Many interventions in the obesity field were implemented without rigorous assessment of their actual impact.

“so we got a lot of nonsense rushing in the field we we got a lot of things that never would have in the beginning you wouldn't have predicted to work but people tried them because they sounded good they felt good gave people a positive feeling vending machines farmers markets uh walking trails without really saying all right let's really work this out how many people are going to do it if they do it how much effect will it have will they compensate by eating more or less or moving more or less later those things weren't done so we got a whole couple of Decades of lousy uninformative research”

“Ah, school-based approaches, uh, farmers markets, walking trails, um, calories on the menu, so on." All good ideas. All good ideas. Nudge. We tried them. None of them really seemed to work. meaningfully, right?”