Manipulate food prices to fight obesity: panel

An expert panel commissioned by the Heart and Stroke Foundation is urging governments to slap a tax on sugared soft drinks, subsidize the poor to eat fruit and vegetables and give farmers incentives to grow more fresh produce, in a novel new take on Canada’s obesity epidemic.

The price of food has a proven impact on weight, and economic sticks and carrots should be invoked to combat the growing weight crisis, the panel concludes in a 79-page report.

The group’s fiscal-policy approach to the obesity issue is bound to generate controversy. Its lead author insists, however, that the soda-tax and other proposals do not represent nanny-state intervention into diet and behaviour.

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[Editor's Note: We at Sierra Club Prairie see this as just another way to drive prices up on highly used and addictive products rather than what should be taking place: regulation of the food industry in their practices of adding unhealthy substances to foods.]