To put some of the recent conversations over chronic disease and diet into economic perspective, consider the hackneyed statistic that we spend more on health care than on food. The stat is true: We spent $2.26 trillion on health care in 2007 and about $845 billion on food. Those numbers are not strangers to one another. To some degree, we spend more on health care
because we spend less on food. Cheap food tends to be nutritionally hollow and purchased in spectacular quantity. Neither quality makes HoHos friendly to arterial health.But the sobering corollary to talking about the public costs of bad diet is that we don't really know how to change the way people eat. Diansheng Dong and Biing Hwan-Lin recently conducted a
study for the USDA's economic research service modeling the likely impact of a 10 percent discount on fruits and vegetables for low-income Americans (defined here as incomes below 130 percent of the poverty line). They concluded that the policy, which would cost $580 million, would increase the consumption of fruits by 2.1-to-5.2 percent and vegetables by 2.1-to-4.9 percent. It's not nothing, but it's not much. The graph below shows the effects of the policy, the effects of the policy doubled (20 percent off fruits and vegetables), and in the final column, how far even the double-subsidy world is from the USDA's recommended consumption of fruits and vegetables (which is probably still too low!):
And cost is just one barrier. Many people lack access to decent produce. Taking 10 percent off the price of the rotted bananas at the convenience store won't do much to encourage their consumption. They're still rotted bananas. More than that, it's foolish to imagine that poor eating habits are the simple outcome of inadequate nutritional education, incomes, and access. HoHos are delicious. Tired mothers don't want to fight with their kids over sugar in breakfast cereals. Cooking takes time, and when you're working multiple jobs and feeding a family, the undeniable ease of fast food is a powerful lure. And fast food is tasty! The fact that most low income Americans -- hell, most Americans -- live closer to a McDonald's than a grocery store only underscores the appeal. So this isn't a question with easy answers. Even if you could get the political system to focus on it, the policies are not obvious and the payoff would not be quick.
