Nutritional policies, food-chain regulation and food consumption

If, for a long time, the prime objective of food policies was to guarantee food safety, nowadays the objectives are more qualitative, at least in the developed countries. The importance of eating “better” has increased progressively in a context where life expectancy is increasing and where shortage has given way to an abundance of low-priced products. According to nutritional standards, food has even become a potential risk factor, with bad eating habits favouring the occurrence of specific illnesses like obesity, diabetes, cancer and heart disease. In the United States, obesity ranks second among the main causes of death (300,000 deaths per year), after tobacco (around 400,000 deaths per year). And the World Health Organization considers that a high energy diet poor in fruit and vegetables is a factor in obesity risk, a risk that may increase because of the relative fall in prices of food products. We attempt to find out whether the present structure of food prices goes against the nutritional recommendations. The food price structure and the socio-economic characteristics of households play a leading role in the distribution of food consumptions, with the price structure going against nutritional quality. In parallel, the private actors’ strategies in the fruit and vegetable sector have not favoured the global consumption of these products whereas the reform of the Sugar Policy could stimulate industrial demand for added sugar. In the face of these observations which are against the nutritional recommendations and the PNNS(French National programme for Nutrition and Health), the public authorities may consider acting on prices to stimulate the consumption of fruit and vegetables by means of subsidies and/or reduce the consumption of fatty animal products by means of taxes. The simulated effects of such policies do not look homogenous within the population, a factor which in some cases could increase the disparities between population categories.