Rachel Griffith - Should The Government Control What We Eat?

Should the government control what we eat?
Government around the world are getting more and more involved with telling consumers what they can and can’t eat as they grappling with rising rates of obesity. Some people believe that the government should mind its own business and let consumers decide for themselves what they eat. Others argues that consumers need protection from themselves and from outside temptation.
In the UK children living in the most deprived areas are twice as likely to be obese compared to those in the least deprived areas. This differences can have long term consequences for health as well as social and economic outcomes. Policies such as taxes on junk foods, restrictions to the availability and advertising of foods, nutritional labeling and regulation to encourage firms to reformulate products aims to encourage a healthier diet, but these policies have sometimes proved controversial. In this lecture Rachel will discuss what different types of policies aimed at reducing obesity might achieve in terms of reduce long-run inequalities in health, social and economic outcomes.

[@tiffanyisaacson5497]

No and they need to watch what they put in are food and they need to make fruits and vegetables more affordable and available especially when out of season in certain regions the only thing they might do is make insurance extremely high for someone who is not healthy or overweight. FYI elementary kids do not need 3 snack times a day in school. They are not healthy snacks example cheeseits and marshmallows.

[@jessicasfakeaccount]

doesn't it rather suggest that parents are less likely to purchase junk food for their kids if the cost exceeds some psychological barrier point? a chocolate bar at $0.99 might seem like it's pocket change, and it's worth it to shut the kid up; but at $1.15, it's no longer affordable.

[@jessicasfakeaccount]

it's worth asking, though, if that's sort of good enough. i mean, there's a _huge_ difference between parents feeding their kids garbage and consenting adults deciding what to put in their own bodies.

[@sydneyhammock3499]

No way. Will any one tell me what to eat

[@jessicasfakeaccount]

i could type a long response and a short response to this, and i'm going to pick the short response.

[@jessicasfakeaccount]

a lot of what is being discussed here relates to the idea of placing normative value judgements on a decision-making process that is more complicated than is being let on. at the end of the day, humans need sugar and calories more than they need vitamins and fibre, so when poor people find themselves in a situation where they have limited resources, it actually makes sense for them to choose the diet options that are higher in fuel than the ones that are lower in it. you might not realize that if you take a sort of an elitist perspective on it, which is something this presentation does in multiple places.

[@jessicasfakeaccount]

if you have $20 and you have to make it last, you really _should_ buy lard, rather than vegetables. that's the _correct_ choice, in context. that's just the simple mathematics of it.

[@jessicasfakeaccount]

but, it means you need to be relatively active, in order to burn the extra fuel, and i think that's the fundamental error being made here and by a lot of policy experts: they focus on restricting diets, rather than on coercing people to be more active. that's really what they're doing wrong.

[@jessicasfakeaccount]

i haven't seen studies on the topic, but i'd strongly suspect that if you were to get people to exercise more then a healthier diet would follow as a corollary; you wouldn't need to get people to change their consumption patterns, if you could just get them out and about. they'd do it on their own.

[@jessicasfakeaccount]

we could have these big debates about consensual behaviour and statist overreach, but in the end i want to push the policies that i think are going to work, and it doesn't seem like any of these attempts to try to restrict people's diets are likely to work. but, if we look at the kinds of jobs we do - from working cash registers to sitting on computers - the commonality is that we spend most of our time at work sitting down, nowadays.

[@solgato5186]

try making it easier to eat well first