Time for a Twinkie Tax?
7. How to slim down the world's fattest society
Americans are the fattest people on earth and they're rapidly getting fatter. One in three adults is obese, as are a fifth of all children--that is, the amount of their body weight that is fat exceeds 25 percent (for males) or 30 percent (for females). The proportion of Americans who are obese has grown almost 10 percent just since 1980. The fitness craze that supposedly swept America in the 1980s was and remains largely a classbound phenomenon; gym memberships have yet to become a priority for the poor and working classes the way they have for the affluent. Yet the "you can't be too rich or too thin" effect is surprisingly small. Girth may no longer be the symbol of wealth that it was a century ago. But current obesity rates vary less across income lines than one might suppose: They are 29 percent for people who make less than $10,000 per year, versus 25 percent for people who make more than $50,000 per year.
Obesity's causes are no mystery: poor diet and lack of exercise. The damage is equally clear. The number of Americans who die annually of obesity-related diseases stands at 300,000, not far behind tobacco's annual death toll of 400,000. And public-health costs have expanded with the collective American waistline: Obesity now accounts for nearly $40 billion of the total treatment cost for heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, gallbladder ailments, and breast and colon cancer.
Muffins to Oprah. The cure for obesity is no mystery either: better diet, more exercise. The trouble is that no one knows how to get more Americans to follow that regimen. Obesity grows for men and women of all ages and all racial groups despite everything our culture has thrown at it: bran muffins, spinning classes, diet books, diet drugs, liposuction, weight-loss clinics, and Oprah Winfrey. Educators and doctors don't seem to have the answer, either. Studies show that children who go through school-based nutrition training programs are no more likely to eat properly than those who don't. Even the most costly hospital-based obesity treatment programs have shown meager long-term results.
So what's the solution?
Tax Twinkies, says Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University's Center for Eating and Weight Disorders. Hit junk-food junkies where it hurts: in their wallets. Slapping high-fat, low-nutrition foods with a substantial government "sin tax" is the one step society hasn't tried, and while the obstacles to its enactment are enormous, there's good reason to think it might work. Study after study of price increases on tobacco and alcohol suggests a correlation between cost and consumption. When the tax is high enough to sharply increase the price, fewer of these products are consumed. Brownell argues that a tax on junk food would have a similar effect.
Such a measure would involve devising a calorie-to-nutrient index, with low-calorie, vitamin-stocked fruits and vegetables on one end of the spectrum and fat-drenched, low-nutrient fast food at the other. The scale would not be based on a simple measure of fat, a necessary nutrient, but on a more complex analysis of nutrients per calorie that took into account such things as the nutritional value of saturated versus unsaturated fats. The higher up the scale any given food item was, the higher the tax on it would be. Foods with low calorie-to-nutrient ratios would pay no tax at all and might even be subsidized in some way to make them cheaper to buy. The idea would be to make high-butterfat chocolate-chocolate chip ice cream more expensive relative to low-fat frozen yogurt, in the hopes that more Americans would reach for the yogurt.
This would be unabashed social engineering. But so is virtually anything the government does about public-health dangers, such as air pollution or drunk driving, that pose smaller threats to most people's life expectancy. And compared with the way the government handles problems like air pollution or drunk driving--by imposing regulations--instituting a Twinkie tax would be less bureaucratic and intrusive. Some Americans may cringe at the thought of having to pay more for certain foods when they themselves don't have a weight problem. But doing nothing to address obesity imposes big financial costs on society, too. Even some who find the proposal harsh or preachy are joining the call for the Pillsbury Doughboy's head. "It may be time for a last resort. We are losing the battle," says Arthur Frank, director of the Obesity Management Program at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Brownell himself has little sympathy for those who ask to be left alone as they chow down their Cheetos. Eat pork rinds if you like, he says, but you'll pay for them, just as you pay for cigarettes and alcohol. To the extent that working-class people eat more pork rinds than affluent people, who are more partial to crudites, the tax would be regressive, just as cigarette taxes are now. (Food represents between 10 percent and 15 percent of most people's budgets, except for the very poor and the very rich.) If a Twinkie tax's net effect ended up being that people simply paid more for their Twinkies--and poor people paid proportionately the most--it would have to be judged a failure. But it would impose no monetary cost on people who were steered away from junk food entirely, and only a modest cost on those who indulged moderately. At the same time, it would bring considerable benefit, monetary and otherwise, in the form of better health.
At the moment, it's true, a "fat tax" would seem to stand a fat chance politically. Small "snack taxes" intended purely to produce revenue in California and Maryland were quickly repealed after snack-food makers and consumers went up in arms. A beefed-up federal version would not be popular, to put it mildly. But Brownell insists his idea is not as far-fetched as it sounds: "If someone had proposed 30 years ago that we should raise prices on cigarettes, that we should ban smoking in public places, that states should sue to recover health care costs, who would have believed that would happen?"
This story appears in the December 29, 1997 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.