According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity costs the US healthcare system $173 billion per year through ailments such as heart disease and diabetes. For decades, Americans have been encouraged to watch their diets and to exercise regularly. It’s often hard to start a diet and/or workout routine because there are so many delicious foods out there, and exercise, at first, is exhausting and painful. But a new class of weight loss drugs, GLP-1s, is changing the diet part of the equation for millions. By inhibiting the brain’s reward system, GLP-1 users have dramatically cut down their consumption of high-calorie sweet and savory foods like ice cream, pizza, pasta, and potato chips, resulting in dramatic reductions in weight.

While this is great news for GLP-1 users, it’s not such great news for snack food manufacturers, who have seen their sales drop rapidly over the past year. Packaged food companies like PepsiCo and Mondelez International have been investing billions of dollars in R&D to redesign their products, packaging, and marketing strategies in order to make up for lost revenue.

One company, however, doesn’t seem to be feeling the pinch of the weight loss trend. Swiss chocolatier Lindt recently reported a seventeen percent increase in premium chocolate sales among GLP-1 users, while sales among non-GLP-1 users rose by only six percent, a result surprised many analysts. As it turns out, while GLP-1s reduces the cravings for high-calorie foods, it does not eliminate them completely. As a result, many have taken a quality vs. quantity approach, opting for premium confections, like Lindt chocolates. In this case, it seems like it goes a little long way.

Discussion Questions:

  1. What is the time-inconsistency problem and how does it relate to weight loss strategies?
  2. What are some “commitment devices” that can be used to overcome the time-inconsistency problem?