Encouraging people to eat healthier foods using a virtual supermarket

Assessing the differential impact of health-related food taxes and subsidies in the UK by household income

Eating healthily helps protect against heart and circulatory disease, but currently, people in the UK are not meeting dietary recommendations. We know food prices help people choose which foods to buy, and some countries tax unhealthy foods to encourage people to eat more healthily. But we do not know whether this would improve UK diets. Public health researcher Dr Peter Scarborough from the University of Oxford has received a grant to allow his team to develop a virtual supermarket (a web-based graphic computer simulation of a UK supermarket) to study whether people buy more fruit and vegetables when they are cheaper, and less unhealthy foods when they are more expensive. This research will reveal whether government policies subsidising healthy foods and taxing unhealthy foods encourage people in different income groups to eat more healthily.