Scams & deals that changed the world

A fascinating new book reveals how activities such as shopping online, popping pills or going on a diet became part of everyday life

PEOPLE being told they’re obese when they aren’t really, healthy people popping pills, light bulbs designed to go pop in the night . . . Welcome to the world of the big consumer rip-off – a world where some of the greatest deals are conjured up for the benefit of everyone except the consumer. But because we’re told some things are good for us and others will make life better and easier, we’re hooked.

In an engrossing new book, Done – The Secret Deals That Are Changing Our World, British investigative journalist Jacques Peretti delves into the private deals that transformed the world of tech, health, work and consumerism over the past 100 years – and altered all our lives in the process.

THE OBESITY SCAM

Long before we even had a real obesity epidemic the idea of a weight problem was conjured from thin air.

In 1945 statistician Louis Dublin at insurance giant Metropolitan Life’s headquarters in New York was down on his numbers and needed to impress his bosses. He began looking at the health premiums being paid by Met Life’s customers and realised it was hugely influenced by their weight.

Then he had an idea. By lowering the threshold weight at which policyholders would move from the “overweight to the more health-critical obese” category, Dublin discovered you could create tens of thousands more customers. And tens of thousands of “normal” people could now be re-categorised as “overweight”.

These newly “obese” and “overweight” customers would pay a higher insurance premium because the health risks associated with their weight would be deemed greater.

Dublin needed a scientific metric by which to make this happen so he invented the body mass index (BMI), a combination of weight and height. It seemed far more scientific than anything before but it confused muscle density and fat. According to his BMI reading, Usain Bolt – the world’s fastest man – is obese.

Overnight half the American population was redefined as either overweight or obese and would now have to pay higher premiums.

“Dublin looked at his data and just arbitrarily decided he’d take the desirable weight for people who were 25 and apply it to everyone,” says Joel Guerin, an investigative journalist who’s analysed Dublin’s methodology.

Met Life did a deal with grocery stores, doctors’ surgeries and supermarkets across America, which began installing weighing machines with the Met Life logo on them. Concerned housewives and businessmen visited their doctors and were assured that, yes, the new BMI calculations did indeed show they were now a danger to themselves.

There was a ticking time bomb inside Americans: fat – and it had to be dealt with immediately. Newspapers reported a nationwide fat panic. People with an especially high BMI were told they were at imminent risk of a heart attack or stroke.

The diet industry was born.