Abstract

Do you like eating junk food? While it might taste great, it’s highly processed food which can lead to obesity. Obesity is a problem not only in richer countries, where people have higher incomes but also in poorer countries, where at the same time many people are underweight. We wanted to see if a tax on highly processed foods could have an effect on obesity rates. To evaluate that we used import tariffs as a measurement tool and created a statistical model. We found out that increasing the price difference between healthier foods and highly processed foods could be a useful step toward reducing obesity in some countries, but could also worsen the issue with underweight, sometimes even within the same country.