Staying at a hotel, I am given the benefit of seeing a newspaper that I would never otherwise be caught dead reading — _USA Today_. In this morning’s edition, two front-page articles are about such incredibly obvious phenomenoms that I can only hope it is simply shoddy _USA Today_ reporting to blame, but I expect that these two items are making news all over the place today. What a sad world we live in.
“Health spending soars for obesity,” we learn from a new study. This comes on the heels of two phenomena observed over the past few months and years. First, health costs are rising *a lot*. No one quite knows what to do about the health care “crisis” in America. Second, more and more people are becoming obese. A recent study, widely misinterpreted among the press, revealed that there is very little difference in life expectancy among those who are overweight, for a few reasons. First, our expectations of weight in this society might be a bit low, meaning that people who are just ten or fifteen pounds overweight might be just fine, thank you very much, especially older people, for whom a bit of extra fat serves as a protective cushion, so to speak. Secondly, we have developed medical ways of managing health conditions that are often the result of high weights, including diabetes and heart disease. While the nightly news saw this as a sign that people should stop worrying about weight, because being overweight is healthy (ha!), the real conclusion was that treating these associated ailments is *profitable*, and so the health care industry is having a field day.
So let us put these two things together, shall we? People are getting increasingly heavier, by eating bad foods, not getting enough physical activity, and not caring about their health. Because of this, society and health insurance must bear the increasingly high costs of keeping these people alive. At the same time, health care costs and premiums are spiraling out of control. Wait, you’re saying THERE’S A CONNECTION? That’s what _USA Today_ was kind enough to report on this morning. Not that there aren’t other factors. Notably, the way we manage old age and our reluctance to allow terminally ill patients to die is another MASSIVE factor leading to incredible health care costs and public health burdens, but obesity is certainly one major factor to consider. And now a “study” has officially “found” this to be the case. Hooray for us. Does someone want to do something about it yet?
Item two is even more straightforward, so I’ll spend less time obsessing over it. In short, companies have started to realize that in this complicated connected world with increased competition, lower prices, and more consumer choice, being *bad* to your customer hurts your bottom line! Airlines, hotels, and other businesses are FINALLY realizing that keeping the customer happy helps to inspire brand loyalty and keep customers, which is much cheaper than more and more advertising to try and catch the elusive new customer. Keeping people happy means they come back, they tell their friends, and your bottom line improves! Shocking!
Scrappy startups like JetBlue apparently were some of the first in this new era to empower their front-line employees to resolve customer complaints by actually changing things, apologizing, and offering incentives in the form of free meals, gift certificates, and free merchandise. This “new” “approach” is called “service recovery,” and it means training and empowering the employees on the ground to actually take the time and make the effort to *fix* the customer’s problems and make the customer happy. Amazing! Innovative! Powerful! Thank goodness someone finally figured this out.
I’m the first to admit that the customer is not “always right,” but generally when you’re paying good money for a service, you have a right to expect that service to be delivered. If a company messes up, it is easy for you to walk away. If they make that extra effort to fix the problem, the customer feels like they are being cared for and becomes more loyal to the brand. Sometimes its not about getting something free or a perk, sometimes it is about a sincere apology and someone actualy working to resolve the issue quickly. After all, if you’re on a family vacation, which would you rather have? Four hours of inconvenience and a $100 gift certificate, or an attentive staff that fixes the problem in five minutes and has you on your way? Your time and your happiness are often more valuable than perks. Companies would be wise to realize that delivering what they promise and keeping the customer satisfied is the best way to keep a customer, and its cheaper than quick fix approaches. I hope this trend will continue, and we will start to reach a better equillibrium.
And thank GOD that _USA Today_ was there to report on this amazing and innovative new marketing trend! A trend that so many of us might just call “common sense.”
Scrappy startups like JetBlue apparently were some of the first in this new era to empower their front-line employees to resolve customer complaints…
An example: On a flight from BOS to LGB, a woman rings the call button about 5 minutes before we’re about to pull out from the gate. She left her PDA on the seat at the gate. The cabin door has already been shut.
If we’d been on some other airline, it’dve been “tough luck, sister”. The flight attendant radio-ed the gate, and the PDA was put into the baggage hold until we arrived at LGB.
It took a total of 5 man-minutes (like man-hours, but a much more manageable chunk) to make a customer happy. And you know what? A planeful of 100+ customers who saw this just become future repeat customers. That I still remember this incident goes to show you how far a little thing like that can go. But then again, maybe I just like JetBlue for the DirecTV…
The study (this year 2006) has been showed to be wrong and flawed
The confounding factor is the fact that both smoking and diseases cause weight loss. So many people may either be “thin” because they’re healthy and lean or because they suffer from a illness that causes weight loss
When they re-analyzed the data comparing the data keeping people who lost weight after contracting an ilness and smokers outside it correctly appeared that the people who were overweight had an increased incidence for all diseases and higher mortality
Another reason for why all studies that showed being overweight is healthy or not so dangerous are flawed is the BMI
“Last year, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that being moderately overweight was not associated with the increase in death rates that was observed among the obese. In fact, that study found that the moderately overweight even had a lower death rate than individuals at normal weight.
This surprising finding bolstered a belief that being 10 or 15 pounds overweight was healthy. One sociology professor interviewed about the study in the New York Times went to so far as to assert that the study proved that what most people consider overweight is actually “the optimal weight.â€
Another study appeared late this summer in the British medical journal The Lancet. This study was a review of previous studies on obesity and cardiovascular health among patients with coronary artery disease (CAD). Once again, the conclusion was surprising: as of four years (on average) after being diagnosed with CAD, subjects who fell into the overweight or mildly obese categories had the lowest risk for dying. The authors of the study did not conclude, however, that being overweight is “healthy.â€
Instead, they strongly suggested that the most widely-used method to classify overweight and obesity (the body-mass index (BMI), which expresses weight in proportion to height) is simply an imperfect tool. They noted that “these findings could be explained by the lack of discriminatory power of BMI to differentiate between
“body fat” and
“lean mass.â€
An accompanying Lancet editorial went further, saying flatly that BMI should be “left aside†as a clinical tool.
Only one week later, in the August 24 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, a major study appeared that shed new light on those much buzzed-about studies. In the new study, 527,265 men and women who were between 50 and 71 years old at the start of the study had their diets, medical histories and other factors tracked by researchers. After 10 years, 61,317 participants had died. When researchers analyzed the data, they looked at death rates among healthy people who had never smoked. (It was important to eliminate the effect of smoking on weight, because smokers are a paradox: they have higher death rates, but tend not to be overweight or obese.)
When the researchers did this, the effect of overweight and obesity at midlife (age 50) became much easier to measure: overweight people had a 20 to 40 percent higher death rate. (The death rates among obese individuals, depending on their degree of obesity, were double or triple the rate of healthy participants.)”
A while back, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published a study and claimed it showed being slightly overweight was healthy. The CDC has since recognized the errors inherent in that study and has abandoned its conclusion. The CDC found that the study was on the wrong track because it included too many people who were thin because they suffered from chronic diseases and consequently weighed less. The classic case is the underweight heavy smoker. The CDC admits this skewed the study, as these sick and skinny people, when fed into the statistical mix, made it appear that being thin caused disease and mortality rather than being a consequence of disease that might lead to early death.
So after all the studies and smoke are cleared away, the old conclusion remains that if you want a longer and healthier life, you don’t want to be overweight or obese.