Blog : The Dubai Diet Plan

by Ed Zwirn on July 19th, 2013

Ah, the problems of affluence...

With gold prices down and oil prices up, the government of Dubai has hit upon the idea of paying its citizens in gold to lose weight. The people there are being offered one gram of gold (worth about $41 at the current price) for each kilogram (about 2.2 pounds) of weight they manage to shed between now and Aug. 16.

Dubai is part of the United Arab Emirates, which as a whole has an obesity rate of 33%, giving it the dubious distinction of being one of the top-10 countries in terms of obesity rates. Not to worry, however, the United States, which has its share of fat cats (in more ways than one), has an obesity rate which currently weighs in at 35.7% and is growing.

All we normally hear about in news reports from Arab countries is bloodshed, intolerance and terrorism, so it is refreshing to see that in at least one Arab country, the people are not so different from us, at least in terms of body mass. 

As Walt Disney would have had it, it is indeed a small world, after all. But there is at least one important difference between Dubai and the U.S. The government there has the riches (and the budget) to shell out the kind of money we are talking about,

There's got to be a penny stock investment angle here, but I'm not quite sure what it is. Perhaps penny stock investors and others could do well by themselves if they found a way to arbitrage this difference. If everybody rich enough to decide which stocks to buy could swap the fat people in their local communities and/or families with those in the Persian Gulf, where obesity rates are high in general, they could get a stake in the Dubai weight-loss trade, and get fat by getting skinny.

Seriously folks, there is something going on in a world containing so many societies in which people don't know what's good for hem. Does a company in your penny stock portfolio have a stake in exporting weight-loss products? Should you be selling short on the obese portion of this penny stock portfolio?

Even if, like most of us, you are not in a position to convert your excess poundage into gold, maybe a penny stock you own can make money off of the growing number of fat people in disparate regions. After all, the more obese any society gets, the more diet products, exercise spas and diet pills get sold on an annual basis. It's not that these products actually solve these kinds of problems, but they take the edge off the guilt we feel whenever we gain weight from overeating and lack of exercise.

So in the absence of the U.S. distributing the contents of Fort Knox to solve its own obesity problems, maybe we can find other, cheaper solutions to a growing worldwide health menace. Rather than investing in a penny stock with the promise to solve world hunger, maybe we should be looking at penny stock companies that take the opposite tack to riches (and/or fatty foods). On the other hand, maybe this says more about the value of gold than the value of obesity-linked penny stock investment vehicles.