Not good news for junk food lovers… a recent U.S. study finds that taxing high fat and sugar-laden junk food would be a more effective way to fight obesity than making healthy foods more affordable.
Looking for ways to prevent obesity is not a new idea, especially with almost a third of U.S. adults over 20 and one in five U.S. kids aged 6 to 19 considered obese according to numbers from the Centers for Disease Control. Still there hasn’t been much research on how taxes (or subsidies) might influence the way people make food choices at food stores.
The team out of the University at Buffalo, a highly respected research university, gave 42 lean and overweight mothers $22.50 per family member to spend at a “supermarket” set up at the UB Division of Behavioral Medicine Laboratory as a grocery store stocked with images of all types of food – cola drinks, cookies, bananas and whole wheat bread etc – a total of 30 healthy options and 30 junk foods. There were four healthy drink choices – 2 juices, skim milk and water – and four sugar sweetened beverages.
The subjects were sent on a two hour grocery shopping trip, told to imagine they had nothing in the house and were going to the market to get the week’s groceries for their family.
The women shopped five different times. For the first visit, the prices of all the foods and drinks were what they would be at a local market. Two shopping trips saw the prices of the healthier foods lowered, while for another two trips the prices of the unhealthy foods and drinks were raised.
Raising the price of junk food, as might happen under a so-called “sin tax” was far more effective in getting the subjects to buy a week’s worth of groceries lower in overall calories than was cutting the prices of the healthy choices.
In fact, reducing the prices of healthy foods actually increased the overall calorie value of the foods and drinks the women bought.
When junk foods were taxed by 10% subjects bought 14.4% fewer high fat and sugar-laden foods and drinks. This brought down the overall calories of the week’s shopping by 6.5%.
Sin taxes have been levied successfully against cigarettes and been mentioned quite a bit lately as a way to help fund restructuring the U.S. healthcare system. No one in Congress has yet to endorse them.
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Warning: New tax on food Continued…
Still, fattening foods are usually cheap, while healthier options like fresh fruit and veggies are often more expensive.
The argument goes that a tax could offset this, and urge people toward buying more healthy options. The University of Buffalo research certainly seems to offer support for this idea.
“The results of this study suggest that the goal would be to develop a strategy that simultaneously reduces purchases of less healthy foods while increasing the purchase of healthier options,” says study lead author Leonard H. Epstein, Ph.D., a UB Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics and also head of the Division of Behavioral Medicine.
“Public health initiatives aimed at modifying food purchasing by manipulating prices may be an important addition to clinical interventions to treat or prevent obesity.”
To your good health,
Kirsten Whittaker
Daily Health Bulletin Editor
