The food industry’s solution to the obesity epidemic: take a walk.

An internationally known obesity expert recently delivered a lecture on strategies for reversing the obesity epidemic at a large public university. His view was that a reduction in exercise, not an increase in intake, has caused the epidemic. He stated that dieting strategies have largely been failures because they asked too much of people. A better solution, he suggested, is to teach people to pursue the more attainable goal of increasing their caloric output by a mere 100 calories a day. To achieve this, he designed a Web-based program, sponsored by a giant soda corporation and an international agribusiness conglomerate, which instructs individuals to take a walk.