Sugary drink tax models show health gains, cost reductions, but vary by design
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Obesity massively increased internationally after the mid-1970s US agriculture policy changes ([0]). Specifically look at corn production after the mid 1970s[1]. One of corn's products is HFCS, the massive influx of this sugar substitute drove international raw sugar prices down until 2007[2].
This had the side effect of sugar being a cheaper food ingredient than most of the alternatives, even in countries that didn't directly import HFCS (since the US was no longer removing as much raw sugar from the market, driving down costs).
A lot of people who bring up HFCS try to paint it as an even less healthy sugar, my point is more nuanced than that: That HFCS is driving down prices and causing more, even raw sugar, to appear in foods as both sugar/HFCS are subsidized by US aggro policy (and tax payer cash) since between mid-1970s and today.
We can pass sugar-drink taxes, but it feels like fixing a leak with duct tape. Instead, we should fix the whole pipe, by changing US aggro policy so that HFCS isn't unnaturally cheap. This will cause both food manufacturers and consumers to consider the healthier and cheaper alternatives.
PS - I'm not against sugar-drink taxes as an interim step.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity#History
[1] https://suyts.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/image20.png
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_raw_sugar_pric...
What are these alternatives?
I suspect however that it's more about the relative price of sugary food compared to non-sugary food. Imagine if the price of Pepsi had to increase because the price of sugar increased. I'm curious if we have any studies on the price elasticity of demand for sugary food.
In fact, big customers of the sugar companies lobby for this to happen all the time (think Hershey). They'd love the U.S. sugar industry to collapse. It's a constant battle.
An honest question, why is this a big issue? If US farms are not competitive producing sugar, why are we incentivizing them to do so?
1. There are strategic reasons for a country to maintain a strong agricultural sector in case of international instability, war... etc. In today's economy we can't be 100% independent, but we still need some level of independence we wouldn't get without government intervention.
2. Other countries are undercutting our prices for reasons we find unethical: extremely low wages, inhuman working conditions, literal slavery... etc. We can't control other countries directly on these fronts, but we can at least ensure that we do not contribute to those practices ourselves.
3. Other countries are driving prices down through government subsidies in a bid to gain control of the market, and our tariffs compensate for that.
I have no clue whether these reasons apply to sugar specifically, or whether the US policy on these questions is proportional and effective. But at least it illustrates that there are reasons why a policy like that makes sense for the country as a whole (and not just for sugar producers).
What would make sense to me is taxing packaged foods that add sugar/HFCS to make it cheaper. The food that does not add sugar tends to be more expensive, for the reason that the sugar can mask issues with using lower quality ingredients. What irritates me is that without carefully examining each and very package, it is easy to get said foods too.
EDIT: Here is a link to the study: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.119.0...
It's a bit more complicated than that. US agricultural policy subsidises corn production (driving prices down), but US trade policy keeps cheap sugar out of the country, while US energy policy diverts corn into making biofuels, both of which drive prices back up. It's not clear what the net effect is.
Even the impact of corn subsidies alone does not seem to be enormous, however. Some estimates have corn subsidies driving the cost of corn down by ~27%, with flow on effects to the prices of meat, dairy, and yes, HFCS. However, HFCS make up ~3.5% of the cost of a soft drink, and the cost of corn is less than half the total cost of making HFCS, which means the total impact of corn subsidies on the price of a soft drink is a couple of pennies.
In other words, if we wanted a sugary drink tax to counteract the impact of corn subsidies in the US, it would probably need to be on the order of 1-2%. Would a 1% tax have any measurable impact on consumption? Unlikely.
Meanwhile, Australia has no subsidies, mostly uses sugar (and not HFCS) but has the same obesity patterns as the US. Analysis of obesity and agricultural policy across countries finds no trends.
Source: https://grist.org/article/farm-subsidies-bitter-and-sweet/
Also, small point:
> This had the side effect of sugar being a cheaper food ingredient than most of the alternatives, even in countries that didn't directly import HFCS (since the US was no longer removing as much raw sugar from the market, driving down costs).
