Banning the advertising of discretionary food promotions: An ex-ante analysis of the impact on households by lifestage in Scotland

Having a poor diet and being overweight can have a negative impact on health and wellbeing. To address this, the Scottish Government published its Diet and Healthy Weight Delivery Plan in July 2018, which included, amongst several measures, restricting the advertising of promotions of foods high in fat, sugar or salt (so called ‘discretionary foods’). The purpose of this paper is to produce an ex-ante analysis of the impact of the measure. The methodology consisted of estimating an augmented version of the linearized version of the Almost Ideal Demand System, which included the presence of promotions, for five lifestage groups, from pre-family to older people without children. The results indicated that the measure has the potential to reduce the number of calories, sugar, fats and salt for all the groups, being the highest reductions found in the pre-family and older than 45 years old without children groups.