In human genes, there is a tendency to accumulate fat?
Text | Chinese businessman Tao Li Xin Bo
"Every festive season to gain three pounds", after the Spring Festival, are you caught in the weight loss battle?
And how profitable is the weight loss business behind every beauty lover?
【Huge market】
In March 2021, Guo Meimei, who had been in prison for less than two years, "entered the palace" again and was sentenced to 2 years and 9 months in prison.
This time, what makes her desperate is a profitable gray business - diet pills.
Along with Guo Meimei, a gang involving 75 people was arrested, involving an amount of more than 50 million yuan.
Before the incident, Guo Meimei was an active micro-businessman, claiming to have "more than 600,000 yuan per month". She sells "Chenk slimming candy" and claims to "eat a box of 7 pounds of weight". One box is priced at 699 yuan, which can be eaten for 10 days, and two boxes are a course of treatment, and its cost is less than 10 yuan.
▲Guo Meimei WeChat circle of friends
The slimming sugar is added with sibutramine, an appetite suppressant, which has long been proven to increase the risk of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease, resulting in side effects such as increased blood pressure, accelerated heart rate, anorexia, insomnia, abnormal liver function, etc., which are fatal in severe cases and have been listed as a banned drug as early as 2010. However, due to its low cost, it has been widely added to illegal diet pills, and frequent replacement of "vests" is circulated on the black market.
Guo Meimei is not an isolated case. Once, every once in a while, there was news that gangs selling illegal diet pills had been caught.
Zhao Benshan's female apprentice "Fat Girl" was also sentenced to 3 years in prison for selling diet pills live, under the guise of "pure Chinese medicine slimming capsules", and the price of each bottle was as high as 1900 yuan.
These high-priced diet pills, the production cost is less than 1 dime / pill, but sold at a price of more than 10 yuan / pill, the profit margin is more than 9000%.
In 2017, after the police in Loudi, Hunan Province, cracked more than 100 million yuan of diet pill dens, Wang Chengliang, the director of the municipal public security bureau, lamented that the profits of diet pills far exceeded drug trafficking.
Repeated accidents, but repeated prohibitions, is because the industry is too profitable.
The opposite of gray production, that is, the weight loss market under the sun, is also in the hundreds of billions.
Globe Newswire estimates that the global weight loss market will reach $264.68 billion by 2025. Ai Media Consulting expects that by 2023, the domestic slimming food market will reach 400 billion yuan.
The key word "weight loss" feeds too many people.
Starting from food, it feeds the market segments of sugar-free foods, fat-reducing meals, and meal replacements; starting from drugs, L-carnitine and slimming tea have created high benefits from Besunyen; starting from sports, gyms, fitness equipment, and electronic scales are derivatives of the weight loss economy; and in the current fan economy, weight loss bloggers are highly sought after; even in medical beauty, it is also a major revenue-generating tool for hospitals - slimming face slimming leg needles, liposuction surgery is very popular.
Even the star group wants to squeeze into the weight loss universe for a piece of the pie.
In the past two years, the keyword of "star + weight loss" has frequently appeared on the hot search, and there are veteran artists Zhang Shaohan in this list, Ouyang Nana, Guan Xiaotong, and many new traffic stars.
Yin Zheng is one of them. Three months after he entered the Little Red Book, he surpassed the "top stream" Cai Xukun, Angelababy and others, and became the most popular star of the Little Red Book.
Yin Zheng's secret is to release his daily notes for weight loss, since entering, he has released more than 200 "eating" videos, quickly increased the number of fans by 2 million, and circled countless fans with a "Yin Zheng stewed dish".
Since being tied up with weight loss, Yin Zheng has received at least 10 major low-fat brand cooperation promotions, even including high-end skin care products such as Sea Blue Mystery and Sisley.
Behind the gold absorption effect, the vast mass base of weight loss can be seen.
According to the latest data from the Report on the Nutrition and Chronic Disease Status of Chinese Residents (2020), more than half of China's adults are currently overweight or obese. At the same time, Ai Media Consulting survey shows that in terms of the willingness to pay for slimming, 91.6% of the netizens surveyed said that they were willing to pay for slimming, of which nearly 60% were willing to pay more than 1,000 yuan.
In 2012, the "Life Times" sorted out more than 10,000 netizen messages, summarized the top ten New Year's wishes of the Chinese, and successfully ranked sixth in weight loss, and even exceeded the other half.
This is a mountain of gold that is constantly growing.
[A "war" waged by a few people]
The foundation of the golden mountain of weight loss is a concept called calories. Most of today's concept of weight loss is based on this, but it has nothing to do with weight loss at the beginning.
"Calories" was originally a simple unit of measurement, and when the U.S. government created the USDA in early 1894, the research team created "calories" in order to find a unified unit to measure the energy values of different foods.
