"The Next Trillion: An Interview with Paul Zane Pilzer," by John Milton Fogg, Network Marketing Lifestyles Magazine, September 2001.

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The Next Trillion:

Why the wellness industry will exceed the $1 trillion health care (sickness) industry in the next ten years.

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NML: Can you define "wellness" for us?

This is such a new need that the word itself, in the context we're using it, is an entirely new term. I had to come up with entirely new definitions. First, I had to realize that what we call the "health care" business is really the sickness business. Our medical industry today has very little, if anything, to do with health. The $1.4 trillion we spend on medical care, which is one seventh of the U.S. economy, is concerned with being sick and treating the symptoms of sickness. It has very little to do with preventing illness, with being stronger or healthier. When you go to people in the medical industry today and say, "I have arthritis, I don't see as well, I don't hear as well." They say, "It's because of age--age, age, age, age." But these things are really just symptoms of poor nutrition.

I define "wellness" as money spent to make you feel healthier, even when you're not "sick" by any standard medical terms. To make you stronger, to make you see better, to make you hear better, to fight what we might call the symptoms of aging.

Walk into any average home in any average neighborhood, talk to them, see what they need. If we were doing this 20 years ago, we'd find that most of them were worried about making a living, about their new job, about what professions their children should go into. The primary need for Americans in our first 200 years was economic. That's no longer true.

Today we are in the eleventh or twelfth year of an unbelievable economic expansion. Here's what you find today as you walk into each home: They have enough to eat, they overwhelmingly know where their economic opportunities are, they know what they could be doing to make more money, and if they're not, it's often by positive choice--for example, because they want to spend more time with their families. The overall primary need today is not their wealth--it's their health.

In the past, we've associated poverty and economic depression with ill health. When I was young, we often equated "poor" with thin, starving. "Thin rich man" was an oxymoron. Today, "poor" and "fat" have become synonymous. The tables have turned: "rich fat man" has become an oxymoron!

Today, the lower the income, the more we see obesity. Obesity is a symptom of poor nutrition. Typically someone who is obese is also vitamin-deficient, suffers from fatigue and arthritis or other ailments that all stem from poor nutrition.

Since 1980, we have more than doubled the percentage of overweight and obese people in our country. In 1980, 15 percent of the population was obese; by the year 2000 that number had jumped to 27 percent--that's 77 million clinically obese people! Those numbers have increased ten percent in just the past four years and are still growing at beyond epidemic rates.

Because of people being overweight or obese, we've also tripled the propensity to get diabetes in this country, with similar increases in so many other diseases. Today, at a time of unprecedented economic prosperity, we're seeing a huge part of our population falling off the edge. For me, here is the most amazing number: 61 percent of the United States

population is overweight. That number, too, has doubled since 1980.

NML: Is there a ray of sunshine here?

More than a ray; in fact, as grisly as this situation is, it has also given rise to an entirely new economic sector, a very positive sector--which is where I got the title The Next Trillion.

NML: Why do you call this the "next" trillion?

Today, the food industry represents about one trillion dollars annually; the "sickness business" is another trillion (actually, about $1.4 trillion). These two industries feed one another in a fairly insidious way because such a huge part of sickness today is caused by the poor nutrition supplied by the food industry. These two trillion-dollar industries work together to support that horrifying 61 percent overweight number.

Looking at those numbers, you might think that one day soon, everyone will be overweight or obese. That's actually not the case, though. The 39 percent of the U.S. population who are not overweight comprise 10 to 15 million Americans who are aging; as they age, they are getting more healthy, more fit, more strong--actually younger, by any standard medical definition.

These people represent that new economic sector. They are primarily wealthy people; the first thing they do as they start to have money is to figure out how they can be healthier--and they're doing it outside the medical establishment. They are going to fitness clubs, watching their food, taking the proper amounts of vitamins and minerals, and investigating supplements and other products that support their wellness.

When I began to see this trend clearly, I started wondering, is there a business here? The answer stunned me.

In the year 2000, wellness in America was already a $200 billion industry; about half of that is composed of the $24 billion spent on fitness clubs plus the $70 billion spent on vitamins and minerals. This $200 billion was hardly a blip ten years ago.

NML: Who is spending this money?

Mostly Baby Boomers: prosperous people from the ages of 35 to 55. The Baby Boomers are a powerful economic force; all marketers know that. Baby Boomers represent only 28 percent of our population--yet that group represents 50 percent of our economy.

Baby Boomers are the first generation we know of in recorded history who refuse to accept the aging process. This is fascinating, from a marketing standpoint. Look at the cars they buy: they're retro, designed to make them look like they're in high school. Look at the clothes they buy: they're retro, too--they look like the clothes they wanted but couldn't afford to buy in high school.

Up until now, the Baby Boomer marketing mind has been all about how to make them feel younger, how to help them remember what it was like to be young. Now it's gone a step further. Today, Boomers are starting to buy things that actually make them younger!

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