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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one active junk food tax law implemented by the Navajo Nation, three state snack food sales taxes that were later repealed, and numerous junk food tax bills that have not been enacted.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) by lentilla on Saturday May 20 2023, @04:05AM (3 children)
People are easily able to categorise [wikipedia.org] products as junk or not-junk. (To be sure there will be many edge cases, but when pressed a choice can be made.) So we (humans) categorise a bunch of products and we pass the results over to Artificial Intellegence to formulate a filter.
The resulting filter will likely look ridiculous - "OK if cooked on Tuesday afternoons" won't make sense to humans, but it may well be an accurate determinant.
Now we leave manufacturers to make products. They can try to devise work-arounds (and they will try, and try and try and try), but they will get caught by the next round of re-categorisation. When it comes down to it, candy in a breakfast cereal box is junk food. Is, was, will always be - own it - nothing inherently wrong eating candy at breakfast.
So I am proposing we determine junk food with a complex filter. A filter that is so complicated that a normal human wouldn't be able to remember the rules... but the rules themselves don't matter in the same way that lighting a candle at midnight doesn't make it "daytime".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday May 20 2023, @11:22AM
I don't think you get what success is in such a situation. Success is not just easily scooting past the previous round of recategorization, which I think most of these triers would easily do, but also using that recategorization scheme to block your competitors. My take is that this would be easy to game merely by bribing the right people.
After all, those huge corporations that would easily figure out this scheme need all the advantages they can get. How much will it cost just for your small business to figure out if their current food product qualifies as junk food, and how easily it would be for a tweak in ingredients to bypass that excise tax?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aafcac on Saturday May 20 2023, @01:17PM
People were able to categorize it easily, but thanks to the sheer number of invented ingredients in "food" today, that can be quite hard. Just keeping track of things that are legitimately harmful versus a bunch of conspiracy theories can be a significant issue. And that assumes that the ingredients are known to be safe with decades of use.
Generally speaking, though, junkfoods are ones with an excessive number of calories and an insufficient amount of nutrients to justify the number of calories. A 1500 calorie food item that has an entire day's worth of nutrient content is probably not junk food, but the same number of calories and only a couple nutrients is definitely junkfood.
And really, probably the best way of handling it is to make it as easy as possible for customers to know how much bang they're getting for the calorie in terms of nutrients.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 21 2023, @04:16AM
People are easily able to categorize it. Meanwhile they get fatter and fatter. We need a system of AI cameras tracking every single morsel everybody stuffs down their throats. The AI can give in-depth nutrition advice, regardless of how healthy or not the cereal mixed with marshmallows is.