Obesity has reached epidemic proportions in the United States and globally. In 2003, more than 60% of the US population and more than 1 billion people in the world were overweight or obese. Obesity puts individuals at increased risk for many chronic diseases. The direct medical costs for obesity and its coexistent diseases were 5.7% and 6% of annual medical expenditure in the United States and European countries, respectively.

Healthy lifestyle changes including exercise and diet are effective solutions for weight loss. Many current weight loss strategies rely on voluntary participation in programs which have high drop-our rates and which are often not all that effective. Insights from behavioral economics can be used to help develop interventions that make it easier for people to do in the short-run what is in their longer-term interests.

In this session, three innovative weight loss programs in the United States based on behavioral economics are presented: a randomized trial to evaluate the effect of modest monetary rewards on successful weight loss among overweight and obese employees in 16 community colleges in one State in the United States; a randomized clinical trial to evaluate the effectiveness of daily lotteries and deposit contracts on weight loss among overweight and obese patients at a Veteran Affairs medical center; and an experiment to test the relative effectiveness of caloric information vs. manipulating defaults through the ordering of menu choices at Subway restaurants.

As described in the individual abstracts, all 3 of these approaches produced significant attrition reduction, weight loss, or healthier food choice. This suggests that behavioral economic approaches could be a promising way to modify the behavior of overweight or obese people to help address this difficult and important public health problem.