For my sins in generally supporting consumer choice in food consumption, and in interests of fostering healthy debate, the Agencies for Nutrition Action invited me to argue with the Morgan Foundation’s Geoff Simmons on the merits of fat taxes and food regulation at his annual conference in Auckland a few weeks ago.

The nutritionists put on an excellent conference. It differed from the economics conferences with which I’m more familiar in two key ways. First, the luncheon was much better, with an excellent marbled roast beef on offer. Second, they ran exercise-based games between sessions. I would be pretty happy if economics conferences learned from the first part.

The ‘why’ matters in food regulation. If you think consumers make poor choices because they’re poorly informed about nutrition, you might support measures targeting information provision, education or labelling. If you think people eat badly because they can foist the cost on to the public health system, then tax measures might make more sense.

I tend to think those kinds of policy options are overrated but I wanted to know what the nutrition group thought. And so, before the conference, Diana Pedlow at the Agencies for Nutrition Action helped Geoff and me to poll the delegates.

Respondents were far surer about what government should do than why government should be involved in the first place. A plurality of those surveyed, and often a majority, provided no answer on our why questions. Among those providing responses, there was strong disagreement that consumers could be trusted to seek out relevant food information and make their own decisions.

But the most strongly supported reason for food regulation was not that people do not understand nutrition or that people are too short-sighted.

Those answering the questions were generally neutral about statements suggesting people just didn’t care enough about their health. And they seemed sceptical that people made poor choices because the public health system meant others would foot the bill. Rather, intervention was supported mainly because of costs imposed on the public health system.

Interestingly enough, economists only really worry about costs on the public health system if people are changing their behaviour because of the public health system. If diets are not affected by the existence of a public health system, then a public health system only changes who pays for things. This could have reasonable fiscal effects, though overseas research suggests that healthy people cost the public health system more in the long run.

But providing a public health system, then forcing everybody to change their behaviours because of the costs to the public health system, does not really seem that great of a deal. It would be a bit like the government announcing, after everyone’s ordered their meals at the restaurant, that the government will be picking up everyone’s tab that night but, to help keep costs down, everyone’s portion will be cut to half its normal size – and you cannot opt out.

On the policy side, just about every possible intervention we mentioned earned strong support. Mandatory front-of-pack nutrition labelling, subsidising fresh foods by removing GST, excise taxes on unhealthy foods, bans on junk food advertising to kids and complete bans on junk food advertising all earned strong support.

Policy interventions

The only intervention where the respondents expressed some hesitation was a comprehensive per-gram excise regime taxing the sugar or fat content in foods. Sixty-two of eighty-six respondents strongly supported four or more policy interventions. Ten respondents strongly supported each and every one. There seemed little particular association between the reasons for supporting interventions and the interventions the nutritionists supported.

But things got even more interesting when we got to the conference. Before our debate, we again polled the audience. As voting was this time restricted to attendees, before and after surveys let us know whether our arguments had made a difference. Before the sessions, less than 5% of attendees thought the government should just stay out of the kitchen. Nobody believed simply providing education was sufficient. Ten percent thought the government should provide education and make healthy choices easier (say, through nudges and labelling).

Forty-five percent thought that, in addition to education and labelling, the government should also use subsidies and taxes to change behaviour. Over thirty percent wanted to also add government regulation of ingredients (like salt content), and a further 10% wanted to do all of that plus ban junk food by 2025.

We had our work cut out for us.

I argued that food regulation has to be based on decent evidence of a real market failure in consumption decisions. Costs on the public health system are not, by themselves, a market failure. If people are making decisions that nutritionists think are wrong, it can be worth the nutritionists’ helping to educate people about dietary choices. Better home economics education in the schools could be a start.

But if people have been given all the information they would need to make the decisions that nutritionists prefer, and still choose otherwise, we have to respect that choice. Going beyond that, to nudge, tax, regulate, and finally shove people into eating what an expert might want makes a mockery of freedom of choice. And you might want to worry that some expert in another area you care about might just disagree with your own informed choices.

As a partial aside, I am looking forward to the Institute for Policy Analysis’s Chris Berg’s presentations next week, hosted by The New Zealand Initiative, on the tyranny of experts. You can register through The Initiative’s website.

Geoff Simmons and I agreed some paternalistic options were simply unworkable, like taking GST off foods designated as healthy. But Geoff made the case for stronger paternalistic intervention, arguing that behavioural economics often shows that people make mistakes. I worry that the nudgers also make mistakes and that it’s usually harder to fix a bad policy than to reverse a bad personal decision.

The post-debate poll showed that we had shifted views a bit. Pre-debate, over 40% of attendees wanted regulation of ingredients or junk-food bans. After, nobody supported bans and only 10% wanted ingredient regulation. The harder paternalists had retrenched to supporting subsidies and taxes. Pre-debate, a little over 10% of respondents supported any options less heavy-handed than taxes and subsidies; afterwards, over 30% did.

There is a lot of support out there for pretty restrictive measures targeting really personal decisions, including what we put on the dinner table. But it can be changed with a bit of persuasion. I really thank the Agencies for Nutrition Action for giving me that chance.