Will Fat Taxes Kill You?

That's the tongue-in-cheek title of my article in Townhall.com.  Here are a couple excerpts:

 It is more than a little disconcerting, then, to learn that the mounting number of federal, state, and local policies aimed at slimming our waists may be misguided. The results from a careful literature review recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that people who are overweight and even a bit obese actually live longer than normal weight folk.

and

The pathologizing of extreme body types by public health professionals, pharmaceutical companies, and the federal government, for example by referring to obesity as an “epidemic”, has added insult to injury. And, it has licensed the actions of those who want to use the power of the government to restrict what we eat. Yet, if being overweight increases your lifespan, is it possible that government mandated fat taxes and soda bans may prematurely kill us?

and

But, if the overweight are living longer than the normal weight, where is the justification for public intervention to control our weight? Indeed, a study published last year in the Journal of Health Economics showed that health care expenditures are lower among overweight as compared to normal-weight men.

I go on to talk about the fallacy of using Medicare and Medicaid expenditures as justification for public intervention.  

Can Behavioral Economics Combat Obesity?

Obesity is a serious health problem. This article demonstrates that using behavioral economics to guide regulations is both misguided and can be counterproductive to obese and nonobese citizens alike.

That's the conclusion of an article in Regulation by Michael Marlow and Sherzod Abdukadirov.  I have a whole chapter in the Food Police on precisely this topic.

Are Healthy Foods More Expensive?

Are healthy grocery items more expensive than their regular within category counterparts? How do purchases of foods with positive health attributes change given negative unemployment shocks? To answer these questions, I supplement five years of multi-market, multi-chain scanner data with additional information on positive health attributes to create a unique dataset. First, this enables a robust descriptive analysis of the price of products with positive health attributes versus their regular within category counterparts; I find no evidence that products with positive health attributes are systematically more expensive or promoted systematically less.

That's from the job market paper of Jessica Rider in the Agricultural and Resource Economics Department at UC Berkeley.  

This is an interesting contribution to the debate between some folks at the USDA, who argue that healthy foods are not more expensive, and the work of people like Adam Drewnowski who say the opposite (here is just one example of many news stories on the debate).  

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 . . .  

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.