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People looking for investment ideas often like to seek out great big societal trends and then find a way to play them. This is called "top-down" investing, and it has many proponents. (By contrast, "bottom-up" investing means looking for individual companies with traits you like, regardless of what industry they happen to be in.) And right now top-down investors have got a huge trend to cash in on, if only they can find a way.

The trend, apparent to anyone with his or her eyes open, is that we Americans as a group are getting older, fatter, and vainer.

We can't do much about getting older. The baby boomers are still America's largest generation, turning 50 at the rate of 10,000 a day. Combine that fact with increasing longevity thanks to medical advances, plus a declining birthrate, and it's clear why our country's average age is headed up.

We can do something about getting fatter, but do we want to? We now read continually about the increasing numbers of people who are overweight or obese. At the same time, health club memberships, sales of low-fat and low-carbohydrate foods, and sales of Dr. Atkins' diet books are roaring through the roof. So why are we still getting fatter?

And of course we could do something about getting vainer, but we definitely don't want to. We want smoother skin, whiter teeth, and darker hair, and we're ever more willing to pay for various expensive procedures to get these things.

So there's definitely a giant trend going on. The great question for investors is how to play it. The lesson to keep in mind, though it's forgotten all too often, is that sometimes revolutionary developments don't make money for anybody. Exhibit A is the airline industry: It has changed all our lives, yet it has been one of the great money pits in the history of capitalism. And let's not even get started on the Internet.

So who, if anyone, will make a ton of money on this trend? I'm going to leave out the whole medical sector -- drug makers, hospitals, etc. -- which will no doubt include some major winners. I'm also not considering cosmetics and related companies, which I suspect will also include some huge winners. For now I just want to focus on companies in the business of helping people live healthier lives.

For those companies, here's an inconvenient fact: Living healthy requires no special products or services at all. You don't need special foods, you just need to make the right choices with ordinary foods. You don't need sprawling gyms with gleaming chrome-plated dumbbells and high-tech machines, you just need to walk or run or jump rope enough to get your heart rate up; for building strength, exercises requiring only your own weight (various push-ups, pull-ups, crunches, etc.) are way more than sufficient. Bottom line, you can live healthy as a racehorse without spending one extra dime.

Fortunately for U.S. businesses, none of that really matters. We're a consumer society, and the way we tend to get what we want is to buy it. We respond to marketing. So there should be vast opportunities for companies that want to sell us healthy living, and many companies are cashing in. They're selling us natural or organic food (Hain's, Wild Oats, Whole Foods Market), "enhanced" water (Propel, Dasani NutriWater), vitamin and mineral supplements (Nature's Bounty and many others), gym facilities (24 Hour Fitness, Club One Fitness, Equinox, Bally's, Gold's, and countless local operations), weight loss programs (Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig), and endless other products and services.

A huge trend, beyond doubt. But here's my question: Which of these companies has what it takes to be a great investment? Specifically, which ones earn very high returns on capital and possess some kind of protection -- a powerful brand, or patents, or extraordinary customer loyalty -- that will prevent other companies from swooping in and competing those returns away?

On cursory examination, I think it's tough to identify any in this sector that fit the bill. That's not to say they're all losers. Many companies in this area are so young that we don't yet know what they can do, and probably some will turn into winners. Picking them at this stage is a roll of the dice. It's also a good bet that many of the successful companies in this sector will get bought by much larger players, just as PepsiCo bought Sobe, Sara Lee bought Earth Grains, Coca-Cola bought Odwalla, Wendy's bought Fresh Enterprises, and Bear Stearns bought Vitamin Shoppe. Stockholders of the acquiree generally do very well in those deals, but they're hard to predict.

This is the danger in top-down investing. The magnitude of the trend can blur our vision when it comes to what investors really care about: big returns on capital that can be sustained for years. That's a trait shared by very few companies in any sector, and in some sectors -- hot though they may be -- by no companies at all.