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Welcome

In this week’s CommenTerry, I discuss compelling research that suggests that government-imposed taxes and regulations on the sale of unhealthy foods and beverages do not necessarily improve child health.

Bulletin Board

  • The John Locke Foundation is sponsoring a Citizen’s Constitutional Workshop on Saturday, November 12, from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at Kaplan Auditorium, Henderson County Library, in Hendersonville, N.C. Historian Dr. Troy Kickler and political science expert Dr. Michael Sanera will discuss "What would the Federalists and Anti-federalists say about the current political and economic crises?" The cost is $8.00 per participant, lunch included. Pre-registration is strongly suggested. For more information or to sign up for the event, visit the Events section of the John Locke Foundation web site.

  • The John Locke Foundation is sponsoring An Evening of Living History with special guests John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. "Jefferson and Adams: A Debate on the Future of the United States of America" will be held at the North Carolina Museum of History on Monday, November 21, at 7:00 p.m. A reception will follow the debate. The cost is $10.00 for adults and $5.00 for students. For more information or to register for the event, visit the Events section of the John Locke Foundation web site.

  • The John Locke Foundation invites you to a Headliner Luncheon on Thursday, December 15, at noon at Sisters Garden in Raleigh. Tim Carney, senior political columnist at the Washington Examiner, will discuss "Big Business and Big Government vs. The Free Market." For more information, visit the Events section of the John Locke Foundation website.

  • The North Carolina History Project would like educators and homeschool parents to submit lesson plans suitable for middle-school and high-school courses in North Carolina history. Please provide links to NC History Project encyclopedia articles and other primary and secondary source material, if possible. Go to the NC History Project web site for further information.

  • Visit JLF’s research newsletter archive because archives are inherently cool.

CommenTerry

In a study published in The Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine and funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago examined the beverage consumption of nearly 6,000 public middle school students in 40 states. They concluded that soda bans in middle schools did not significantly reduce students’ consumption of sugary drinks.

UI-Chicago researchers discovered that the middle school students in the study responded to the ban by simply purchasing different kinds of sugary drinks, like juices and sports drinks, in school vending machines. More importantly, overall consumption of sugary drinks did not fall in schools that banned all sugar-sweetened beverages from campus. Kids simply brought them from home.

Undeterred by the results, one study author argued that "more initiatives that target sweetened beverage consumption outside of schools — like beverage taxes and regulations on their marketing to children — were needed." But there are no guarantees that these "initiatives" would lower childhood obesity rates.

Canadian researchers Mark J. Eisenberg, Renee Atallah, Sonia M. Grandi, Sarah B. Windle, and Elliot M. Berry recently published an excellent overview of the issue of taxing and regulating food and beverage consumption outside of schools.

In "Legislative Approaches to Tackling the Obesity Epidemic" (Canadian Medical Association Journal, September 20, 2011), Eisenberg and his colleagues point out that unhealthy food and drink consumption is relatively inelastic. In other words, taxing certain food and beverage items may not necessarily reduce consumption of them. Furthermore, consumers may simply shift their consumption preferences to other unhealthy, non-taxed foods and drinks. That raises the difficulty of defining which foods and drinks should be subject to the tax.

I suspect that the process of deciding which foods and beverages to tax and regulate would have more to do with politics than science. Undoubtedly, it would invite various food and beverage industries to "negotiate" with government regulators and elected officials for special exemptions from the taxes and regulations. Those kinds of taxes and regulations are also unpopular with certain consumer groups, particular those who consume unhealthy foods and beverages in moderation and generally lead healthy lifestyles. Moreover, as Eisenberg et al. point out, lower income communities may object to food and beverage taxes because those kinds of taxes "have a disproportionately negative effect on lower socioeconomic classes, which are typically more dependent on fast foods for their nutrition" (p. 1498).

Additionally, it is not as simple as banning advertising or modifying land usage to create healthy "built environments." Eisenberg et al. reviewed the literature on advertising and obesity, and they concluded that the "the link between poor health outcomes and advertising of unhealthy foods is still unclear" (p. 1499). Moreover, the authors acknowledged, "A true causal association with regards to neighbourhood-associated risk factors and obesity has yet to be clearly established" (p. 1498).

For example, there is no consensus among researchers about the kinds of businesses that may contribute to the problem of school-age obesity. In "Proximity of Food Retailers to Schools and Rates of Overweight Ninth Grade Students: An Ecological Study in California" (BMC Public Health, 2011), researchers Philip Howard, Margaret Fitzpatrick, and Brian Fulfrost found that schools within a 10-minute walk of a convenience store had a higher rate of overweight ninth-graders than schools without them. Contrary to the expectations of the authors, there was no relationship between overweight students and nearby fast food restaurants and supermarkets.

The relationship between obesity and convenience stores was rather weak, however. According to researchers, "The presence of a convenience store near a school is predicted to increase its overweight rate by 1.2%. … For a school with the mean number of ninth graders (474), the model predicts that an additional 6 students would be overweight in comparison to a school without a nearby convenience store" (p. 5).

The above discussion does not exhaust the research literature on the subject, but it does offer reasonable doubt about the efficacy of government-imposed taxes and regulations on the consumption of unhealthy foods and beverages by children.

Random Thought

My long-term goal is to learn how to Fushigi.

Facts and Stats

According to the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, children ages two and older are considered:

  • At a healthy weight if their BMI falls between the 5th and the 85th percentiles
  • At risk for being overweight if their BMI is in the 85th to 95th percentile.
  • Overweight or obese if their BMI is at or higher than the 95th percentile.

Mailbag

"This dude Terry Stoops needs a baseball bat upside his head…"
— scorpiokarma in response to my Locker Room post "Memphis schools offer breakfast, lunch, and dinner"

Education Acronym of the Week

SSB – sugar-sweetened beverages

Quote of the Week

"But even if we accept the obesity claims at face value for the sake of argument, an attack on obesity is not a legitimate role of government — at least if we are to retain any respect for individual liberty."
–"Nanny State Disapproval: Manipulating Your Diet through Taxation" by Fergus Hodgson, The Future of Freedom Foundation, November 15, 2011.

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