We compare food values in the US and Norway using the best-worst scaling approach. The food values examined are aimed at capturing the main issues related to food consumption such as naturalness, taste, price, safety, convenience, nutrition, novelty, origin, fairness, appearance, environmental impact, and animal welfare. Results show that respondents in both countries have mostly similar food values, with safety being the most important value; while convenience and novelty are the least important values. Specifically, US respondents consider price more important and naturalness less important than Norwegian respondents.

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The consumption of large quantities of Sugar-Sweetened Carbonated Soft Drinks (SSCSD) may lead to obesity, which is associated with health problems such as diabetes, cardiac diseases and mental health problems. The effects of increasing the Value Added Tax (VAT) on purchases of SSCSD are estimated. Obesity is more likely among heavy drinkers than among light or moderate drinkers. Therefore, the effects on high- and low-purchasing households are estimated by using Quantile Regressions (QRs) on Norwegian household purchase data. Since many households did not purchase SSCSD during each survey period, censored as well as ordinary QRs are used. Our results suggest that a VAT increase from 13 to 25% will have the highest percentage effect among low-purchasing households but the absolute effect is highest among high-purchasing households. Low-purchasing households will reduce their purchases by about 5 L while the reduction is almost 20 L among high-purchasing households. However, the effects among high-purchasing households are not statistically significant from zero. A reduction of 5 L corresponds ceteris paribus to an annual reduction of about 0.3 kg of body weight.