Coca-Cola Fights Back

A remarkably large number of pundits and public health professionals have focused their angst on sugar-sweetened sodas.  The proposals range from soda taxes, bans on large soda sizes, removals of soda machines from schools, to prohibitions against purchases of sodas with food stamps, to vilifying Beyonce for starring in Pepsi commercials (apparently she is no longer up to snuff to sing the National Anthem at Obama's re-inauguration).  It's hard to know how much traction these proposals will ultimately gain, but there does seem to be some concerted effort focused on this issue at present.  (I previously blogged about one of the biggest anti-sugar activists here).

According to this bit on the Fox News Channel, it appears Coca-Cola is (sort of) fighting back.  From the small snippet available in the preview on Fox, it appears their main defense goes something like this: almost all foods, including Coke, have calories; yes, we want folks to lose weight but why single out calories from Coke?  Oh, and we're also developing non-calorie sweeteners.    

I somehow doubt this response will alleviate the angst those who abhor Big Food.  Whether it is convincing to the average consumer is a different question.  Will Coca-Cola's response have any impact?  Hard to say . . .  

Food Socialism

From Bloomberg.com, we learn:

At a bustling food market in downtown Caracas, armed officers belonging to President Hugo Chavez’s National Bolivarian Guard marched by boxes of lettuce and tomatoes, checking prices and storage rooms.

and

“This is the worst it’s ever been, I can’t find any eggs, rice or flour,” Noreli de Acosta, a 55-year-old housewife.  

What is behind it all?

Chavez suffered his only electoral defeat in 2007 when voters narrowly rejected a referendum to change 69 articles of the constitution amid shortages of beef, milk and sugar. He subsequently accelerated the nationalization of farms and food industries. Since taking office in 1999 he’s seized more than 1,000 companies or assets.Capital controls have exacerbated shortages by limiting the amount of foreign currency Venezuelans can obtain to import goods.

Yet, rather than freeing up capital controls, here is what the socialist government is up to:

Last year the government ordered companies such as Procter & Gamble Co. (PG) and Unilver Plc (ULVR) to lower the price of shampoo, soap and other personal care products to contain inflationary pressures. Authorities regulate prices for a wide range of products including chicken, cheese and coffee.

The government blames producers and merchants for hoarding products and this week carried out televised raids of warehouses. Among goods confiscated were 9,000 tons of sugar, part of which was imported by a supplier to the local unit of PepsiCo Inc. (PEP)

Shockingly, Chavez supporters are undeterred:

At a nearby poultry store, display cabinets were half empty and one shopper complained that prices were twice what the government mandated.

Morela Tirado, a 53-year-old housewife, said such shortages are only a small inconvenience and have not undermined her support for the Chavez government.

“So you switch meat for chicken, pasta for rice, what’s the big deal? Nobody is going hungry,” said Tirado. “It’s not that there’s no food, you just don’t always get what you want.”

It's too much of a stretch to say that calls for fat taxes, large soda bans, and veggie subsidies will lead to this kind of outcome.  But, I'd at least hope that situations like this in oil-rich Venezuela at least serve as a cautionary tale for those who think we can top-down engineer everyone's weight, health, and eating patterns.  After all, it is hard to imagine that Chavez and his advisers thought their capital controls, import restrictions, price-caps, and confiscations would lead to such bad outcomes.  These were - I'm sure - well meaning (but short sighted) plans to control the economy in one way, all the while forgetting that interventions in one area cause unexpected disruptions in another.    

Who Is To Blame For Obesity?

A recent poll conducted by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research asked people what they thought were major vs minor causes for obesity.  You can find all the issues listed here (see question 3).  The two major reasons were:

People spend too much time in front of TV, video game and computer screens

And

Fast food is inexpensive and easy to find

82% thought the first issue related to TV was a major reason and only 14% thought it minor.  75% thought inexpensive, available fast food a major issue, 17% thought it minor.

Some discussion over at Reason.com suggests that these findings indicate people perceive “technology” as the most blameworthy category.  But, I think the fact that fast-food availability is the 2nd leading cause casts some doubt on this interpretation.

A more direct way to get at the issue of whether people perceive the problem to be one of personal responsibility, nefarious actions of “Big Food,” or the “food environment” is to directly ask.  That’s exactly what we did in the same survey I discussed in my last blog post.  I’m not going into the details much now because they are the centerpiece of a paper we currently have in review, but I will reveal some juicy nuggets.

We asked people to indicate for each of seven entities, whether they thought each entity was primarily, somewhat, or not to blame for the rise in obesity.  Here are the results with the % ascribing primary blame in parentheses.

Individuals (80%)

Parents (59%)

Food manufacturers (35%)

Restaurants (20%)

Government policies (18%)

Grocery stores (10%)

Farmers (4%)

It is remarkable that 80% say individuals are primarily to blame for obesity when one notes that over 69% of adults in the US are overweight or obese according to the CDC. It is comforting to see that people haven’t completely abrogated personal responsibility.

Do People Want More Food Regulation? Or Less?

Over at Reason.com, Baylen Linnekin reports on the results of a recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.  According to Linnekin, the poll shows little public support for food taxes and bans.  Balyen contrasts the recent survey with some previous survey work I’d done which seems to show the opposite.

A vast literature on polling and survey research shows that subtle changes in wording and response categories can result in large shifts in behavior.  Thus, it is useful to compare the two questions side-by-side. In the end, I think you’ll find much more similarity in the two studies than perhaps first meets the eye.

Here is the exact AP-NORC poll question and response categories (it was a telephone poll and you can find the script here):

Do you favor, oppose, or neither favor nor oppose the following government policies?FOR EACH FAVOR OR OPPOSE: Is that strongly (favor/oppose) or somewhat (favor/oppose)?

