A bag of chips may not be a simple 25 or 50 cents anymore thanks to taxes on junk food.
According to the Washington Examiner, newly re-elected President Barack Obama will eventually tax and regulate junk food to drive people to eat healthier, suggested by chair of the White House Economic Council Larry Summers.
"I think there is no question that the way Americans eat and what Americans weigh is a big contributor to health problems and it's a big contributor to health costs," Summers said in a recent interview on Morning Joe. "It's not the agenda now, but I think at some point you're going to see tax measures and regulatory measures that are going to be directed at helping people be healthier. That's just going to happen and I think it's probably a good thing when it does."
Summer also said the agenda would be like the anti-cigarette policies. "[J]ust as we have over time done things with respect to tobacco that are very constructive and that are saving hundreds of thousands of people's lives, that kind of agenda is going to come to other aspects of public health, including the way people eat," he said.
Michelle Obama recently did an overhaul of the school lunch menu as part of her effort to fight child obesity, but Summers said that children should like the food they eat at their schools.
"Should kids be going hungry at lunch because they can't have any good food - any food they like in the schools?" he asked rhetorically. "You can obviously take it too far and you have to be careful."
Despite un-popular new lunch menus at school, the children obesity rate continues to rise.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percentage of 6- to 11-year-olds who are obese climbed from 7 percent in 1980 to nearly 20 percent in 2008, FOX News reported. The number of obese 12- to 19-year-olds also soared, increasing from 5 percent to 18 percent during the same period.
Food ads may contribute to obesity. Research showed that when shown 60 familiar food logos and 60 familiar nonfood logos to 20 children (10 obese, 10 healthy-weight children), "regions of the brain associated with reward were more active in obese kids than in healthy-weight children after the youngsters viewed the food logos. And areas of the brain associated with self-control were more active in healthy-weight kids than in their obese counterparts."
As of now, food and beverage companies in the U.S. spend more than $10 billion annually marketing to American children in an effort to ""build brand recognition, brand preference and brand loyalty," the researchers said, according to the FOX News report.
"One key to improving health-related decision-making may lie in the ability to improve cognitive and self-control," the researchers added. "'Including self-control training with obesity and behavioral health interventions may lead to greater success' in weight-loss efforts."
