Does visibility matter? – A simple nudge reduces the purchase of sugar sweetened beverages in canteen drink coolers

Advertising and Stocking at Small Retailers: A Sweetened Beverage Excise Tax in Philadelphia

INTRODUCTION

In 2017, Philadelphia enacted a $0.015 per ounce excise tax on SBs that covered both sugar-sweetened beverages and artificially-sweetened beverages, which reduced purchasing and consumption. This study assessed whether the tax also changed beverage advertising or stocking practices that could influence consumer behavior among stores in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Philadelphia-adjacent counties not subject to the tax.

METHODS

Using a longitudinal difference-in-differences approach, beverage advertising and availability changes were evaluated from 4-month pretax to 6-, 12-, and 24-month post-implementation in small independent stores in Philadelphia (n=34) and Philadelphia-adjacent counties (n=38) versus Baltimore (n=43), a demographically similar city without a tax. Mixed effects models tested whether beverage advertising/availability increased in Philadelphia and surrounding counties after implementation versus Baltimore, included store-level random intercepts, and were stratified by beverage tax status, type, size, and store ZIP code income. Data were collected from 2016 to 2018, and analyses were performed in 2022-2023.

RESULTS

SB advertising increased post-tax in Philadelphia (6 months= +1.04 advertisements/store [95% CI=0.27, 1.80]; 12 months= +1.54 [95% CI=0.57, 2.52]; 24 months= +0.91 [95% CI=0.09, 1.72]) relative to Baltimore. This was driven by increased advertising of sweetened beverages in low-income ZIP codes. Marketing of SBs increased significantly in Philadelphia-adjacent counties relative to Baltimore. Although SB availability in Philadelphia did not change, it increased in surrounding county stores (6 months= +0.20 [95% CI=0.15, 0.25]; 12 months= +0.08 [95% CI=0.03, 0.12]) relative to Baltimore.

CONCLUSIONS

Marketing of SBs, especially in low-income neighborhoods and in surrounding counties, increased following Philadelphia's beverage tax among small, independent retailers. These increases in advertising might have dampened the tax's effect on purchasing behaviors, although estimated effects on sales remained large.

Nudging Strategies for Arable Land Protection Behavior in China

Arable land protection is critical to the sustainable development of agriculture in China and acceleration of the realization of the trinity protection goal of the quantity, quality, and ecology of arable land. As a new program of behavioral science to promote social development, nudge has gradually gained the favor of researchers and policy makers due to its unique advantages of small cost and substantial effect. However, current research and practical exploration of arable land protection behavior intervention based on the idea of nudging are still lacking. Implicit nudging strategies directly target the heuristic and analytic systems of arable land protection behavior of each stakeholder and possess more advantages than traditional intervention strategies. Therefore, this article designs six arable land protection behavior nudging strategies from the perspectives of cognition and motivation to realize the theoretical discussion of "generating medium-scale returns with nano-level investment". The nudging strategies of the cognitive perspective include default options, framing effects, and descriptive norms, while those of the motivation perspective aim to stimulate home and country, and heritage and benefit motives to promote arable land protection behavior of various stakeholders. The utility of nudge to arable land protection behavior may be controversial in practice. Therefore, the implementation in China should be based on the division of farmers, the number of options should be appropriate, and the external environment of arable land protection behavior should be fully considered.

Are Perceptions of Health Dependant on Social Class? Studying Soft Power and Symbolic Violence in a Health Promotion Program among Young Men at Vocational Schools

Health behaviour among young people has a social gradient, and tends to be skewed in terms of gender as well. Young men in vocational educational settings are an example where the inequality in health is apparent. Addressing this problem requires an understanding of health behaviour and its determinants in the target group in order to be able to develop interventions that can address the problem. The aim of the paper is to investigate to what extent a multicomponent intervention based on the Whole School Approach, targeting the risk behaviours, smoking, eating and physical activity that have an impact on health behaviour among male students in a disadvantaged educational setting. The paper uses self-reported longitudinal data on risk behaviours from the “Gearing up the Body” 1-year intervention program that was implemented among students at a Danish vocational school. For the analysis, we created a score model to categorise students and behaviour. Analyses suggest that interventions had only a modest impact and what evidence there is shows that the interventions reduced the health behaviour scores by 0.03 points. More specifically, we find that symbolic violence reduces the health behaviour score of the healthy types by 0.20 points, whereas soft power increases the health behaviour of the unhealthy type by 0.05 points. An explanation for the disappointing results of the “Gearing up the Body” program is tension between different understanding of what is “right” and “wrong” health behaviour. We find that the ideas of soft power and symbolic violence can contribute to a better understanding of why health and health behaviour is understood differently among vocational students. Thus, the finding demonstrates that one needs to apply a participatory approach rather than a normative approach addressing the health behaviour of disadvantaged individuals.