Institute For The Future

Give Me a McStatin with Cheese

 

In what really is not a joke (though is likely a provocation), a group of British physicians published an article in the American Journal of Cardiology last week arguing that fast food companies should start packaging statins with their burgers and suggest names like a "McStatin pack" and slogans like "I'm neutralizin' it." The suggestion may seem silly, but the study authors make the fairly reasonable argument that we're allowed to put all sorts of unhealthy junk into our bodies, so why not at least make it easier to obtain pills to limit the damage?

 

Unfortunately, I can't seem to track down a full version of the article, but the abstract of the piece puts the logic this way:

 

 

 

 

In other spheres of human activity, individuals choosing risky pursuits (motorcycling, smoking, driving) are advised or compelled to use measures to minimize the risk (safety equipment, filters, seatbelts). Likewise, some individuals eat unhealthily. Routine accessibility of statins in establishments providing unhealthy food might be a rational modern means to offset the cardiovascular risk. Fast food outlets already offer free condiments to supplement meals. A free statin-containing accompaniment would offer cardiovascular benefits, opposite to the effects of equally available salt, sugar, and high-fat condiments. Although no substitute for systematic lifestyle improvements, including healthy diet, regular exercise, weight loss, and smoking cessation, complimentary statin packets would add, at little cost, 1 positive choice to a panoply of negative ones.

 

 

 

 

Now, of course, some critics of the proposal have the reasonable concern that spreading statins onto Big Macs might encourage reckless eating, and also note that a statin doesn't really counteract all of the negative effects of fast food.

 

But setting aside the seeming weirdness of the proposal, and the debate on the specifics of it, I think there are a couple bigger, notable points here. The first is that while it might sound mildly absurd to directly pair unhealthy food with a pill to offset some of its worst effects, my sense is that this is more or less how a lot of people already manage their health--through little mental accountings of good and bad things that (hopefully) net out to health. I actually argued that this could form the basis of an innovative design principle for motivating people to improve their health just a couple months ago.

 

The other major question here involves is one of those big questions about how we want to engage with people--and how we want people to engage with the world. Of course it would be much healthier to rarely eat fast food and avoid the statins altogether--but millions and millions served would seem to imply that, at least for many people, this is an unrealistic goal. And there are many reasons for this--fast food is cheap and convenient, unhealthy food is often comforting, and so on.

 

We could try to help people improve their food choices by telling them to eat healthier, which probably won't work. We could try to act at one of those pressure points--make healthier food available in more convenient locations, for example--which I think really would help a lot of people eat healthier.

 

The idea of packaging statins with junk food is something a bit different--an explicit (and I'm guessing intentionally provocative) call to recognize that eliminating bad choices isn't always possible, and sometimes the better approach is to limit the impact of those choices. Statins in hamburgers is an over-the-top example of that strategy--but that doesn't make the strategy a bad one in general.