Socially Engineering Food Choices Doesn't Work

To say that Los Angeles merely failed would be putting it mildly

By Baylen Linnekin of Reason. He is the executive director of Keep Food Legal Foundation and an adjunct professor at George Mason University Law School, where he teaches Food Law & Policy. Excerpt:

"Earlier this week, the nonpartisan RAND Corporation released a study that helps demolish the argument that governments (cities, in this case) can socially engineer away residents’ obesity by restricting food freedom.

he study, funded by the National Cancer Institute, focuses on a ridiculous, controversial, seven-year-old zoning ban on new fast food restaurants in South Los Angeles. To say that the measure merely failed would be putting it mildly.

“Since the fast-food restrictions were passed in 2008, overweight and obesity rates in South Los Angeles and other neighborhoods targeted by the law have increased faster than in other parts of the city or other parts of the county,” reads a RAND press release on the study.

Well then.

“The South Los Angeles fast food ban may have symbolic value, but it has had no measurable impact in improving diets or reducing obesity,” said lead author Roland Sturm of RAND.

The RAND study results represent some of the best evidence to date that policies that restrict food freedom do no make people healthier. The failure and repeal of Denmark’s so-called “fat tax” and damning research on mandatory menu labeling are two other convincing examples.

They also echo—and magnify—the results of an earlier RAND study by Sturm that I wrote about here in 2013. The earlier study, which also looked at the Los Angeles fast-food ban, was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

“Obesity in South Los Angeles, 30 percent in 2007, had climbed to 33 percent by 2012 despite the ban on new fast food restaurants,” I noted in my column while discussing the larger implications of that earlier RAND study.

The new study’s release is fortuitous, coinciding as it does with a flurry of increased scrutiny over an ongoing FDA proposal to mandate an “added sugar” label on packaged foods."