Department of Economics, Auburn University, 140 Miller Hall, Auburn, AL, 36849, USA.
Department of Consumer and Design Sciences, Auburn University, Auburn, AL, USA.
Sci Rep. 2020 Sep 22;10(1):15435. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-71082-y.
Given the healthcare costs associated with obesity (especially in childhood), governments have tried several fiscal and policy interventions such as lowering tax and giving rebates 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 brain-based responses in parents with low socioeconomic status change when rebates and lower taxes are offered on healthy food items. We performed behavioral and brain-based 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 rebate on healthy foods increase their purchase significantly compared to baseline. Rebate has a higher effect than lower 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 rebate on healthy food items, the reward signal for such items in the brain is significantly enhanced. Second, we demonstrate that rebate 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 rebate. Third, fiscal interventions decreased the amount of frontal cognitive control required to buy healthy foods despite their lower calorific value as compared to unhealthy foods. Finally, we propose that it is possible to titrate the amount of tax reductions and rebates on healthy food items so that they consistently become more preferable than unhealthy foods.
鉴于肥胖相关的医疗保健费用（尤其是在儿童时期），各国政府已经尝试了几种财政和政策干预措施，例如降低税收并提供退税，以鼓励父母为家人选择更健康的食物。这些财政政策的效果目前仍存在争议。在这里，我们通过研究社会经济地位较低的父母在提供健康食品退税和减税时其行为和大脑的反应如何变化来解决这个问题。我们进行了行为和基于大脑的实验，后者利用父母在模拟购物市场购物时的脑电图（EEG）以及在更受限的扫描仪环境中进行的后续功能磁共振成像（fMRI）来进行。行为数据表明，与基线相比，健康食品的减税和退税明显增加了他们的购买量。退税的效果比减税治疗更高。从 EEG 和 fMRI 实验中，我们首先表明健康/不健康的食物分别在大脑中引起最小/最大的奖励反应。此外，通过对健康食品提供减税或退税，大脑中对这些食品的奖励信号会显著增强。其次，我们证明退税比减税更能鼓励消费者购买健康食品，部分原因是大脑中与奖励相关的反应更高。第三，尽管健康食品的热量值低于不健康食品，但财政干预措施减少了购买健康食品所需的额叶认知控制量。最后，我们提出可以调整健康食品的减税和退税金额，以使它们始终比不健康食品更受欢迎。
