should the government regulate fast food essay

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Should more governments take aim at fast food?

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Policies that counter fast food consumption might offer governments a way to tackle the growing obesity epidemic, a new study proposes.

The research is the first to look at the effects of deregulation in the economy and increases in fast food transactions and BMIs over time.

The findings show that fast food purchases were independent predictors of increases in the average body mass index (BMI) in the United States and 24 other wealthy nations from 1999 to 2008.

Nations with stronger government regulations—such as producer protection, price controls, intervention on competition, and taxes—experienced slower increases in fast food purchases and average BMIs.

“Unless governments take steps to regulate their economies, the ‘invisible hand of the market’ will continue to promote obesity worldwide with disastrous consequences for future public health and economic productivity,” says Roberto De Vogli, associate professor in the department of public health sciences at the University of California, Davis.

Rather than looking at the density of fast food outlets or self-reported fast food consumption as researchers have done in the past, De Vogli and colleagues compared data on fast food transactions per capita with figures on BMI, a standard measure of body fat based on height and weight. A person with a BMI of 25 to 29.9 is considered overweight, while a BMI of 30 or more is considered obese.

Published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization , the study focuses on high-income countries, but the findings are also relevant to developing countries as “virtually all nations have undergone a process of market deregulation and globalization—especially in the last three decades,” De Vogli says.

Unhealthy weight is widespread

While the average number of annual fast food transactions per capita increased from 26.61 to 32.76, average BMI increased from 25.8 to 26.4. Thus, each 1-unit increase in the average number of annual fast food transactions per capita was associated with an increase of 0.0329 in BMI over the study period.

The BMI figures revealed that the problem of unhealthy weight is widespread; people living in all 25 countries included in the study were, on average, overweight.

The average number of annual fast food transactions per capita increased in all 25 countries. The sharpest increases were in Canada (by 16.6 transactions per capita), Australia (14.7), Ireland (12.3) and New Zealand (10.1), Norway (9.0), and the US (8.6), while the lowest increases were in countries with more stringent market regulation, including Italy (1.5), the Netherlands (1.8), Greece (1.9), Belgium (2.1), Portugal (2.6), and Spain (3.4).

“It’s not by chance that countries with the highest average BMIs and fast food purchases are those in the forefront of market liberalization,” De Vogli says. “Whereas countries with lower average BMIs and fewer fast food transactions have some of the tightest controls on food economies.”

Increases in BMIs could not be explained by increases in animal fat consumption or total calories, which remained close to constant over the course of the study.

“This was surprising,” De Vogli says. “Fast food tends to be high in animal fats, which have been linked to unhealthy weight. The only factor that can partially explain the BMI increases is soft drink purchases.”

Future research should focus on categorizing food items according to levels of processing instead of fats and calories, which could help identify the specific determinants of overweight and obesity, De Vogli says.

“The next step will be to study in detail what is done with food and how those processes alter calorie and nutrient content along with health.”

Researchers from the University of Texas Health Science Center and Queen’s University in Belfast contributed to the study, which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK.

Source: UC Davis

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Will Regulating Fast Food Restaurants Really Help Poor People?

Eating fast food is frequently blamed for damaging our health.  It is not the healthiest type of meal since it is typically high in fat and salt.  Because of this some government officials have considered regulating parts of the fast food industry to improve public health and reduce health inequalities across society.

Regulating fast food locations to improve health among low income Americans rests partly on a key assumption: that fast food is primarily eaten by poor people, who cannot afford nutritious but more expensive food.  Mark Bittman in the New York Times, summed it up nicely: “The ‘fact’ that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes.”

Our recently published research examined this assumption by looking at who eats fast food using a large nationwide random sample.  What we found surprised us.  The poor don’t eat the most fast food.  Instead, the middle class do.  Moreover, the difference between the proportion of rich people and poor people who eat fast food was quite small.  It seems when you ask people if they ate at a fast food restaurant like McDonalds, Kentucky Fried Chicken or Taco Bell last week, the majority of rich, poor and middle class said “yes.”

Who Eats Fast Food?

In retrospect, the fact that everyone eats fast food should not have been surprising.  There are rich and famous people, like President Donald Trump , who state they are fans of fast food .  Trump even made a commercial for McDonalds in 2002 extolling the virtues of their hamburgers.  President Bill Clinton was so fond of fast food, Saturday Night Live created a skit parodying his visits to McDonald’s.

