MW Bring on RFK Jr.'s food-dye ban

By Brett Arends

Especially if it will raise the price of junk food

Will RFK Jr.'s food dye ban drive up food prices? I hope so.

I have no idea if artificial food dyes really are bad for you. Or if U.S. health secretary Robert Kennedy's plan to ban some of them, announced in recent days, will survive the inevitable legal counterattacks and propaganda of Big Food.

But if they are going to raise the price of junk foods, I say: Bring it on.

It is news to no one that food prices have risen a long way. Food inflation was one of the many reasons the Democrats lost last year's election. Many people voted for Donald Trump in the hope he would Make American Groceries Affordable Again.

(Since the election, egg prices have risen 45%. I'm not kidding. You can see the numbers here.)

But amid all this rage about food inflation, here's an uncomfortable fact.

The average American household could get its food budget back to where it was five years ago, before Big Inflation, if they got their actual food consumption back to where it would have been two generations ago - before the Big Eat.

That's not me talking. That's math. Take it up with Archimedes.

Food prices have risen just over 25% during the inflationary wave of the past five years. You can see the data here.

But the amount of food that the average U.S. household eats has also risen a lot more than was considered normal and healthy until around the middle of the 1970s.

How much more? Er ... about 30%. Maybe more.

I'm not making this up. Check the numbers here. The average U.S. consumption was around 3,000 calories a day for decades.

Today: nearly 3,900.

Other estimates may vary. But they're as likely to be higher than they are lower. And - to steal back from the MAGA crowd the McKinsey term I first popularized - these numbers are certainly directionally correct.

What this means is that, mathematically, people could get their food budget back to where it was in 2020 just by cutting their food consumption back to the levels we saw before they suddenly took off in the latter years of the 1970s.

Actually, they'd be spending less than they were before. Oh, and given that hourly earnings have risen about 25% since the start of 2020, they'd have a lot more money left in the bank.

Why should Americans eat less? They don't have to if they don't want to. But it's not as if all this extra food we're eating is something positive. The explosion of food consumption has produced an epidemic of obesity that is now killing more than half a million Americans a year. They are literally eating themselves to death.

That's the equivalent of three 747 jumbo jets, carrying a total of more than 1,300 people, crashing every single day. It works out at around one per minute. Another one of our fellow citizens died, before his or her time, of obesity while you were reading this article.

Once again, this isn't me talking. It's the medical journal the Lancet.

To put this in context, by this count obesity has already killed more than twice as many Americans since 2019 as COVID.

Oh, and a new scientific paper just confirmed that consumption of "ultraprocessed foods" was killing people.

But while almost no policy measure was considered too extreme in order to "fight" the coronavirus that causes COVID (don't get me started), no matter how foolish, needless or even damaging, almost any policy measure would be considered too extreme to deal with the obesity epidemic.

It's risky even to talk about it.

So found comedian Bill Maher a few years ago.

Apparently it's better to ignore all these bodies effectively piling up in the morgue. Just pretend it isn't happening. Or even celebrate it.

Arguably the only positive on this front in recent years has been the sudden emergence of powerful anti-obesity drugs such as Ozempic $(NVO)$ (DK:NOVO.B). Their financial cost is huge. And the health effects of using them over the long term are unknown. But they are better than the status quo, and that's for sure.

Obesity, or overeating, is now killing more Americans than smoking. (So reports the Lancet, and the Cleveland Clinic.) I'm old enough to remember when smoking was normal. People smoked in offices and stores, aboard airplanes, and even in hospitals.

But Americans decided the horrendous death toll was too much for any civilized society to bear. So they fought the epidemic, mainly using two tools: social pressure (now apparently relabeled "shame") and higher prices.

We smokers were forced to stand outside buildings in all weathers in order to have a smoke, desperately trying to light our cigarettes in rain, hail, high winds or snowstorms. Sneering passersby took exaggerated detours to avoid us. Sometimes some prima donna - 50 yards away, across a busy city street - made her feelings known by flapping her hands in front of her face while making a pantomime coughing sound. It was quite normal for people to reprove us to our face for our "disgusting" - the favorite word - habit.

Nobody worried they were smoker shaming or being smokephobic. The terms were never invented.

Meanwhile, the cost of a pack of cigarettes, just $1 back in the 1980s, was jacked up as high as $13 (in Boston, anyway).

And you know what? It worked. The share of the population that smokes has fallen by about three-quarters in 50 years, from more than 40% to barely 10%. Hundreds of thousands of lives - millions, actually - have been extended.

How times have changed.

But if Kennedy has a plan that would raise the cost of foods - particularly those artificially colored - I'm all in. It's a start, anyway.

-Brett Arends

This content was created by MarketWatch, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. MarketWatch is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 29, 2025 14:39 ET (18:39 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.