How Financial Professionals Bet Against Wellness Coaches and Public Health Officials
Boy oh boy! Where has my head been? Don’t answer that. All these years, I and thousands of other health professionals have been trying to find ways to get as many people as possible to adopt healthy lifestyles. It turns out that the smart money has always bet against us.
Financial professionals know that adopting a healthy lifestyle is a very simple and common sense approach that isn’t likely to happen with enough people.
Do you know if everyone:
• started walking four or five times a week…
• left the tuxedo…
• and made some smart food choices…
obesity would vanish, type 2 diabetes would be a history lesson, heart disease and stroke would disappear from the disease map, and 8-10% of US GNP would be freed up for non-profit goods and services. disease related.
In fact, if regular exercise were a pill, it would be a $1 trillion per year global mega hit. And that’s only if everyone walked regularly.
Pretty easy, right? But financial professionals don’t think common sense like this is common. It’s not even a long shot: 25 million to 1, the equivalent odds of the mega lottery jackpot of happening.
What sets financial professionals apart from most is that they bet a lot of money (usually from other people) that they are right in predicting the future.
Timothy Schluter of Fisher Investments recently wrote a great article titled “Industry Watch: The Rising Risk of Diabetes.” He explained that as emerging economies improve, the diet of people in those countries is the first thing that needs to change. He later wrote: “…the introduction of foreign and processed foods, as well as a more sedentary urbanized work environment, introduced a relatively modern phenomenon to China: obesity.”
So the United States is finally running a trade surplus on something: obesity. And following those unhealthy lifestyles abroad are pharmaceuticals, medical device manufacturers, and healthcare services of all kinds. In fact, investing in this type of company, with an international reach, is considered a stable and safe way of investing. Populations in emerging economies are going to need much more of this material.
I began to wonder if anyone really believes that everyone can lead a healthy life. Which brings me to my favorite hobby: stupid questions!
What if these programs worked with 100% success?
• Hospital community wellness programs
• Distillery beverage in moderation campaigns
• Tobacco smoking cessation messages
You have to wonder about an industry launching a program that, if completely successful, would shut it down. If nothing else, America’s dairy farmers’ “got milk®” campaign makes economic sense if they were to achieve perfection. Tobacco PR people probably think it should be “I don’t have milk.”
The financial professionals I know really like wellness programs. But they know that economic progress introduces the lifestyle diseases of the modern world.
Maybe bad lifestyles are the problems we’d rather have in the world than alternative problems? I just don’t think humanity needs to make that trade. We can have a modern world without self-inflicted diseases. I’m still not giving up on that idea.
Here are two takeaways for health and wellness professionals:
1. Hate the sinner but love the sinner. Think of yours as a “spay and neuter” campaign. You probably wouldn’t endanger the existence of cats and dogs, but you would improve the lives of the living population.
2. Keep working to help all people lead healthy lives. But just in case, you might also consider investing in a diversified portfolio of healthcare stocks—the kind of organizations that hope you don’t have a real chance of achieving healthy outcomes with an entire population.
Then call me in a few years, and we can celebrate our own health, at the expense of those who didn’t listen to us.