Our research didn’t look at famous people. Instead it used a cross-section of young baby boomers living in the U.S from all walks of life.  Thousands of respondents were asked by interviewers how often they ate fast food during three different week-long periods.  Overall, 79% of the respondents said they ate fast food at least once.

Breaking the respondents down by their income did not show big differences.  Among the ten percent with the highest income, about 75% ate fast food at least once in a three-week period.  The corresponding figure for the poorest ten percent was 81%.  Both numbers are not very different from the 85% rate for people with incomes in the middle.

We also found that people whose income or wealth changed dramatically up or down during our study period didn’t change their fast-food eating habits.  This suggests becoming richer or poorer doesn’t have much impact on how often people eat fast food.

If fast food isn’t particularly healthy, then why do so many people eat it?  Our research confirms people eat it because it’s fast and convenient.  We find the more hours someone works the more likely they are to eat fast food, regardless of their income or wealth.

Attempts to Fix Public Nutrition

These results suggest focusing on preventing poor people from having access to fast food may be misguided.  For example, Los Angeles in 2008 banned new freestanding fast food restaurants from opening in the poor neighborhoods of South L.A.   The reason for the ban was because “fast-food businesses in low-income areas, particularly along the Southeast Los Angeles commercial corridors, intensifies socio-economic problems in the neighborhoods, and creates serious public health problems.”

While research suggests this ban did not work these fights over food continue today.  Donald Trump clearly has different eating habits than his predecessor, Barrack Obama.  Because of this shift in presidential attitudes toward food and government’s role in society the Trump administration is rolling back Obama’s nutritional regulations on school lunches and new labeling requirements for restaurants and other food providers.

Fast Food Industry

The type and number of regulations are important because fast food restaurants are big business in the US.  The latest figures from 2012 show there are over 120,000 franchised limited service restaurants, employing about 2.6 million people.  These stores had sales of around $130 billion, which means about $400 in yearly sales for each person living in the US.

The data on the fast food industry highlight one important reason why the poor do not eat more fast food. Meals in these restaurants are not cheap in absolute terms.  The typical limited service restaurant meal costs over eight dollars .  Fast food is cheap only in comparison to eating in a full-service restaurant.

Moreover, this eight dollar figure is quite high compared to the US poverty line, which for a family of two is a bit above $16,000 , or about $44 per day.  It is doubtful a poor family of two is willing to constantly spend an average of $16 on eating a single fast food meal, since it i over one-third of their daily income.

Our goal is not to be fast food cheerleaders.  We do not doubt that a diet high in fast food is unhealthy.  We do doubt that the poor eat fast food more than anyone else.

If politicians are really trying to help improve the health of the poor, limiting fast food restaurants in low income neighborhoods is not the way to go.  Our research shows that drinking soda is associated with increase fast-food consumption.  Soda taxes could lower intake of sugary drinks and fast food, but these goods are often bundled together as value meals and the tax faces stiff oppos ition from well-funded sources.

We also find that checking ingredients is associated with lower fast-food intake, while working more hours raises fast-food consumption.   This suggests that making it easier for Americans to learn what is in their food could help sway consumers away from fast food and toward healthier eating options. More importantly, policies to make nutritious foods more convenient would help offset the lure of fast food.  It’s hard to choose nutritious foods if they are not available and affordable.

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Exploring what works, what doesn’t, and why.

Processed foods are making us sick. It’s time for the FDA and USDA to step in.

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Federal food law is clear: It bans “any poisonous or deleterious substance which may render [a food] injurious to health .”

For decades, regulators have used that provision mostly to crack down on food contaminated with toxic chemicals or microbes such as Listeria and salmonella that can make us acutely ill . It’s important to protect people from these harms, but let’s also put them in perspective: These regulated contaminants kill an estimated 1,400 Americans per year . By contrast, 1,600 Americans die every day from chronic food illness, such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

In recent years, evidence has mounted that these chronic illnesses are caused by deleterious substances in ultra-processed foods . From heat-and-eat meals such as frozen pizza to sweetened breakfast cereals, ultra-processed foods are industrial formulations of ingredients from substances extracted from foods or synthesized in laboratories. They are also staples of our diets .

