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specials. Their recommendations should not be for items that have too much salt, too many calories, or too much sugar. Just as it would be unethical for a doctor to recommend a treatment that carries a worse prognosis over a more favorable one, or for a lawyer to advise a client to make a plea bargain for the harshest sentence, the recommended meal of the day should always be balanced and healthy.
    Reframing the way we think about the food industry and the way we promote careers in the food business, from a field that requires no skills and no training to a highly respected profession that has as much responsibility for the health of our nation as the health industry itself, is a critical paradigm shift that I believe is necessary to control obesity.
    We won’t know the impact of any of these proposed new regulations until they are enacted. Offering healthy meals could backfire if people become more likely to overcompensate by eating poorly afterward, rewarding themselves with foods they should avoid. All innovations should be accompanied by rigorous evaluations to see whether unintended consequences negate any short-term benefits. We may have many false starts and bumps in the road ahead, but the more we keep at it, the more likely we are to succeed.

    * LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and was developed by the US Green Building Council to set a benchmark for design, construction, and operation of high-performance green buildings.

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    In the Meantime: What Individuals Can Do
    Until all the necessary impulse control policies are in place and all the grocery stores and restaurants stop encouraging customers to buy food that increases their risks of chronic diseases, individuals still have to face the onslaught of foods and food cues that lead them to eat too much. Not only was Rome not built in a day, but it took a hundred years before we had solid alcohol control laws and more than fifty years before we started making progress on tobacco control. It is certainly going to take time to create a groundswell of support for widespread regulation of food sales and harmful marketing practices. So what can we do in the meantime?
    Here is my advice:
            1)    Don’t go out to eat.
            2)    Don’t go into supermarkets.
            3)    Stop watching TV.
            4)    Spend your leisure time in a park.
    Right!
    This is highly unlikely to work for any but the most fanatical. Noteverybody wants to make avoiding the food environment a centerpiece of his or her life. Not everybody has the inclination to cook every night. Not everybody lives near a supermarket with delivery service.
    Dieting has been the mainstay of our approach to obesity for decades, though its general failure for the majority of people should make us question its efficacy. Many dieting behaviors that are believed to protect us from eating too much don’t hold up to scrutiny. For those who have already tried dieting without success, I would not recommend going that route again. There are many reasons why dieting fails, and often it makes some people even fatter.
    The Problem with Dieting
    One difficulty we might face when trying to reduce food intake is trying to limit our thoughts about food. It may seem like a good idea when we go on a diet to avoid thinking about food, because when we start thinking about food, we typically end up going to the refrigerator or the store to get something to eat. As sensible as it seems to try not to think about food, this is a very big mistake. The moment we try to forget about food, it seems that it’s all we can think of. This phenomenon has been dubbed the “ironic process of mental control” by researcher and professor Daniel Wegner of Harvard University, who has devoted quite some time to understanding why, when we are asked not to think of a polar bear, that’s exactly what we think of. 1 If only someone hadn’t told us not to think of a polar bear,