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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one active junk food tax law implemented by the Navajo Nation, three state snack food sales taxes that were later repealed, and numerous junk food tax bills that have not been enacted.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 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?