Healthy Food, Unhealthy Food and Obesity∗

By conducting a systematic demand analysis for unhealthy and healthy food using data from both the United States and Japan, we seek additional evidences to examine whether the latent behavioral mechanisms embedded in two “price effects ” explanations of the rising obesity problem are in fact operative. Our findings lend little support to the hypothesis that substitution between healthy and unhealthy food induced by relative price changes is a major cause of the obesity epidemic in the United States. Instead, falling food price in general is likely to be one of the many causes