Thinking in Circles About Obesity Applying Systems Thinking to Weigh
Thinking in Circles about Obesity: Applying Systems Thinking to Weight Management Tarek K.A. Hamid, Operational and Information Sciences, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California Low-carb…low-fat…high-protein…high-fiber…Americans are food-savvy, la
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in Circles About
Obesity
Applying Systems Thinking to Weight Management Tarek K.A. Hamid
Thinking in Circles About Obesity
Thinking in Circles About Obesity Applying Systems Thinking to Weight Management
Tarek K.A. Hamid
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Tarek K.A. Hamid Department of Operations Research Naval Postgraduate School Monterey CA 93943 USA [email protected]
ISBN 978-0-387-09468-7 e-ISBN 978-0-387-09469-4 DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-09469-4 Springer New York Dordrecht Heidelberg London Library of Congress Control Number: 2009931951 # Springer ScienceþBusiness Media, LLC 2009 All rights reserved. This work may not be translated or copied in whole or in part without the written permission of the publisher (Springer ScienceþBusiness Media, LLC, 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013, USA), except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Use in connection with any form of information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed is forbidden. The use in this publication of trade names, trademarks, service marks, and similar terms, even if they are not identified as such, is not to be taken as an expression of opinion as to whether or not they are subject to proprietary rights. Printed on acid-free paper Springer is part of Springer ScienceþBusiness Media (www.springer.com)
To Nadia: My wife and best friend.
Preface
Today’s children may well become the first generation of Americans whose life expectancy will be shorter than that of their parents. The culprit, public health experts agree, is obesity and its associated health problems. Heretofore, the strategy to slow obesity’s galloping pace has been driven by what the philosopher Karl Popper calls ‘‘the bucket theory of the mind.’’ When minds are seen as containers and public understanding is viewed as being a function of how many scientific facts are known, the focus is naturally on how many scientific facts public minds contain. But the strategy has not worked. Despite all the diet books, the wide availability of reduced-calorie and reduced-fat foods, and the broad publicity about the obesity problem, America’s waistline continues to expand. It will take more than food pyramid images or a new nutritional guideline to stem obesity’s escalation. Albert Einstein once observed that the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them, and that we would have to shift to a new level, a deeper level of thinking, to solve them. This book argues for, and presents, a different perspective for thinking about and addressing the obesity problem: a systems thinking perspective. While already commonplace in engineering and in business, the use of systems thinking in personal health is less widely adopted. Yet this is precisely the setting where complexities are most problematic and where the stakes are highest. Though the tools and concepts associated with systems thinking are new and advanced, the underlying worldview
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