Citerank: (7) 348770Tackling obesityMany policy interventions have been suggested to address the obesity crisis across multiple studies—and indeed many such measures have been implemented, and are being implemented, now. There's recognition too that these interventions need to be part of a coherent and comprehensive whole systems strategy [4]; with some grounds for optimism that such an approach has the potential to accomplish a significant reduction in the prevalence of obesity in the UK across the next decade. [2]565CA4D9, 371533How to regulate the portion sizes of food eaten at home?The average energy intake from eating out accounts for only around 10 per cent of total energy intake (with the total energy intake per person estimated to be an average of 2,192 kcal per person per day versus an approximate energy intake from eating out of 220 kcal per person per day).8FFB597, 371534Encourage the perception that large portion sizes are anti socialEncouraging the perception that large portion sizes are anti social might help to reduce the portion sizes that people prepare and consume at home.959C6EF, 399546Tackling obesityMany policy interventions have been suggested to address the obesity crisis across multiple studies—and indeed many such measures have been implemented, and are being implemented, now. There's recognition too that these interventions need to be part of a coherent and comprehensive whole systems strategy [4]; with some grounds for optimism that such an approach has the potential to accomplish a significant reduction in the prevalence of obesity in the UK across the next decade. [2]565CA4D9, 399689How to regulate the portion sizes of food eaten at home?The average energy intake from eating out accounts for only around 10 per cent of total energy intake (with the total energy intake per person estimated to be an average of 2,192 kcal per person per day versus an approximate energy intake from eating out of 220 kcal per person per day).8FFB597, 399785Encourage the perception that large portion sizes are anti socialEncouraging the perception that large portion sizes are anti social might help to reduce the portion sizes that people prepare and consume at home.959C6EF, 399858Anti-social campaign worked well against smokingThe well-organized and sustained campaign to portray smoking as an anti-social activity appears to have played a significant role in the reduction of smoking (and therefore might play a similarly effective role in reducing the portion sizes and prepared and consumed at home).1198CE71

Taxes have played a huge role in tackling smoking but this was associated with an aggressive and well funded public health single-issue campaign against smoking. New data suggests that the anti-social aspect of smoking was every bit as powerful as taxes.

There is a general consensus among policymakers that raising tobacco taxes reduces cigarette consumption. However, evidence that tobacco taxes reduce adult smoking is relatively sparse. In this paper, we extend the literature in two ways: using data from the Current Population Survey Tobacco Use Supplements we focus on recent, large tax changes, which provide the best opportunity to empirically observe a response in cigarette consumption, and employ a novel paired difference-in-differences technique to estimate the association between tax increases and cigarette consumption. Estimates indicate that, for adults, the association between cigarette taxes and either smoking participation or smoking intensity is negative, small and not usually statistically significant. Our evidence suggests that increases in cigarette taxes are associated with small decreases in cigarette consumption and that it will take sizable tax increases, on the order of 100%, to decrease adult smoking by as much as 5%.