Today's children may become the first generation of Americans who will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. The culprit, consistent with public health experts, is obesity and associated health problems.

So far, the strategy to slow the pace of stagnant obesity has been driven by what philosopher Karl Popper calls the "bucket of mind theory". When minds are seen as containers and perceived as a function of the number of known scientific facts, the focus is naturally on the number of scientific facts contained in common minds.

But the strategy did not work. Despite all the diet books, the wide availability of low-calorie foods and a few fats, and the widespread publicity for the obesity problem, America's waistline continues to expand.

It will require more images of food pyramid or new dietary guidelines to stop the rise of obesity. Albert Einstein has once noted that the great problems we face can not be solved by the same level of thinking as when we created them, and that we will have to move to a new level, a deeper level of thinking, tosolvethem. This book represents, represents a different perspective to think about and address the problem of obesity: the perspective of systems thinking. While it is already common in engineering and business, the use of personal health thinking systems is less widely dependent.

However, this is exactly where the complexities are more problematic and the faces are higher.