Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education
Open Access

Abstract

The global food scenario has changed a lot in recent years. The food industry, in fact, develops ceaselessly formulas to increase the organoleptic attractiveness of the foods and their compulsive consumption. These are known as â�?�?hyperpalatable foodsâ�?, generally obtained through sophisticated processes (â�?�?highly processed foodâ�?) and containing abnormal amounts of sugar, fat and salt (in full: â�?�?junk foodâ�?). These foods are supposed to be one of the reason of widespreading food-addiction, not to mention the pervasive obesity epidemic. The paper proposes, in its first part, a phenomenology of food addiction, and then tackles the topic of controversial â�?�?food taxesâ�? (tax on foods with contents of fat, sugar, salt above certain thresholds), recently applied in several European countries (Denmark, Finland, France, Hungary), in order to cope with alarming phenomena of obesity, overweight and compulsive consumption of junk food. Over the past 15 years, the debate over them is greatly animated, creating sometimes opposing barricades. The issues - ethical, legal and technical - related to the implementation of a food-tax are numerous and thorny, not to mention the fact that the effectiveness of such a policy is still far to be proved. Empirical data show fairly limited results of food-tax policies to date. The paper, through a comprehensive analysis of data and literature available, outlines the key socio-economic reasons for this failure and possible corrections to be made. Key-words: Food-addiction, health-policies, food-tax, hyper-palatable, highly-processed food.

Biography

Email: umpagano@unina.it