Great Uncle Fred? I have been thinking about kids being persuaded that they know more about things than older people. Obviously, kids know more about some things than adults but people who want to sell you stuff want you to think you know more about everything and will therefore pester your parents into buying stuff for you. Something like that. There is a big con-trick going on with kids, rubbish products, terrible music, stupid clothes. I’m a kid: I know these things and I know that adverts work on kids like they don’t work on adults unless they’re pretending to be kids like when they buy cars. But what, I wonder, is the biggest con-trick played on humans in this country? (Brian, Spring 2008)

A con trick involves an innocent, though somehow foolish, consumer being persuaded to part with his or her money and receiving nothing, or less than nothing, for it; and the more successful the con, the more frequently it can be repeated. The trickster is not necessarily a criminal; his chief ally is the naivety, or willed stupidity, of the person ready to be tricked. The most astonishing example of this sort of relationship (in Britain, at the beginning of the 21st century) is found in the sphere of attempted weight-loss. The total worth of the diet industry in this country would be impossible to quantify precisely but, in 2004, it was established that the British diet food and drink market was worth £4.6 billion. The American diet industry was then estimated to be worth up to $100 billion (which is more than the American government’s combined budget for health, education and welfare). These figures show a healthy contribution to an advanced economy, which is all very well. But - consider all the effort and sadness and self-denial and self-deception ... At any one time, around 12.8 million Britons are thought to be on a diet. Of these, 1.7 million are always on a diet. And what proportion of the 12.8 million succeed in losing some weight? Five per cent. Five per cent! The rest either stay the same, or gain weight. This is partly because our bodies are cleverer than we are in some ways and they are still attuned to the possibility of famine: a sudden and drastic cut in calories might be a diet to you - to your body it is a famine, a crisis, and must be responded to by storing fat for future use: that is to say, some diets are bound to make you fatter. Also, there is the problem that if the dieter thinks that the problem can be solved by anything more complicated than “Eat Less, Exercise More” (and no one has ever proved that it can), then the dieter has already made something simple and painless into a matter of difficulty and torture. From the outset, the dieter is slightly at odds with the truth: the truth of the matter is that the dieter is perhaps a wee bit lazy, a wee bit greedy, but these uncomfortable possibilities cannot be faced. There must be hard-to-understand reasons for the unwelcome weight-gain. And self-deception breeds more self-deception: for instance, it is quite common to deduce from a dieter’s behaviour that he or she believes that food consumed in private doesn’t really count. All this might be funny if it weren’t for the fact that we, as a species, have not yet worked out how to get sufficient food to everybody. And starvation is not at all funny. Also, food is a glorious necessity and it is desperately sad that people should get themselves into such a tangle over it, that it should bring anything other than satisfaction and delight into lives. The conduct of those few individuals who make barnloads of money by exploiting the daftness of the average dieter is only to expected. But the biggest con - surely - is that perpetrated every day - every second - on millions of people, by the diet industry. At the moment there has been no answer logged for this question.

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