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How is "junk food" defined for food policies like taxes? A combination of food category, processing, and nutrients can determine which foods should be subject to health-related policies, according to a new analysis examining three decades of U.S. food policies by researchers at the NYU School of Global Public Health and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts.
[...] "There is a growing recognition that an unhealthy diet stems from overconsumption of what we colloquially refer to as 'junk food,' " said Jennifer Pomeranz, assistant professor of public health policy and management at NYU School of Global Public Health and the first author of the study, published in the journal Milbank Quarterly. "However, public health efforts to address junk food are hindered by a lack of a uniform method to define junk food for policy purposes."
One policy example where a definition for junk food is needed is a junk food tax, which raises the price of such products to reduce consumption and generate revenue for other programs to improve the nutrition and health of communities in need. Previous research by NYU and Tufts shows that taxes on junk food are administratively and legally feasible.
[...] They identified and analyzed 47 laws and bills from 1991 through 2021, including one active junk food tax law implemented by the Navajo Nation, three state snack food sales taxes that were later repealed, and numerous junk food tax bills that have not been enacted. (Their analysis did not include policies that solely focused on beverages such as soda taxes.)
[...] The researchers were surprised that no state tax laws or bills directed the state's public health department to define the foods subject to the tax, a practice regularly used at the federal level and a mechanism that states could use to have experts define the foods to be taxed.
The researchers further concluded that their analysis supports the use of junk food taxes implemented as excise taxes paid by manufacturers or distributors, rather than sales taxes that need to be administered by retailers and paid directly by consumers. Revenue from excise taxes can be earmarked for particular uses, including improving access to healthy food in low-resource communities.
"An advantage of excise taxes is that food companies may be motivated to reformulate their products to be healthier to avoid taxation," said study co-author Sean Cash of the Friedman School at Tufts. "Defining foods to be taxed is not a static exercise, as existing products are reformulated and thousands of new packaged foods are introduced each year—so how we tax foods is not just a tool for steering consumers away from the least healthy options, but also for encouraging healthy innovations in what ends up on the supermarket shelves."
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday May 19 2023, @10:01PM (14 children)
This practice had led to a lot of abuse at the federal level, such as changing definitions of wetlands. At that post, I quoted at length from a reason.com article. I'll do so here as well.
Think about that with respect to junk food. Passing on such responsibilities to a regulatory agency means that the definition of "junk food" is now a moving target that can be exploited by the administration in power to grant market power to certain favored brands or used to punish certain lifestyles: perhaps, a single brand of a major company's junk food magically jumps through the regulatory hoops that competitors can't manage, maybe vegetable-based foods and juices are now junk food, or maybe animal products are now junk food.
And of course, it'll take a lot of money to determine if your product falls under the terms of the definition this year or who to bribe to keep your product from getting hit. This is a massively bad idea no matter how "administratively and legally feasible" it may be.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday May 19 2023, @10:02PM
(Score: 4, Interesting) by gznork26 on Friday May 19 2023, @10:15PM (9 children)
Regulation of something entails defining what is to be regulated, and therein lies a nest of worms. If you enumerate items to be regulated, the countermove is to re-brand something or create a new product that is not in the list. If you specify characteristics, the countermove is to reformulate and escape the restriction. And so forth. So how could the regulated set be defined such that it actually means something useful? It feels like a logic problem, but I don't see how to compile it without warnings or errors that can be exploited. Ideas? Examples?
Khipu were Turing complete.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Friday May 19 2023, @11:55PM (5 children)
You have just described regulatory thrashing which occurs over much more than just defining stuff. My take is that even the largest and stodgiest of private businesses will be more agile than a regulator. If your regulation is so terrible that businesses are routing around the damage like this, then you need to change the approach.
My opinion is that we're way too eager to regulate things. For starters, I think regulation should be for something compelling and which has a large externality associated with it. I grant that a given source of junk food potentially has society-wide harm, depending on how prevalent the junk food consumption is, but it doesn't have externalities. If I gorge myself on junk food, you aren't harmed by that consumption or its aftermath. One might argue publicly funded health care costs, but even then society choose to fund that and embrace the costs that come with that choice.
Another reason to restrict regulation is that we can then focus on the things that are really important, rather than have them fall through the cracks because there were too many distractions around.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 20 2023, @01:12AM (4 children)
While I'm not in favor of over regulation either, you've gone too far (IMO) with this line,
> If I gorge myself on junk food, you aren't harmed by that consumption or its aftermath.
If you have a coronary and get to the crowded ER just before I do (I don't gorge on junk food), you may well take up the bed that I need.
(Score: 2, Touché) by khallow on Saturday May 20 2023, @01:39AM (3 children)
And if I have a coronary a few years later (due to not gorging on junk food), I still might take the bed you need.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Sunday May 21 2023, @04:15PM (2 children)
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 21 2023, @07:31PM (1 child)
That is indeed the problem. When you're complaining about displacement of health resources, the health food dude will displace them just the same. It just might be a bit later.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2023, @10:51AM
It's much easier to convince people to pay taxes on their "sinful" stuff like tobacco and junk food...
And if there's a pension or universal healthcare or basic income scheme, those unhealthy smokers paying billions of taxes and dying before retirement or soon after retirement are great for the country's budget. And even after retirement they'll be paying (tobacco) taxes. Would be similar for junk food addicts if they get taxed.
