David Allison

And I can remember being in a meeting with Kelly.

He and I were both speakers.

The meeting was convened by leaders in the food industry.

They were inviting him, and this is just as he was ramping up the rhetoric of toxic environment, toxic food environment, the epidemiologic environment, the public health environment argument.

This was when it had just begun emerging.

The NHANES-3 and then the later NHANES data was suddenly this wake-up call for the country.

Yeah, we knew there was obesity and we knew it was getting worse.

We didn't realize how rapidly it had started to get worse in the last couple of decades.

And now there was this hype, this panic.

And Kelly spoke and he said, we need social movement here.

He said, we can't do it on our own.

I've been the behavioral psychologist type.

He himself struggles with obesity.

It's not education.

The guy's brilliant.

He's enormously educated, but he still struggled, as did many other people of a similar degree of education and expertise.

And he said, we're treating this too much as an individual problem.

He said, you've got companies like McDonald's who have a goal of nobody should ever be more than X minutes away from McDonald's if they're driving in the United States.

And he said, that's a problem.

It's a problem when I'm driving down the street and I'm being assaulted by all the signage and so on.