"Right now, obesity disproportionately affects lower-income individuals and minorities, and those individuals may not be able to afford commercial programs. So we need to see whether incentivizing or making these programs free would both increase the number of people who participate and lead to good [weight] losses," added Wing, who is a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Providence, R.I. and has done extensive research on the behavioral treatment of obesity.