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It is time for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to use their authority under federal law to protect us from these highly processed foods. This would be a paradigm shift — but it is also common sense: FDA and USDA must make at least as much effort preventing chronic food illness as they do acute food illness.

About 678,000 Americans die each year from chronic food illness. That toll is higher than all our combat deaths in every war in American history—combined. That’s right: there are more deaths each year from our food than all the combat deaths from the Revolutionary War through the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In addition to deaths, poor diet causes tremendous suffering. For instance, two-thirds of severe COVID cases resulting in hospitalization have been attributed to four diet-caused diseases: obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart failure. In other words, these hospitalizations could have been prevented if the patient didn’t have these diseases. All told, the economic cost of nutrition-related chronic diseases has been estimated at $16 trillion over the period from 2011 to 2020.

About 678,000 Americans die each year from chronic food illness. That toll is higher than all our combat deaths in every war in American history–combined.

Mounting evidence suggests that ultra-processed foods are causing much of this harm.

In a recent study conducted by the National Institutes of Health to discover the cause of sharp increases in obesity in the U.S., volunteers were randomly assigned to either eat minimally processed foods or ultra-processed foods matched for daily nutrients like carbohydrates, sodium, fat, and sugar. Investigators thought weight gain would be the same in both groups, since nutrient composition was equivalent. They were wrong.

While on the ultra-processed diet, people ate an additional 500 calories per day and began to rapidly gain weight. When the same people were later assigned to eat the minimally processed diet, they lost weight.

This is an important finding, because it raises the possibility that it’s the additives and processing—not just the percentage of fat or sugar in a diet—that make us sick. More research is urgently needed.

Our regulatory agencies clearly have the legal authority to take on this threat to public health. Congress revealed its intent in a 1958 amendment that provides that no food additive shall be deemed safe if it is found to induce cancer, a chronic illness, when ingested by humans or animals. There is recent precedent for using our food safety laws to regulate chronic food illness. In 2015, the FDA banned artificial trans fats from food on the grounds that it caused heart disease, another chronic illness linked to diet.

The agencies should use this same authority to regulate the design of ultra-processed foods. Our food must continue to be delicious, affordable, and convenient—traits Americans appropriately demand—but can be eaten daily without making us sick.

Our laws make clear that action is required. What’s missing is leadership and funding.

Our food must continue to be delicious, affordable, and convenient—traits Americans appropriately demand—but can be eaten daily without making us sick.

The leadership must come from Robert M. Califf, our FDA Commissioner, and José Emilio Esteban, the newly confirmed under secretary for food safety at USDA. Through appropriate regulation and enforcement, they must provide food companies with legal incentives to design foods that promote health and well-being — and these incentives ought to be equal to those the marketplace provides for taste, cost, and convenience.

As for funding, the President and Congress must provide the needed budget. The president should ask for at least $200 million to address chronic food illness in his Fiscal Year 2024 budget and Congress should appropriate it. It won’t be easy. In last year’s budget, the president asked for $135 million to cover USDA nutrition security, FDA nutrition regulation, and NIH nutrition research. He received $0.

In a recent event promoting his proposed redesign of FDA’s food program , Califf acknowledged that nutrition initiatives require more funding and said: “We need leaders who will be very persuasive with government.”

He needs to be that persuasive leader — making nutrition a priority and getting FDA’s food programs the resources they need to be effective.

There is precedent for FDA and USDA collaborating in a moment of food-related crisis. In 1993, the nation was hit with a deadly Shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC) outbreak from contaminated Jack in the Box hamburgers. At the time, there were eight cases per 100,000 population of these deadly infections. USDA declared these bacteria an adulterant and adopted FDA’s use of preventive controls. It then worked with the meat industry to provide the needed training and technical assistance to keep STEC out of our meat. Finally, USDA inspectors — who are a constant presence in meat-packing plants— reinforced these steps. Today, STEC cases are down to about 1 case per 100,000. Our food is safer now due to USDA’s stronger food safety laws, bigger budget, and effective collaboration with FDA.

Now is the time to apply that model to address the threat of chronic food illness. FDA and USDA must work together to design a 21 st century food safety system to protect us not just from acute cases of food poisoning but also from the deadly toll of chronic exposure to ultra-processed food. Our lives literally depend on it.

Source images, from top left: Liza Tkachuk / iStock, LauriPatterson / iStock, SondraP / iStock, and mg7 / iStock.

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