It was really "socialized" after 1900.
At that time, the United States was setting off a wave of "science", and people's worship of science reached an incomparable level, science is correct, science is justice. At the time, almost all the media outlets had a column for scientists, with Lulu Pitts, the most famous, serving content for more than 400 newspapers across the country and single-handedly promoting "calories."
Lulu Pitts
Lulu Pittez is a medical expert, the language is pungent and sarcastic, it is precisely she hates obesity, she feels that obesity is a person who has no self-control, can not control the weight, is morally problematic, and her articles often make personal attacks on fat people:
"All your problems come from one word, obesity. Dead fat! Come, tell me first, how many pounds do you have? ”
More than 100 years ago, she was the first to introduce the concept of calories into weight loss, proposing the way calories are still popular today. She talks about her strict control of 1,200 calories per day. She also published Diet and Health: The Key to Calories, which topped the bestseller list for two consecutive years in 1924 and 1925.
At the same time, the fashion industry also began to abandon those fat clothes, represented by Vogue and Chanel, began to emphasize tailoring, emphasized the curve of the body, and released a powerful signal: thin is fashion.
So the banner of weight loss has since been raised, which has overturned the previous trend of abundance and beauty, and involved people in the war against fat.
In 1940, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company published the world's first "ideal weight scale", saying "no" to the view that "adults can also gain weight as they age".
Five years later, Parisian fashion designer Lewis Reard invented the "bikini", and since then "beauty", "beach" and "bikini" have appeared repeatedly in various film and television works, expressing a clear rejection of fat.
In 1956, the world's first tv weight loss program was launched, and most of the women in the United States began to jump with the TV.
The trend continued until 1994, when a European magazine surveyed 1,000 young European women aged 18-25 and found that 54 percent would rather be killed by a truck than gain weight, and more than 70 percent would rather be stupid and uncultured than gain weight.
Obesity is being demonized year by year.
After the reform and opening up, such a wave also invaded China, and the qigong that was widely sought after in the 80s was a large part of it that was rushing to lose weight, pursuing slimness, and gradually becoming synonymous with women in the new era.
▲ In the 80s, the society said that practicing Qigong could lose weight, and a 6-year-old boy with a weight of 47 kilograms and a height of 120 centimeters was practicing Qigong to lose weight
Today, the trend of weight loss has continued for a hundred years and is getting more and more intense. From bird legs, comic waist to BM wind, weight loss has become the consensus of the whole people, thin has become the aesthetic of the whole people, we subconsciously react, fat is not good, thin is good.
So fat went from the physiological realm to the moral realm.
Under such moral requirements, thinness becomes a sign of success, it represents personal self-discipline and self-control, while fat is completely on the opposite side, weight loss becomes a social pressure, and in the high calorie is more and more readily available, obesity rate rises year by year at the moment, the horn of weight loss is blowing louder and louder, fat has become the enemy of the whole people.
And the weight loss market naturally makes a lot of money.
But in this long and protracted battle, there is a bottom hole: will there really be a winner?
An inescapable but deliberately overlooked fact is that weight loss is still a problem that humans cannot overcome.
At present, the popular weight loss method on social media is nothing more than two, eat less and move more, and have a very windy "ketogenic" diet.
David Ludwig, a professor at Harvard Medical School, has been concerned with food and obesity for many years, and in his best-selling book" Always feel hungry? It is pointed out that "eating less and moving more" is actually useless.
The hunger diet program is doomed to cure the symptoms, and a strong sense of hunger will stimulate the body's confrontation, so that the short-term weight loss effect will be lost, and even the weight will exceed before weight loss after rebound.
While eating less, increasing the amount of exercise can not effectively help lose weight, it will make people hungrier, will eat more food to "compensate".
The key to continuous weight loss is to adjust the diet structure, reduce the intake of refined carbohydrates, stimulate the vitality of fat cells through healthy food combinations and suitable exercise, let the metabolism enter the weight loss mode, and the feeling of fullness will increase at the same time, and the weight will begin to decline.
"Ketone", on the other hand, was invented as early as 1972, but countless scientific experiments have proven it to be unfeasible, and even the companies founded by the inventors have long since collapsed.
Scientists have turned their attention to deeper biological mechanisms.
In 1962, anthropologist James V. Neel first revealed the "frugal gene" hypothesis, stating that humans, in response to food scarcity in ancient times, prioritized converting energy into fat and consuming as few genes as possible when food was plentiful.
This may indicate that human genes have a tendency to accumulate fat. The weight loss market is tantamount to fighting with human nature, and the difficulty can be imagined.
【Loopholes that cannot be filled】
Looking back over the century, weight loss has always been a man-made business, flowing with huge wealth, but its underlying logic is limited by biological laws and is doomed to form a closed loop.
