Efficacy of Price Interventions for Mitigating Childhood Obesity by Promoting Healthy Food Choices: A Neurobehavioral Study in Parents with Low Socioeconomic Status

Given the healthcare costs associated with obesity (especially in childhood), governments have tried several fiscal and policy interventions such as lowering tax and giving subsidies to encourage parents to choose healthier food for their family. The efficacy of such fiscal policies is currently being debated. Here we address this issue by investigating how behavioral and neural responses in brains of parents with low socioeconomic status change when subsidies and lower taxes are offered on healthy food items. We performed behavioral and neural experiments, with the latter employing electroencephalography (EEG) acquired from parents while they shop in a simulated shopping market as well as follow up functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the more restricted scanner environment. Behavioral data show that lower tax and subsidy on healthy foods increase their purchase significantly compared to baseline. Subsidy has a higher effect than tax treatment. From the EEG and fMRI experiments, we first show that healthy/unhealthy foods elicit least/maximal reward response in the brain, respectively. Further, by offering lower tax or subsidy on healthy food items, the neural reward signal for such items was significantly enhanced. Second, we demonstrate that subsidy is more effective than lower tax in encouraging consumers to purchase healthy food items, driven in part, by higher reward-related response in the brain for subsidy. Third, fiscal interventions decreased the amount of frontal cognitive control required to buy healthy foods. Finally, we propose that it is possible to titrate the amount of tax reductions or subsidy on healthy food items so that they consistently become more preferable than unhealthy foods. This could then inform fiscal policy employed by Governments in this regard.