Health committee  Anything we can do to help consumers make better health choices is a good thing. Education is an important part of that. I'm not a sociologist; I spend time talking about economics. But my idea is that consumers have to buy a lot of stuff. They have to rush home and make meals.

Health committee  If consumers are buying food and they're trying to figure out how healthy it is, at this point in time what they have to do is look at that label. That doesn't make any sense to a lot of people. It's very difficult to understand. If consumers want to decide how to make healthy ch

Health committee  The more I look at the numbers, the more it seems to me consumers are responding in the way we were expecting them to. They are buying healthier foods and they are eating less. I keep coming back to this idea of exercise. My thought on exercise is that if I want healthier food,

Health committee  All I can say is that my results show that as the price of food falls, people try to make healthier choices because they can afford to make healthier choices. Within the food groups the high-fat foods are the cheapest, so if you reduce the price of food, they can buy the healthie

Health committee  We found a very strange result, and that was that if you tax the low-fat, high-quality fruits and vegetables, you could actually increase the total amount of fat that people eat in the U.S. And if you tax the high-fat, low-quality things, you could actually decrease the amount of

Health committee  Our conclusion is once again for Americans, but Americans are doing what you'd expect them to do. As their incomes go up, they eat less fat. Also, they do consider low-fat foods to be high in quality. So as new information comes out, they do try to switch. What we recommend is

Health committee  I thank the committee for inviting me here today. I've been working in agricultural economics for 30 years and no one has ever invited me to talk to them on anything I have ever done, so I welcome the opportunity. I know Sean hasn't been at this as long as I have, so he's very lu

Health committee  I've been working on fat taxes now for about two years. I've been working on them with my colleagues in economic research at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Of course, the U.S. has obesity issues as well, and they are basically the same as ours. There are obesity issues in th