Ren Zhengfei at the beginning of founding Huawei, lack of funds, once sold diet pills; and in early 1996, when the capital chain of giant group was about to break, Shi Yuzhu launched "giant fat" weight loss health products, so that giant group climbed up from the quagmire.
They are the most savvy entrepreneurs in China, who know the huge benefits of losing weight and know that it is not appropriate to stay here for a long time. After Huawei's capital turnover was normal, he never set foot in the weight loss market again, and Shi Yuzhu, a marketing master who "played it out" with human nature, found out the bottom line of the weight loss market earlier.
In the marketing of "giant fat", Shi Yuzhu started with a big promotion, and the slogan was:
"The next day works", "100% works", and "ask the people to testify" that can no longer be classic.
What he is eyeing is the mentality of weight loss users who are eager to succeed, which is also the characteristic of the weight loss market, which has brought impulsiveness and blindness, under such publicity, the sales volume of jubu fat has risen rapidly.
But at the same time, weight loss users also have a second mentality, there is no immediate effect, after use that is, thrown, will not be repurchased, and on the biological basis of weight loss is difficult, almost no product has an immediate effect, that is, this is a hammer deal. Shi Yuzhu is well versed in this, and after the intensive bombardment of advertising, there is no more market strategy in the follow-up.
But it is the characteristics of the weight loss market that have spawned a lot of fast money. In recent years, various concepts have been flying all over the world, enzymes, sugar substitutes, green juice, keto, fat-reducing meals, fitness, L-carnitine, in various forms and packaging, a concept scraped, is a large amount of fast money, but it can not last long, in the short term can not see the effect, the concept will die, so the need for new concepts.
In the weight loss market that has lasted for a hundred years, there has never been a real giant.
The myth spawned by fast money, the most famous is Besunyen, in 2009 it spent 190 million yuan to advertise, a year later, in exchange for a successful listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, became the first share of health tea in the mainland, at that time, Besunyen annual sales of 800 million.
But the good times are not long, in 2016, the State Food and Drug Administration stipulated that the name of health care products must not have functional propaganda text, slimming tea was forced to change its name to "Changjing Tea", when Besunyen lost 68.7 million yuan for the first time, down 174% year-on-year.
Besunyen's rapid demise is just a microcosm. This market that has existed for a hundred years seems to have an open door, but whoever wants to really step in will be hit in the head, with rapid results as a gimmick, and eventually it will disappear quickly.
Today, in fact, many companies have begun to reflect on the shortcomings of this market. Taking the current more optimistic brand Beast Life as an example, although it is classified as a meal replacement, the main focus is to provide "solutions" rather than sell weight loss products.
Replacing products with solutions can offset the negative effects of "disposable after use" to a certain extent, which can bring about longer-term repurchases and better survival of enterprises.
With similar logic to Beast Life, there are a large number of weight management brands such as Keep and Gollum, which will also provide users with a series of solutions through smart device assistance, exercise planning, meal replacement food, etc. according to the user's personal information.
They replace weight loss with weight management, which actually solves many pain points in the weight loss market, from the blind pursuit of thinness to the pursuit of a healthy long-term lifestyle, which can make the business model work longer.
However, on a large scale, weight loss is still results-oriented, and most audiences are still in a hurry.
At the same time, due to biological logic limitations, the weight loss market does not have a product with a definite effect guarantee, which means that the repurchase rate is still not too high.
This also means that in the end, it is still the fight who tells the story well. Most weight loss products still do not have their own moat, it is difficult to form a competitive advantage, so the anti-risk ability is relatively low.
The weight loss market will most likely continue to fight, the old concept will continue to grow old, and the new concept will flock to the market.
But from the perspective of consumers, today's weight loss market has made great progress, and some players in the weight loss market have realized that emphasizing simple thinness and rapid weight loss is not only unsustainable business model, but also harmful to consumer health.
So the wave of anti-excessive weight loss is gradually rising, and Beast Life, Keep, is also constantly promoting that weight loss should not be a short-term process, and it is not the thinner the better. Perhaps under the continuous cognitive update, people will slowly pursue a healthy and long-term lifestyle.
【References】
[1] "3 post-90s and 100 million yuan diet pill counterfeiting interest chain: profit margin of nearly 9,000%" China Youth Daily Hong Kefei
[2] "Chinese's Top Ten New Year's Wishes: I Want Parents to Be Healthy first," Life Times
[3] Compendium of the History of Obesity in the World: From Primitive Worship to Being Replaced by Fear, A Health Perspective
[4] Lulu Petes Wikipedia
[5] "Weight Loss: Young People And Punk Out of a 100 Billion Market" deep Krypton new consumption
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