Requiring more physical activity in schools (84%, 89%)

Providing nutritional guidelines and information to people about how to make healthy choices about diet and exercise (83%, 90%)

Funding farmers markets, bike paths and other healthy alternatives (74%, 81%)

Providing incentives to the food industry to produce healthier foods (73%, 80%)

Requiring restaurants to post calorie information on menus (70%, 78%)

Banning advertisements for unhealthy foods aimed at children (44%, 53%)

Placing a tax on the sale of unhealthy foods and drinks (31%, 40%)

Limiting the types or amounts of foods and drinks people can buy (15%, 25%)

As shown above, there were eight issues listed (in random order across respondents).  I’ve listed them in order of support.  I’ve also listed the % favoring in parentheses beside each issue, then a comma and the % favoring plus not opposed (to which I’ve added in the “neither opposed nor unopposed” to the total).

I’d hardly call this set of responses free market or libertarian.  There is ample support for requirements, subsidies, and mandates.  Given the way the question was asked, I could see a respondent perceiving the question to ask something like “rank these interventions from most favored to least favored.”  It would be interesting to know if there were strong order effects.  For example, if “taxes” came first, were they more/less supported than if they came last.  In any event, there is apparently weaker support (and less than majority support) for “fat taxes” and bans on amounts or types of foods people can buy (although, my gut feel is that if you replaced the vague “types or amounts of foods” with something specific like “transfats” or “GMOs” you might get a very different answer)

My study (published in Food Policy) phrased the questions a different way and used an online format.  I asked about preference for government action related to 10 food issues.  None of them match up perfectly with the list of eight above, but I’ll pull out two that are somewhat similar to the above. 

Each question asked:

Which of the following best describes your view on what the U.S. government should do?

Each question had two options that involved more government action, a status-quo option, and two options that involved less government action. 

Here are the results from one question about healthy food with % of respondents falling into each category:

Which of the following best describes your view on what the U.S. government should do?

Ban the use of transfats, saturated fats, and other unhealthy ingredients in food production (15.1%)

Increase regulations to restrict the use of transfats, saturated fats, and other unhealthy ingredients in food production (38.8%)

Maintain current policies on transfats and saturated fats (e.g., mandatory labeling in the supermarket)       (31.6%)

Reduce regulations on transfats and saturated fats    (2.7%)

Make no law regarding transfats, saturated fats, and other unhealthy food ingredients, leaving people to take responsibility for their own diet          (11.8%)

So, 53.9% wanted more regulation on this topic, 31.5% wanted the status-quo and 14.5% wanted less regulation.

Here are the results from another question I asked:

Which of the following best describes your view on what the U.S. government should do?

Create an agency to plan food production and distribution to improve nutritional intake (15.4%)

Use extensive taxes and subsidies to promote healthier foods           (14.2%)          

Maintain current regulations designed to promote healthier foods which include mandatory nutritional labels on foods and establishing suggested dietary intake (53.1%)     

Decrease efforts to promote healthier foods  (5.3%)

Eliminate all food health regulations; allow citizens to make their own food choices (11.9%)        

So, 29.7% wanted more regulation on this topic, 53.1% wanted the status quo, and 17.2% wanted less regulation.

In total, seven of the questions I asked about garnered majority support for government action and the most favorable related to issues that could be perceived as relating to food safety, food affordability, and animal welfare. Three issues did not garner support for more government action.  So, in my study 70% of the issues raised were such that people wanted more government action compared to the status quo or less government action. 

The AP-NORC poll asked about eight issues, and (depending on how you treat the “undecideds”), either 62.5% or 75% garnered majority support for more government action. 

So, yes, we can find a couple questions were we “free market” folks can take a bit of comfort.  However, the overall response patterns in both surveys are much more statist than I am comfortable with.  That’s one reason I decided to write The Food Police (you can also read more on my interpretation of these results here)  I’m hopeful I can bring more folks over to my way of thinking by presenting a perspective that differs from the one normally offered by many food writers.   

How Much Fatter are We?

I am working on a presentation I will give later in the month at the University of Alabama Medical School on the economics of obesity.  To put things in context, I wanted a graph showing the average weight of US men and women over the past 40 or so years.  If you think it would be easy to find this information on the web, you'd be wrong.  

There are lots of studies reporting the percent obese or reporting the mean BMI for a couple years, but the CDC, for some reason, hasn't complied a simple data set that lets you compare in the same units (their publications sometimes report means, sometimes medians, sometimes BMI, sometimes weight in lbs) for consistent age ranges.  After several hours work, I finally cobbled together the graph below showing the average weight (in lbs) of men and women from about 1960 to 2010 for people aged 40-49 (if you want to check me, the data was obtained from the publications here, here, and here, all of which rely on National Health and Nutrition Examination (NHANES) Survey).

Is it what you expected?  From about 1960 to today (or at least the latest comparable data I could find), the average weight of men aged 40-49 has increased 31.5 lbs.  For women, the number is 27.2 lbs.  In the past 10 years, the average weight of men aged 40-49 has increased 4.6 lbs.  For 40-49 year old women, weight actually fell 0.2 lbs over this time period.  In the last four years, the average weight of men in this age rage actually went down 1.7 lbs and the average weight of women fell 3.3 lbs.  

It is also worth mentioning that the average 40-49 year old male is today 1.3 inches taller than he was in 1960.  The average women is a full inch taller as well.

Whether these changes in weight are large or small are a subjective judgement call.  I will only point out that the average 40-49 year old women today weights about the same as the average 40-49 year old man from 1960.