Obscurity causes obesity

Recently I did a post describing how complexity can be used to obscure the effects of a policy or the true intentions of policymakers influenced by corporate interests or other powerful groups - such as farmers. 

Food processors appear to be doing something similar. Chris van Tulleken explains the UK's Nutrient Profile Model, NPM 2004/5, which was developed as a tool to regulate food advertisements directed at children:

If you struggle to make sense of the nutrient data table on the [package of food] to guide healthy eating for your child, then the NPM 2004/5 is going to blow your mind. You can’t look up the NPM score of a food easily – you have to calculate it using the following three steps, which I write out only to illustrate their complexity. First, you award a score for the bad stuff: calories, saturated fat, sugars and sodium. These are called ‘A’ points. Second, you add up the points for the good stuff: fruit, vegetables, nuts, fibre and protein. These are called ‘C’ points. (By the way, you may need to pay for access to something like the NielsenIQ Brandbank nutritional database to gather all this information.) After you’ve calculated the A and C points, there are other rules to be factored in, like: ‘If a food or drink scores 11 or more A points then it cannot score points for protein unless it also scores 5 points for fruit, vegetables and nuts.’ Clear so far? Well, then you subtract the C points from the A points to calculate a score out of thirty. Any food that scores more than four is classified as HFSS [High in (saturated) fat, salt and sugar]. But, even if you do all that, it isn’t clear whether children should eat these HFSS foods, or in what amounts. The designation determines only whether a food can be marketed to children at particular times and in particular ways. Chris van Tulleken, Ultra-Processed People, April 2023

By such means is the relationship between ultra-processed food and health obscured; and by such means do we understand how ultra-processed foods make up 60 per cent of the calories consumed by the average UK citizen, and at least 80 percent of the calories consumed by one in five citizens. So policies intended to safeguard the health of our children get corrupted in the black box of our policymaking, regulatory or legislative bodies. The result? As Mr van Tulleken tells us, over the past thirty years, obesity has grown at a staggering rate: '[A]mong children leaving primary school rates of obesity have increased by more than 700 per cent, and rates of severe obesity by 1600 per cent.' This is despite fourteen government strategies containing 689 wide-ranging policies addressing obesity having been published in England in that period. Oh, and children in the UK (and US) are shorter too: 'This stunting goes hand in hand with obesity around the world, suggesting that it is a form of malnutrition rather than a disorder of excess.'

Policymakers and their paymasters couldn't get away with such deceptive behaviour under a Social Policy Bond regime, in which the first step is an explicit setting of verifiable goals. Such goals would be meaningful to ordinary people, which means we could all engage in the policymaking process. So, for example, government would set broad health goals, using an array of indicators, such as longevity, infant mortality, quality-adjusted life years and others, all of which would have to fall into an agreed range for a sustained period before the bonds could be redeemed. (See here; or here for a longer essay on Tradeable Health Outcome Bonds.) Regulations to control adverts targeting children would be enacted only if they could be shown to have favourable health impacts. As with all Social Policy Bonds, investors would have as their sole criterion for the activities they undertake their efficiency in achieving the targeted goal. Currently, big corporations influence policy in their favour, and obscurity and complexity allow them to get away with it. By targeting broad, transparent, agreed outcomes, Social Policy Bonds could reclaim policy to the benefit of the people on whose behalf it nominally made.