Assorted Links

• Bad news: Agriculture ranks low on list of top innovators (only Monsanto makes the list)

• Obesity is not a public health problem (or maybe it is? I must say that I was amused to see that this last link claims that behavioral economics holds the secret to “solving” obesity)

• More evidence that calorie labels are unlikely to be very effective

• Sometimes, old wives' tales are true

• I find it hard to take some of this writing seriously, but here is an interesting take on obesity “informed by feminist poststructuralist theory” which argues, among other things that:

Obesity science qualifies as ‘state science,’ to use Foucault’s term: it is a tangled web of government lobbies, academia and its research sponsors, service industries from the human genome sciences to multinational pharmaceutical and agribusiness complexes, the legal-juridical complex, and the insurance industry. Obesity science and its hegemonic norms have instituted a hidden political agenda through the very language and technologies deployed in the name of ‘truth.’ Obesity science and its dominant discourse act as a ‘fascist structure’

Efficacy of Fat Taxes and Thin Subsidies

Science News reported the following results from a recent study:

Taxes on soft drinks and foods high in saturated fats and subsidies for fruit and vegetables could lead to beneficial dietary changes and potentially improve health, according to a study by experts from New Zealand published in this week's PLOS Medicine.

and

The authors say: "Based on modelling studies, taxes on carbonated drinks and saturated fat and subsidies on fruits and vegetables are associated with beneficial dietary change, with the potential for improved health. "

My first reaction was "duh."  Clearly if you raise prices of (say sugar or fat) high enough, you will get people to eat less.  In fact, one way researchers often model a ban on a substance is by simulating what happens when the price gets high enough that no one buys the product.  

Thus, the key question isn't whether one can change consumption and nutrient intake with sufficiently high taxes or subsidies.  The better questions are by how much? and at what cost?  An even better question still: where is the market failure that would justify the tax or subsidy?  The answer to that last question is actually much less obvious than most public health professionals presume (see here or here).

On the former question of how much?, let's turn to the original study mentioned at the first of this post.  The study is actually a literature review, pulling together the findings of previously published papers (including one that I co-authored).  Below is a graph showing some of the key results from different studies simulating how much change in consumption (or energy intake) would occur from a change in the price of a good. Pay attention to the scale of the vertical axis.  My take (see the middle chart) is that it would take very large price changes to get energy consumption to change by much (a 20-40% increase in price results in a 0.2-0.4% reduction in calories consumed).  

Stated differently, these sorts of policies are likely very costly in achieving the desired health outcomes.  Moreover, we must ask why - if these health changes are really so inexpensive and beneficial - people are not already voluntarily making them?

Pesticide Facts

Over at his NYT blog, Mark Bittman weighs in on pesticide use in agriculture. It is really hard to know where to start to address the misnomers that are raised in his piece. Let me begin by saying, however, that no one (including myself) likes the thought of eating pesticides in food. But, we need to put things in perspective. Here are some UC Berkeley scientists:

We estimate that about 99.9% of the chemicals that humans ingest are naturally occurring. The amounts of synthetic pesticide residues in plant foods are low in comparison to the amount of natural pesticides produced by plants themselves.

Bittman begins by saying:

After the publication of “Silent Spring,” 50 years ago, we (scientists, environmental and health advocates, birdwatchers, citizens) managed to curb the use of pesticides[1] and our exposure to them — only to see their application grow and grow to the point where American agriculture uses more of them than ever before. And the threat is more acute than ever.

But if you click on the link he actually provides in the quote, you'll find front and center from the EPA that:

Total pounds of U.S. pesticide use decreased by approximately 8% from 1.2 to 1.1 billion pounds from 2000 to 2007.

Similarly, if you look at the USDA, you'll find that:

In 2007, roughly 877 million pounds of active ingredients were applied to U.S. cropland at a cost of roughly $7.9 billion. In comparison, in 1980, roughly 1.1 billion pounds of active ingredients were applied at a cost of roughly $7.1 billion (in inflation-adjusted dollars). During 1980-2007 the aggregate quantity of pesticides applied in the U.S. declined at an average rate of 0.6 percent per year

So, it appears the entire premise of the piece is off base. Still, I will briefly remark on some of the other claims raised in this piece:

