What makes ‘junk food’ junk? Study examines how three decades of US policy define junk food for taxes and other regulations — ScienceDaily

Junk food, a term that generally describes sweet or savory snacks and desserts with low nutritional value, accounts for 15% of all calories consumed in the United States.

“There is increasing recognition that an unhealthy diet comes from excessive consumption of what we colloquially call ‘junk food,'” said Jennifer Pomeranz, an assistant professor of public health policy and management at the NYU School of Global Public Health and first author of the study, published in the journal Milbank Quarterly. “However, public health efforts to address junk food are hampered by the lack of a uniform method for defining junk food for political purposes.”

An example of a policy where a definition of junk food is needed is a junk food tax, which increases the price of junk food to reduce consumption and generate revenue for other programs to improve the nutrition and health of communities. needy. Previous research from NYU and Tufts shows that taxes on junk food are administratively and legally feasible.

Although junk food taxes are not widely used in the United States, several countries have successfully implemented them. Hungary taxes unhealthy foods that fall into certain categories and have high levels of nutrients, such as sugar and salt, an approach that has led to less junk food consumption, increased nutrition awareness, and pushed manufacturers to reformulate their products to make them healthier.

“People often say that it would be too difficult to define ‘junk food’ for taxes or other policies. Our new results point to numerous examples of existing US policies that define junk food and identify common threads between them,” said the study’s lead author, Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of politics at the Friedman School at Tufts.

To gain a deeper understanding of how existing policies determine what constitutes junk food, the researchers evaluated policies in which federal, state, or tribal governments defined food categories for tax or other related regulatory purposes. Not all of the policies targeted junk food: Federal regulations define foods covered by food assistance programs, while several states have tried to exempt the sale of home-cooked or farm-raised foods from retail requirements.

They identified and analyzed 47 laws and bills from 1991 to 2021, including an active junk food tax law implemented by the Navajo Nation, three state snack sales taxes that were later repealed, and numerous food tax bills. junk food that have not been enacted. (His analysis did not include policies that focused solely on beverages such as soda taxes.)

They found that existing policies used various criteria to define foods, including product categories (eg, candy, chips), processing (eg, added preservatives), place of preparation or sale (eg, ., homemade, farmers market, vending machine), nutrients (eg, levels of salt, saturated fat, sugar, or calories), and serving size. Of the 47 policies, 26 used multiple criteria to define foods.

Two themes emerged: First, the policies used food product categories to help differentiate between staple or necessary foods and non-staple foods. For example, bread was often excluded from junk food or snack food policies as it was considered a staple food, while candy and chips were considered non-staple foods.

Second, policies commonly added a combination of processing and/or nutrient criteria to determine which products within food categories would be subject to or exempt from regulation, generally favoring products with lower levels of processing and additives. This combined approach, which may provide a path forward for new junk food policies, is used in a Navajo Nation junk food tax that defines which foods are taxed based on category, processing, and nutrients, including fats. saturated, salt and sugar. .

The researchers were surprised that no state tax bill or law mandated the state public health department to define taxable foods, a practice that is regularly used at the federal level and a mechanism that states could use for experts define taxable foods. .

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 to be administered by retailers and paid directly by consumers. Excise tax revenue can be put to particular uses, including improving access to healthy food in low-income communities.

“One advantage of excise taxes is that food companies may be motivated to reformulate their products to be healthier and avoid the tax,” said study co-author Sean Cash, of the Friedman School at Tufts. “Defining the 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 the way we tax food is not just a tool to ward off taxpayers. consumers of less healthy options, but also for encouraging healthy innovations in what ends up on supermarket shelves.

This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (2R01HL115189-06A1).