Thus it makes perfect sense to me, since I don't consume that much junk food... 😉
First they came for the smokers, and I did not speak out because I was not a smoker... (well actually I spoke out against bans - we should not ban smoking in restaurants and bars but instead tax places that allow smoking - don't miss out on the $$$$$$).
(Score: 1) by the_olo on Sunday May 21 2023, @07:40AM (2 children)
I think there is an effective way to counter the escape of restrictions through reformulation.
The regulators need to base the criteria for food as close as possible on scientifically-proven, biologically significant and objectively lab-measurable properties.
So instead of declaring "tax on fries" which is easy to evade, the taxation criteria could be based on things such as glycemic index [wikipedia.org] (above a certain threshold the tax would kick in and grow higher the more glycemic index exceeds that threshold).
Other possible metrics could include the ratio of fermentable and non-digestible fiber to easily digestible carbohydrates (i.e. to glucose).
For fat component of foods, the ratio of saturated to unsaturated fats.
Etc. etc.
These metrics should properly weed off harmful ingredients of food, and any reformulation would necessarily make the foods less harmful (e.g. lowering the glycemic index of a meal will practically always make it less harmful for insulin sensitivity).
(Score: 2) by gznork26 on Sunday May 21 2023, @10:44AM (1 child)
Thank you. Focusing on the glycemic index as a way to define junk food is an excellent solution.
It raises an interesting question, though. GI is not new, but this approach has not been taken. I suspect the reason has to do with how the situation must be understood: GI is a way to measure how a biological system responds to a complex mixture of ingredients. The typical method of regulation focuses on what is taken to be a proximate cause of the problem being regulated, so rules are made regarding some ingredient.
The distinction also exists in other areas. There is opposition to seeing and responding to systemic problems in society as well, with segments of the population insisting that systemic causes do not exist. So now I'm curious about whether focusing on a systemic element such as GI in dietary regulation would be met with similar resistance, and how it could be overcome.
If such opposition can be overcome in food regulation, how can the same approach be used in other areas?
Khipu were Turing complete.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2023, @10:33AM
If you use GI then are watermelons, pineapples, bananas and mangoes junk food? https://www.goodrx.com/conditions/diabetes/best-and-worst-fruit-for-diabetics [goodrx.com]
How about sweet potatoes? https://www.healthline.com/health/type-2-diabetes/fruits-vegetables#fruits-and-vegetables [healthline.com]
Those Okinawans eating junk food every day and living past 90... 😉
High fat ice cream has a lower glycemic index than bananas and sweet potatoes (for most people the fat tends blunt the sugar spike)... More protein too.
FWIW I do actually think that lots of fruits are junk food: https://www.newsweek.com/zoo-weans-animals-fruit-because-its-increased-sugar-makes-them-fat-and-rots-1145259 [newsweek.com]
And most fruit juices are even worse...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by the_olo on Sunday May 21 2023, @08:07AM (2 children)
khallow your arguments relate to areas of regulation that suffer from subjective interpretation and fuzziness of the science that backs the regulatory decisions.
In nutrition science, there has been a lot of back and forth over the last few decades, and carrying out studies is difficult because of the need to sustain a consistent diet among a large population of study participants over a long time. However, eventually a few unquestionable facts have been successfully established that can be used as a basis for objective, measurable criteria that are easily testable in a lab.
For example, there is a pretty robust understanding of how high glycemic index [wikipedia.org] of foods is associated with deterioration of insulin sensitivity [wikipedia.org] and a causative link to metabolic syndrome [wikipedia.org] and type 2 diabetes [wikipedia.org].
Similar findings have been established about the fiber content of foods (e.g. ratio of various classes of fiber to certain classes of human-digestible carbohydrates) and fats (ratio of various classes of unsaturated fats to saturated fats).
The good thing about such metrics is that they are easily measurable, independent of properties that are mostly irrelevant for health (e.g. animal vs plant-based foods) and attempts to game them would lead to the foods inherently becoming more healthy / less harmful because they would have to improve food's health-relevant properties.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday May 21 2023, @07:29PM
Any area of regulation that has large conflict of interest, including what you just mentioned, suffers from subjective interpretation and fuzziness. Nutrition regulation in particular is notorious for this.
My point here is that the strategy of "X is bad because science so force people to pay more for X" is extremely naive politically for many reasons. First, because as above, it ignores how tools of enforcement are already abused to yield results very different than expected - the science can be quite objective, but the politics isn't by definition. Second, it's not a compelling reason because if those people were weighting their decisions the same way the would-be policy makers were, then they wouldn't be buying X in the first place. There's a natural gap here between policy and actual people.
It also creates precedent for more meddling. Since we're fixing people because they eat the wrong foods, then it is a short jump to the usual meddling: fixing people with the wrong psychology, the wrong beliefs, wrong ancestry, or who just cross the wrong people.
Perhaps you say that can't possibly happen. Well what gave you the idea we should do this? Prior meddling in things like liquor and vice. This is just a bit further down that slippery slope.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2023, @10:16AM
Different foods affect different people differently though.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/huge-differences-even-when-people-ate-the-same-foods/ [cbsnews.com]
So for some people tomatoes are junk food?
Or are you going to say high glycemic index foods are OK as long as they provide enough other nutrients? Then would people start overdosing on vitamins etc just because the snack food manufacturers start "fortifying" their stuff?
Or just go with what happens with > 66% of a random sample? Is that a healthy sample or unhealthy sample or random sample of those not hospitalized?