• Even if pesticide use were increasing (which according to the above it is not), you have to keep in mind that not all pesticides are created equal. The pesticides farmers now use include much more glyphosate (think Round-Up) than they once did, which is less toxic and environmentally damaging than options they use to use (think atrazine).
• I agree integrated pest management (IPM) is a promising alternative and it is one that many farmers and food processors are already, voluntarily, pursuing because it can be profit enhancing. Pesticide resistance is a problem - always has been, always will be. Calling something a "superweed" makes it sound as if this is a new problem but it isn't. IPM can help mitigate resistance issues.
• The piece tries to link trends in pesticide use with autism and IQ. Has anyone heard of the Flynn effect? IQ is rising not falling.
• It is true that organics tend to (on average) use fewer total pesticides. But it is simply not true that organic farmers can't use pesticides. They can use "natural" pesticides like copper and sulfur, which are more toxic than many synthetics. There is really no way to tell when in the supermarket whether the organic has more or less pesticides than the non-organic.
• If you want to read a really nice account about pesticide risks in food, see Bjorn Lomborg's book. There you'll find lots of data and statistics showing that the relative risks of food pesticides are very small in the grand scheme of things. Moreover, he shows that the bigger cancer risk is not ingesting too many pesticides but rather not ingesting enough fruits and veggies.
• On an acre-per-acre basis, which commodities are the biggest users of pesticides? You might be surprised to find out that it is not corn, soybeans, or wheat but rather fruits and veggies like lemons, strawberries, etc. It is true that more pesticide is used in corn than strawberries but that's only because we grow a lot more corn than strawberries. If you look at pesticides per acres planted, a much different picture emerges.

Mark Twain on Smoking, Drinking, etc.

A colleague alerted me to this humorous piece by Mark Twain (from an essay titled The Moral Statistician written in 1893; it was partially reprinted in the WSJ a couple weeks ago).  Apparently Twain was a bit put off by the food police of his day . . .

I don't want any of your statistics. I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it.

I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc., etc., etc. And you are always figuring out how many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of wearing expansive hoops, etc., etc., etc. You never see but one side of the question.

You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they ought to have died young; and that hearty old Englishmen drink wine and survive it, and portly old Dutchmen both drink and smoke freely, and yet grow older and fatter all the time. And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime, (and which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone,) nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not  smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all these little vicious enjoyments for fifty years, but then what can you do with it? -what use can you put it to? Money can't save your infinitesimal soul; all the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life -therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment, where is the use in accumulating cash?

It won't do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a good humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and in church you are always down on your knees when the contribution box comes around; and you always pay your debts in greenbacks, and never give the revenue officers a true statement of your income. Now you know all these things yourself, don't you? Very well, then, what is the use of your stringing out your miserable lives to a lean and withered old age?

What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as "ornery" and unloveable as you are yourselves, by your ceaseless and villainous "moral statistics?" Now I don't approve of dissipation, and I don't indulge in it, either, but I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatever, and so I don't want to hear from you any more. I think you are the very same man who read me a long lecture, last week, about the degrading vice of smoking cigars, and then came back, in my absence, with your vile, reprehensible fire-proof gloves on, and carried off my beautiful parlor stove.

Assorted Links

• The editor of Food Safety News weighs in on my recent WSJ Op-Ed.

• The debate on Mandatory Country of Origin labeling of meat products heats up because of some research by my colleagues and me.

• The journal Agricultural and Applied Economic Perspectives just released a new issue with several interesting papers.  Here are some excerpts of a few of the papers.

• Poudel et al.

Our major findings are as follows: (1) if dietary requirements do not increase by more than 20% from the current level, crop yields from current cropland must increase by more than 57% just to meet dietary demand

• Crespi et al.

Exercising short-run oligopsony power is inimical to the long-run interests of buyers in these settings because below-competitive returns will lead to the exodus of resources from input production. Policy proposals grounded in the presumed linkage between concentration, competition, and market power may well be misguided and detrimental to the objectives that proponents seek to advance.

• Taylor et al.

Since U.S. domestic workers are unwilling to do farm work and the United States can feasibly import farm workers from only a few countries in close geographic proximity, the agricultural industry will eventually need to adjust production to use less labor. The decline in foreign labor supply to farms in the United States ultimately will need to be accompanied by farm labor conservation, switching to less labor intensive crops and technologies, and labor management practices that match fewer workers with more farm jobs.