After the American Music Awards in 1985, 45 of the superstars who attended - including Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, Billy Joel, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen - got together and stayed together until 8 a.m. the next morning. But they were not partying.

They were recording “We Are the World,” a song that would ultimately provide $63 million in aid to fight the famine in Africa. A famine so severe that in just two years and in just one country it caused 1 million deaths.

While that fundraising saved countless lives, receiving the funds ahead of time would’ve saved more. That’s why I’m calling upon the new generation of American musical megastars to be proactive: to get together and make some moola for Africa right now.

This time, though, the reason is radically different.

According to a projection announced about a month ago by the World Obesity Atlas, by 2030 more than 101 million African men and women will be obese. That would be a 272-percent increase from 2010 and create a health crisis the continent is as ill-prepared to handle as the famine 40 years ago.

I’m not an economist, so I won’t attempt to estimate how much money is needed. But I did just read a study that gave money (the prospect of it really) to obese individuals in the United States that worked really well.

You could read it, too, in the Dec. 5, 2022 issue of JAMA Internal Medicine - if its protracted title doesn’t turn you off: “Effectiveness of Goal-Directed and Outcome-Based Financial Incentives for Weight Loss in Primary Care Patients With Obesity Living in Socioeconomically Disadvantaged Neighborhoods.”

In the study, 668 obese adults from 18 to 70 years of age and living in “low-income neighborhoods” in New York City and Los Angeles set out to lose 5 percent of their body weight in six months, a rather reasonable goal. To reach it, someone weighing 200 pounds has to lose just 1.7 pounds per month.

All 668 received a membership to what used to be called Weight Watchers, a digital scale, a food journal, a fitness tracker, and attended monthly meetings with a doctor. But two-thirds of the group got more.

The chance to make money by reaching their weight-loss goal.

Half of the two-thirds were told they could get up to $750 for doing so.

Something to keep in mind as you continue that’s both editorializing and the truth: Regardless of monetary incentive, all obese people should be highly motivated to lose at least 5 percent of their body weight. A study performed at the University of Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis and published in Cell Metabolism in 2016 revealed that while bigger percentage losses helped even more, a 5-percent drop significantly reduced the risk of both Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease while markedly improving metabolic function in liver, fat and muscle tissue.

So it’s a bit disappointing that only 22.1 percent of those in the study not offered the cash incentive achieved their goal.

And a bit confusing to anyone who believes, as I do, that to take the best possible care of everything else, you need to take the best possible care of yourself.

That’s because 49.1 percent of those offered the added cash incentive did indeed lose at least 5 percent of their body weight. In other words, the prospect of making a bit of money - for achieving something far more valuable than any amount of money - made that something about 225 percent more likely to occur.

Talk about a one-step-forward-two-steps-backward finding absolutely loaded with socioeconomic implications. But such talk’s not for here.

What is that the probable reason for what’s projected to happen in Africa and what happened in this inner-city U.S. study could also be adversely affecting your health too.

Consuming too much ultra-processed food (UPF).

A recent study shows that even if you gain no unwanted weight from doing so, there’s another serious consequence: an increased risk of cancer.

Published in the journal eClinicalMedicine in February, the study reviewed health information accrued over the course of a decade on nearly 200,000 people in the United Kingdom. It found for every 10-percent increase in the amount of UPFs consumed, there was a corresponding 2-percent increase in developing any type of cancer, with the likelihood of women developing one specific type, ovarian, increasing to 19 percent.

Moreover, every 10-percent increase in UPFs increased the risk of dying from cancer by 6 percent, with the likelihood of women dying from ovarian cancer increasing to 30 percent.

As reported here previously, UPFs have been linked to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, and obesity. A study published in July 2022 also detected a correlation between UPFs and cognitive decline.

While virtually all foods you eat are processed to some extent, UPFs are specifically the ones that use added sugar, salt, fat, and manufactured ingredients to enhance taste or increase shelf life, such as cookies, candies, soda, white bread, pizza, potato chips, and microwaveable treats and meals.