IEA Head of Lifestyle Economics Christopher Snowdon has spoken on CapX’s podcast to discuss recent proposals by Nesta to force companies to reduce calories in unhealthy food products.

Christopher said:

“[Nesta] have in mind a mandatory target for the food industry to take at least ten per cent of the calories out of ten categories of food that they’ve identified as being particularly unnecessary in the modern diet; things like ready meals, crisps, and chocolate,

“There’s a big ‘man in the pub’ element to public policy making, (…) a lot of the time, they just come up with things that somebody who doesn’t know anything about the market at all (…) might come up with after a number of drinks (…) taking various important ingredients out of food was one of them.

“Because it was Public Health England who came up with it, rather than just some bar fly, it actually had legs,”

You can listen to the full podcast here.