This blog was a collaboration between the HEG’s own Heather Brown, Emma Frew (Birmingham University) and Grace Hampson (OHE)
Obesity is a complex disease. Despite an understanding that the rise in obesity levels have been caused by the influence of the food environment, many suggested treatment programmes rely on individuals taking responsibility to tackle their own obesity. Sadiq Khan’s (Mayor of London) Draft London Food Strategy poses some interesting economic issues in relation to the best ways to tackle obesity. As part of the iHEA Economics of Obesity Special Interest Group, we responded to the consultation, providing an economic perspective on some of the proposed measures.
We focus on two key aspects of the strategy:
1) Voluntary Participation by Businesses to Promote Healthy Food Choices
2) Banning Advertisement of Junk Food on Transport for London
Voluntary Participation:
We question whether voluntary participation by business is enough to promote healthy food products. What are the incentives for businesses to promote healthy foods? Can businesses work with government and public health policy makers to change consumer preferences so that we purchase healthy foods? Structuring the right incentives will be key to motivating change, but this appears to have been given little thought in the draft strategy.
Banning Advertisement of Junk Food:
We support strong steps to tackle obesity and reduce health inequality. However, care must be taken when implementing any strategy to guard against adverse unintended consequences.
Currently, the advertising of junk food makes up 65% of advertising revenue for Transport for London and it is not clear what will make up this difference if this is removed. Currently, alcohol advertising is permitted, so would replacing junk food with alcohol advertising help to improve population health?
If no other companies filled the revenue void, would this impact on the services that Transport for London could offer? If so, care must be taken to ensure that health inequalities are not increased by reduced services caused by the funding gap.
The evidence on the impact of advertising on unhealthy food consumption is inconclusive; a direct causal relationship has not been proven. However, if we can draw an analogy with the advertising of alcohol then econometric studies between marketing expenditure and consumption of alcohol has found no or only a modest correlation of between 5-8%. In the food market, other studies have shown that advertising has little relationship with the size of the market – the best examples are instant coffee and frozen vegetables – trends in advertising bear no relation to trends in consumption.
Another option could be to potentially use some of the money from advertising to support advertising for healthy foods i.e. if a company buys an advert for junk food they also need to pay for an advertisement for healthy food or contribute to a fund that would pay for this. Alternatively, some of the advertising money could go directly to support ‘healthy’ options such as healthy convenience foods or community gardens.
Overall:
We are widely supportive of the need for a food strategy and some of the innovative ideas proposed. However, more thought is needed around the potential unintended consequences of some of these measures, and plans for evaluation need to be put in place. Policy needs to be viewed as part of a wider system approach operating at multiple levels to respond to obesity, and we caution against heavy reliance on unmeasurable or unenforceable targets.