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I think there is a lot of fat in the government.

Money flows into the US, and inflates US assets, and allows the US to have a monstrous trade deficit. That means we are consuming more than we are producing.

This unchecked spending is growing faster than our economy, faster than inflation, and far beyond our means to sustain it.

Paradoxically Americans are becoming both more obese and more nutrient deficient at the same time. Obese children eating processed foods are nutrient depleted and increasingly get scurvy and rickets, diseases we thought were left behind in the 19th and 20th centuries.

While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health.

Obesity is awesome from a Wall Street perspective. It's not just one disease - there are all sorts of related diseases to profit from.

The U.S. has been living in a situation of excesses for too long. Consumers were out spending more than their income and the country was spending more than its income, running up large current-account deficits. Now we have to tighten our belts and save more.

It is a foregone opportunity that we could have a trillion dollars more of income for the United States if we were producing at capacity rather than falling so far short of it.

There's no reason that America should be No. 1 in obesity; we have the greatest country in the world.