Healthy eating hogwash

A new study shows that it isn't much more costly to eat healthy food than unhealthy. We needed a study to tell us that? The guinea pig shoppers were confined to certain products and one outlet. What about markets, discount stores and growing or picking your own produce? Or are low income people too stupid to shop around? Of course they aren't.

But this is what caught my eye.

The study appears in the latest New Zealand Medical Journal. An accompanying editorial by public health researchers at Otago University urges for action to reduce the price of healthy foods.

It suggests the Government consider schemes such as providing vouchers for fruits and vegetable discounts for low-income families and a mandatory traffic light system for foods as a simple way of indicating a food's health benefit or detriment.

Next month, Dr Ni Mhurchu will start recruiting 1200 supermarket shoppers for a Wellington trial looking to see if a discount of 12.5 per cent (the rate of GST) on healthier foods will spur people to buy more healthy foods.

First, voucher schemes can and will get ripped off. The voucher has a value to A but not to B. This alone shows it is B who really needs to use it. But B sells it to A for a smaller amount of cash than the voucher's redeemable value. Both parties are happy. And the desired result has not been achieved.

Second, GST off healthy food? What a bun fight that would be. For instance only last year Food Standards Australia New Zealand questioned whether fruit with over a certain amount of sugar was in fact healthy.

Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) has released draft guidelines governing nutrition and health claims made about food.

Under the draft, foods with more than 16 grams of sugar per serve can not be advertised as healthy, ruling out fruits like mangoes, grapes and apples.

Again I shake my head at what we get served up from (some) academics. The 'solutions' are generally to be driven by government action, involve costly redistribution and administration and inevitably cannot be demonstrated to improve matters.