Fight Aging!

This short article on corporate strategy has been circulating over the past couple of days; I found it interesting:

Campbell Soup Company is expecting a major shift in the market, which will affect the way products are developed and marketed.

According to Chor San Khoo, the firm's vice president of global nutrition and health, longevity will be the next big trend to hit the industry.

"Wellness is a huge market, and is growing at double digit rates. But the way consumers consider wellness is changing, and we predict there will be great changes in the market over the next ten years, which will impact how we develop products, how we market them, and possibly how we regulate them," she said.

"When the health and wellness market first emerged, the focus was on foods with health benefits. Now it is on a better quality of life. In the future, consumers will want to live longer."

According to Khoo, the major factors affecting the health and wellness market are an ageing population, increasing obesity, nutrition individualization, and higher numbers of working women.

"We're getting older and fatter. Obesity is the cross point to multiple disease conditions. In the next ten years, I predict we won't use the term 'wellness' anymore, we'll use 'live longer' as a basis for how we market products," she said.

As I've no doubt mentioned once or twice, the best way to cut through the blather and see what people really think about the future is to listen to those who (a) have have money at stake, and (b) are accountable for failure. That isn't to say that individuals or factions within that group will be right, but the wisdom of this crowd is the best you're likely to find.

What is most interesting to me here is not that you'll find people who care deeply about perceptions of health and life span at the Campbell Soup Company - you'll find them in any large company that addresses health markets - but the belief that the Tithonus Error will vanish. It would be a sea change indeed for the person on the street in 2017 to hear "live longer" in the same way as "wellness" is heard today: a wholly beneficial term, with the accepted, implicit and internalized assumption that those extra years of life are vigorous and healthy.

This is an interesting experiment: find any random person you know and ask them what the downside would be to using better medicine to live for 150 years. Nine times out of ten, I'll wager, your friend will tell you that living for so long would be terrible because a person would spend most of his or her life decrepit, increasingly crippled by age-related conditions. In otherwords, your random friend thinks that "healthy life extension" means "being aged for longer."

This preconception about the way in which healthy life extension works is known as the Tithonus Error. It is widespread to the point of ubiquity, unfortunately. Most people dismiss healthy life extension out of hand precisely because they see no attraction in being - as they assume - increasingly aged and debilitated.

The Tithonus Error is one of a number of significant hurdles to attaining widespread support for longevity research. I'd be pleased to see the messaging resources of corporate giants working to overturn this mistaken belief in the course of doing business.

Technorati tags: advocacy, life extension