As controversial as they are, taxes on unhealthy products such as sugary drinks can be effective in getting people to stop buying them, data suggest. (To learn more, read “Soda taxes could help Americans tackle their sugar addiction.”) Levying surcharges on other foods that health policymakers want to curb the public’s consumption of might also work, according to researchers tapping into data from Chicago Booth’s Kilts Center for Marketing.
Specifically, they find that higher prices on cookies, chips, frozen pizza, and other “vice” foods are more likely to discourage purchases by people at risk for obesity than other people. They suggest that health policymakers could consider broadening taxes on such foods knowing that the higher prices may have a greater effect on this group.
The researchers use the term vice to describe foods “that are tempting and purchased impulsively.” They define virtue foods in the study as including apples, carrots, packaged salads, dry beans, rice, eggs, and bottled water. These are terms and definitions borrowed from behavioral science.
The American Medical Association recognized obesity as a disease in 2013. Obesity involves complex factors that go beyond the behavioral; there are genetic, environmental, social, physiologic, and economic components that scientists don’t fully understand yet and doctors are still figuring out how best to treat and address. One thing is for sure: it is not linked to morality the way vice and virtue may imply.
To complicate things further, the tool doctors have been using to measure obesity, and which the researchers employ in this study, the body mass index, is considered by the AMA to be unsatisfactory, as it fails to account for differences in body composition based on sex, ethnicity, race, and age.
And yet, there’s little question that the disease is concerning to public-health experts. About 42 percent of Americans are obese, and obesity is linked to heart disease, strokes, diabetes, fatty liver disease, and certain cancers.
The researchers, University of Illinois’s Ying Bao, University of Toronto’s Matthew Osborne, University of Massachusetts, Amherst’s Emily Wang, and Penn State’s Edward C. Jaenick, set out to test the effects of taxing vice foods, and were surprised, they say, to find a stronger reaction from the high BMI group over the general population. They measured the effects by tracking how consumers reacted to price swings in the vice and virtue categories using three data sets from 2010 to 2015: NielsenIQ Consumer Panel Data, which tracks US household purchases from grocery stores and other retailers; NielsenIQ Retail Scanner Data, which gauges weekly quantities of products sold and their prices; and the Circana MedProfiler health survey, which collects information including people’s self-reported weight, height, and diet and exercise habits.