Thinness and Obesity: A Model of Food Consumption, Health Concerns, and Social Pressure

Abstract

The increasing concern of the policy maker about eating behavior has focused on the spread of obesity and on the evidence of a consistent number of individuals dieting despite being underweight. As the latter behavior is often attributed to the social pressure to be thin, some governments have already taken actions to ban ultra-thin ideals and testimonials. Assuming that people are heterogeneous in their healthy weights, but are exposed to the same ideal body weight, this paper proposes a theoretical framework to assess whether increasing the ideal body weight is socially desirable, both from a welfare and from a health point of view. If being overweight is the average condition and the ideal body weight is thin, increasing the ideal body weight may increase welfare by reducing social pressure. By contrast, health is on average reduced, since people depart even further from their healthy weight. Given that in the US and in Europe people are on average overweight, we conclude that these policies, even when are welfare improving, may foster the obesity epidemic.JEL classification: D91, I18.

Obesity and Smoking: can we Kill Two Birds with one Tax?

“…As some studies show that obesity is positively correlated with inequality, fat taxes or tobacco excises might exacerbate inequality (Pickett et al , ; Elston et al , ). In addition, if obesity is also a social phenomenon, policy interventions aimed at reducing its prevalence may have persistent and amplified effects, which should be taken into account (Dragone and Savorelli, ; Strulik, ). Note also that we have focused on a partial equilibrium analysis.…”

“…To determine the long‐run dynamic properties of the optimal choices of the agent, we focus on the steady state of the problem where food consumption, smoking, addiction to smoking, and body weight are optimally chosen and are stable over time. Before describing the possible types of steady state that are consistent with the model, we introduce some terminology analogous to that of Levy () and Dragone and Savorelli ().…”

“…Notably, this result emerges only when smoking has a metabolic effect on body weight ( ϵ > 0), which rationalizes its use as a sort of dieting device. Outcomes (ii) and (iii) describe, respectively, the case where an overweight agent underconsumes food to avoid becoming even more overweight (Levy, ; Dragone, ) and the one where an underweight agent overconsumes food to avoid becoming even more underweight (Dragone and Savorelli, ). Outcome (iv) describes the case where underconsuming food, despite being underweight, is optimal.…”

“…To understand how these outcomes can emerge, in this paper, we propose a dynamic model that studies smoking, eating, and physical exercise as concurrent choices. We consider a setting that builds on the literature, suggesting that they are intrinsically dynamic phenomena (Becker and Murphy, ; Gruber and Kőszegi, ; Levy, ; Charness and Gneezy, ; Dragone, ; Dragone and Savorelli, ) and that they are related through two distinct pathways: their impact on individual metabolism and body weight (Chiolero et al. ; Caudwell et al.…”

“…Second, based on the available medical and sociological literature, we design a dynamic model that clearly emphasizes the interdependence between smoking, eating behavior, and exercising and the importance of the substitutability among health‐related behaviors. Third, we study rational smoking, rational eating, and physical exercise as joint choices, which reciprocally affect each other in an intertemporal framework (e.g., Becker and Murphy, ; Gruber and Kőszegi, ; Levy, ; Dragone, ; Dragone and Savorelli, ). On the one hand, this allows studying the implications of the taxation of addictive goods in the context of interdependent health‐related behaviors; on the other hand, it contributes to the literature on fat taxes, which has been mainly addressed in static models (Schroeter et al.…”