I heartily recommend your reading this story from The Salt, NPR's food blog, which tells about NuSI, a 38-year-old billionaire's research initiative on obesity and nutrition.

The money lines:

"We want to get to the moon; in other words, we want to discover the perfect set of rules and understand what controls obesity and the metabolic syndrome," says Peter Attia, a Stanford and Johns Hopkins-trained doctor who is NuSI's president. When they get there, NuSI claims, they'll have the tools to lower the obesity prevalence rate in the U.S. from 35 percent to 15 percent, and the diabetes rate from 8 percent to 2 percent. Their goal is to do this by 2020.

The cofounders or NuSI are the billionaire, John Arnold, who went from Enron to a highly successful hedge fund, and Gary Taubes, the author and New York Times Magazine writer whose podcast attracted Arnold's interest.