Drs. Tannista Banerjee, Veena Chattaraman & Gopikrishna Deshpande, and graduate student Hao Zou published an article in Nature Scientific Reports examining whether fiscal interventions such as rebates or lower taxes, change behavior and brain-based responses to healthy and unhealthy food choices in parents with low socioeconomic status. After conducting shopping stimulations and neurobehavioral experiments with EEG and fMRI assessments, fiscal interventions - especially rebates - increased parent reward responses for healthy food items, suggesting simple fiscal and policy interventions may be useful in promoting healthy dietary choices in families with low socioeconomic status. To read the full study, click here.
A neurobehavioral study on the efficacy of price interventions in promoting healthy food choices among low socioeconomic families
Given the healthcare costs associated with obesity (especially in childhood), governments have tried several fiscal and policy interventions such as lowering tax and giving rebates to encourage parents to choose healthier food for their family. The efficacy of such fiscal policies is currently being debated. Here we address this issue by investigating how behavioral and brain-based responses in parents with low socioeconomic status change when rebates and lower taxes are offered on healthy food items. We performed behavioral and brain-based experiments, with the latter employing electroencephalography (EEG) acquired from parents while they shop in a simulated shopping market as well as follow up functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the more restricted scanner environment. Behavioral data show that lower tax and rebate on healthy foods increase their purchase significantly compared to baseline. Rebate has a higher effect than lower tax treatment. From the EEG and fMRI experiments, we first show that healthy/unhealthy foods elicit least/maximal reward response in the brain, respectively. Further, by offering lower tax or rebate on healthy food items, the reward signal for such items in the brain is significantly enhanced. Second, we demonstrate that rebate is more effective than lower tax in encouraging consumers to purchase healthy food items, driven in part, by higher reward-related response in the brain for rebate. Third, fiscal interventions decreased the amount of frontal cognitive control required to buy healthy foods despite their lower calorific value as compared to unhealthy foods. Finally, we propose that it is possible to titrate the amount of tax reductions and rebates on healthy food items so that they consistently become more preferable than unhealthy foods.
