Using apples & pears = wrong assumptions?
Jinfo Blog

By Joanna Ptolomey

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Some of the projects I get involved in are policy development briefs. I find evidence to help people make the right assumptions, identify risk and make decisions. Most of my policy work is in healthcare where socioeconomic inequalities are a big part of the equation for better health outcomes.

Finding the best evidence, connecting the dots, then interpreting for your population, can make policy work a murky pool in which to make decisions. Let’s take the example of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the recent launch their new food desert locator website.

This story starts over 20 years ago in my home city of Glasgow, Scotland whereby evidence appeared in peer reviewed journals that attributed health issues and poverty in the city to something called Food Deserts. It is thought that the term was coined by a local resident of a Glasgow housing estate when a university research project studied the location of food stores in urban areas. The study presented some evidence to suggest that the lack of healthy food availability in deprived urban areas was linked to poorer health outcomes for some lower socioeconomic groups.

The term became normalised with the launch of the health inequalities Acheson report, commonly being used by experts, politicians, commentators and academics. But were the right assumptions and correlations being made?

My daily work bread and butter is essentially about how people use information – yes finding, managing and sharing information is important but how you use it is just as important. If you take pieces of information, make assumptions and connect them in the wrong way then the basis of your decision could be essentially flawed.

A recent Economist article called the food desert idea a mirage and not the real problem. There are questions around the definition of a food desert area (based in the US by census areas) and also what is considered a food store (a supermarket or local/roadside markets). Can you prove a causal link between food deserts, dietary health and health outcomes? What factor does consumer choice play?

Here is an anecdotal piece of evidence from me, the consumer. As I was going through the supermarket checkout a couple of weeks ago the cashier asked me if I really wanted the bag of cherries going through – she weighed them in at a cost of £6.69 (US $11 approx). Now I took them, but I momentarily considered what I could have had instead – six giant bars of chocolate or six multipacks (eight packets in each) of crisps (chips) or six giant bags of chocolate sweeties or three tubs of luxury branded ice cream or three packs of frozen pizza. And, in an era of choice and consumer behaviour, linked with sky rocketing food prices, making healthy food available does not necessarily mean we will or can choose it.

For the record I took the cherries which were eaten in one hour by me and my kids. They were delicious, but I would be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about the ice cream!

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