“Did you know that chewing gum could increase a person’s metabolic rate by as much as 20 percent?” offered a seasoned ex-government official, as a curiosity, from behind a podium in the corner of the small conference room. Many in the audience, seated actually at multiple round tables, chuckled. Others jotted down a note. Some of them chuckled but also secretly jotted down a note. I’m not supposed to say who did what. Most of what happened in the meeting, I was directed, is not intended for public consumption at this point.

As attention to obesity has increased, soaring national obesity rates seem to be leveling off. In certain places, and among certain age groups, obesity seems even to be on the decline. But it is still a major health issue of our time, involving a third of Americans directly and costing billions of dollars, despite the fact that by some expert accounts, if everyone took in around 30 fewer calories per day, the national obesity rate would be back down to where it was in the 1970s. Why, then, has progress been meager?

Much of it has to do with public perceptions of obesity: either as a purely biological disease of metabolic imbalances and inefficiencies, or, oppositely, as a failing of character. The IOM is increasingly embracing media as a way of conveying an answer to what obesity is, and how it’s really best understood as neither. It is a confluence of the biological, the psychological, and perhaps most importantly, the social.

But I can say that the group was important and eclectic. There was the national health officer from the YMCA, a CDC program chief, the director of the childhood obesity team at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the vice president of the NAACP, executive director of the Congressional Hunger Center, the global director of health and nutrition at Mars (yes, Mars, proprietor of Combos, has a director of health and nutrition), a professor of global health from Duke University, a distinguished professor from University of California at San Diego, and on and on. It was all headed up by the attorney and former mayor of Nashville, Bill Purcell. There was no audience, no corporate sponsorship, and no grandstanding; it was just a lively meeting where people came to ostensibly solve obesity.

After the gum-chewing provocation, the speaker dove briefly into the under-appreciated concept of non-exercise activity thermogenesis: burning calories through basic daily activities. Is there a way to make a person into a fidgeter? He said yes, possibly. And that everyone should always give standing ovations for speakers—which everyone duly did, for every speaker, throughout the day. All of this built to the more salient overarching point that, by various metabolic calculations, as he put it, “The notion that people with obesity have decreased energy requirements is untrue.”