mother was putting my brothers and me to bed. He did this six days a week. All our neighbors and relatives lived a similar existence, except those unlucky enough to be out of work. And, although everyone talked mostly about economic issues (how to make money, where to find work, etc.), no one seemed to have solutions for how to achieve economic success. This is why I became an economist: to find these solutions—solutions to what then seemed to be the most important problems facing my immediate society—my parents, relatives, and close friends.a

Twenty-five years later, while giving a speech in the Midwest, I realized that I was in the wrong profession, given the original reason I had chosen to become an economist.

It was Saturday, September 7, 1996, at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis. I was getting ready to go onstage as the keynote speaker before 45,000 people to discuss my latest book, God Wants You to Be Rich. My speaking fee had just been handed to me in a sealed envelope—more money for a 45-minute speech than I used to make in a full year when I graduated from Wharton and started working at Citibank.

I should have been elated. But instead I felt guilty. As I watched the audience file into the stadium and began my speech, I felt as if I were about to rip them off.

Like much of America, half of the audience was unhealthy and overweight, a direct consequence of diet and lifestyle evidenced by the fatigued look on their faces and the size of their waistlines. Nothing I was about to say about economics was going to improve the quality of their lives until they first learned how to take care of their bodies.

A strange urge seized me—to scrap my prepared speech and tell my audience that good health was more important than any riches they might acquire—but I chickened out. I didn’t want to offend my hosts. And truthfully, I didn’t know back then what actions would allow most people to take control of their health.

On the flight home early the next morning I began to wrestle with this question: Why would intelligent people spend time and money to improve their lives in every area except the one in which they most obviously needed improvement? And, more significant, what should a person who is unhealthy and overweight do to begin taking control of his or her life?

Why We Need a Revolution: Two Nations Divided by Great Wantb

I arrived in Los Angeles around 10 A.M. that Sunday morning and rushed to Pacific Palisades to meet the contractor who was renovating our family beach house. As we stood outside discussing the construction, neighbors jogged or biked by on their way to the beach. I was struck by how fit and healthy everyone appeared. Compared to some of the people I had just seen in Indianapolis, these neighbors seemed to be inhabitants of a different planet.

That week, as I began the research that led to this book, I became excited about why an economist needed to write about health and weight.

I quickly discovered that the major reason so many people are unhealthy and obese has more to do with economics than with biology.

Incredibly powerful economic forces are preventing people from taking control of their health and are actually encouraging them to gain weight—forces so powerful that nothing short of a revolution will be able to stop them.

For many individuals, it may be impossible to take control of their health until they first understand the $1.3 trillion food and $2.0 trillion medical industries that represent a quarter of our national economy.

I discovered that the effects of obesity and poor health go far beyond a person’s mere appearance. In our new millennium we have replaced racial and gender discrimination with a new kind of discrimination, based on a person’s weight and appearance. Whereas in the past poverty was associated with thinness and obesity with wealth, most people who are overweight today occupy the lower rungs of the economic ladder.

Rich fat man has become an oxymoron, and poor and fat have become synonymous.

Incredibly, despite the fact that we are enjoying the greatest economic prosperity ever known to humankind, 65 percent of the U.S. population is overweight, and a staggering 30 percent are clinically obese. These figures increased 7–10 percent in just five years since I wrote the first edition of this book (2002 to 2007).5

Weight and appearance now define social and economic opportunities, just as family name and birth did in the nineteenth century.

When a person is fat—not just 15 pounds overweight, but clinically obese—it is hard to find a job, a relationship, or the energy to stay on top of the everyday demands of even a simple life.

Even most people of normal weight are unhealthy, although they often don’t know it. Modern medicine tells them to accept headaches, stomach distress, body pain, fatigue, arthritis, and thousands of other common ailments as inevitable symptoms that afflict an aging population. Yet these ailments, like being overweight and obese, are the direct result of a terrible diet.

How Economics Perpetuates Obesity and Malnutrition

Economics is largely to blame for this state of affairs. A powerful trillion dollar food industry bombards us with messages calculated to make us eat more and more of the worst possible food.

Understanding how the food industry works today is critically important for entrepreneurs wanting to lead and/or participate in the wellness revolution.

Packaged food companies, such as General Foods and Procter & Gamble, employ some of the best and brightest minds to study consumer psychology and demographics. In trying to decide what sorts of foods to sell us, they invariably apply one of the great unwritten laws of marketing: it is easier to sell more product to an existing customer than to sell that same product to a new customer. In other words, it is easier to influence a regular customer to eat four additional bags of potato chips per month than it is to persuade a new customer, who may never have tasted potato chips, to buy even one bag of this exotic new substance.

Most processed food sales, products such as Hostess Twinkies, Oreo cookies, and McDonald’s Happy Meals,6 are governed by what those in the business call a “potato chip marketing equation.” According to this law, more than 90 percent of product sales are made to less than 10 percent of their customers. In the case of processed foods, that coveted 10 percent consists largely of people weighing more than 200 pounds and earning less than $35,000 per year. The targeting of overweight customers is especially lucrative since these unfortunate individuals typically consume twice the amount per serving as a person of normal weight.

Each company studies its 10 percent, known as the target market, like rats in a laboratory. Customer surveys reveal their likes, dislikes, hopes, dreams, heroes, and desires. High-consumption customers are recruited to take part in focus groups, where they are asked to sample new products, view advertising, and offer opinions.

No expense is spared to hit every psychological button that matters to the target market. If people in that market like a particular actor or singer, that very celebrity will soon appear on radio or television, praising the product. If a certain look, feel, or lifestyle appeals to people in that market, legions of stylists and designers will ...