Americans spend over $40 billion per year on stuff we hope will make us thin. We buy diet sodas, diet food, diet books, diet videos, and more- we go to commercial weight-loss centers, we risk liposuction and other weight-loss surgery, and we take pills (even when they are proven so dangerous that they are withdrawn from the market).
Yet, the more we diet, the more we gain; we are much more likely to survive cancer than maintain weight loss for more than two years. It seems we are wasting a lot of time, a lot of heartache, and a lot of money on a futile goal.
What if we put that $40 billion to some other use? Each year, we could:
Put on third of all graduating high school seniors in the US through four years of college.
Pay off the federal deficit- twice.
Build 2.5 Habitat for Humanity homes for EACH of the US’s 2.5 millions homeless people.
Donate FOUR times more money to charities than the COMBINED charitable donations from all US corporations.
Provide SIX times more federally-funded day care centers.
Allocate EIGHT times more money to AIDS research, prevention and treatment.
Provide NINE times as many free school lunches to hungry children.
Run 97 small universities.
Fund the National Endowment for the Arts for 250 years.
Start an airline with 400 new 747 jets- and equip them with comfortable seating.
Install 840 new Macintosh computers in every US public high school.
Operate 4,000 health clinics.
Create 66,000 battered women’s shelters.
Take everyone on Earth out to see a movie.