Only in the short term; that effect would have ended years ago. The global price of sugar now is driven by the marginal cost of production in Brazil, mostly. Americans don't consume (much) imported sugar, but they also don't export much HFCS, and most of what they do export goes to a single country (Mexico). There's no glut of "sugar the US would have consumed" on the market.
Second, global sugar prices have been pretty flat for the last 20 years; I don't think your link 3 is really showing what you say. You can poke at the chart here: https://www.macrotrends.net/2537/sugar-prices-historical-cha... but I'm not sure what I'm meant to be seeing.
The drinks aren't cheap and people pile on the sweet options. You even have the option of no sweetener (which few people take advantage of).
I can see if,
Sweetened drink = $8.00
Unsweetened = $4.00
Yes, that would likely have an effect.
The equivalent 12oz coffee milkshake is ~$4.
Guess which one is more popular?
That said, I do actually buy the non-sugary drinks because they're cheaper. I tend to buy Blonde Americanos to get the lowest bitterness espresso flavor from them, at the lowest price.
The actual cost of manufacturing a soft drink is in the order of pennies - [0] does a breakdown where the numbers are likely wrong but in the right ballpark. An increase of a few c per litre in tax at the production level would have a huge knock on effect on the price of the drinks, unless the manufacturers eat the increases.
Customers are also hugely price sensitive, an increase of a few pence can have a massive change on purchasing patterns.
[0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-it-cost-to-manufacture-3...
Looking at one weekly special[1] I see Pepsi selling four 12-packs for $12. I would be shocked if customers taking advantage of that deal would balk at it being $13, for example. That would still be only $0.27 per can.
[1] https://shop.shoprite.com/store/e65b663/weekly-specials/848
The price difference is $0.02 per can, (which is potentially the difference a sugar tax might make), it would certainly be enough to sway a large number of people to choose the cheaper option.
Not sure about the regularity of these deals, but I remember as a studen often going to a place with a €4 meal deal. One week we went along, and the price of the deal had been increased to €4.50, and even though their competitors had been selling at that price (or higher) for quite a while before that, the people who defaulted to there for lunch stopped going purely based on a tiny price increase.
But that's not the point of a soda tax: it's to shape consumer behavior and cause them to prefer smaller portion sizes if they don't simply switch off sugary drinks altogether. That's why the taxes are 1-2 cents per ounce on sugary drinks.
Philadelphia saw a 38% reduction in sales of sugary drinks after a 1.5 per ounce tax was added. [1]
Beverage sales inside Philadelphia’s city limits dropped by 51% but were partially offset by an increase in sales just outside the city, resulting in a net decrease in soda sales of 38% in the area, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/14/sugary-drink-sales-fall-38pe...
This was tried in chicago and rolled back because poorer ppl had "knee-jerk against sugary drink taxes". It targeted drinks that poor drank and left out things like chai tea latte.
[0] https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/american-dai...
For instance, the article says:
> In the U.S., seven cities (Philadelphia... currently have volume-based taxes for sugary drinks
Philadelphia has a tax on certain beverages that has very little to do with whether those beverages contain sugar or not. Diet sodas and low-carb protein drinks (think atkins meal replacements) are taxed heavily in Philadelphia. 100% juice is not. What Philadelphia has is a "sweetened beverage" tax that specifically doesn't care about sugar, regardless of health consequence, regardless of how it is sweetened, regardless of how much sugar exists in the product "naturally".
The other cities do specifically target sugar-sweetened beverages, and then exempt 100% fruit juice despite Minute Maid 100% Apple Juice containing even more sugar than Coca-Cola.
would you target a vanilla latte? What if you get latte without sugar?
My first line started with "I'm hugely in favor of sugar consumption taxes". I don't understand which part of that was unclear, but I'll attempt to clarify.
> What if you get latte without sugar?
True fact: milk has sugar in it.
I favor a model that taxes proportionally by total mg/ml, not just "added". This is what the American Heart Association advocates for too, though even they dance around the fruit juice problem.
It only affects poor people anyways. So sugar is OK for the rich but bad for the poor? So stupid.
Public health is public.
> It only affects poor people anyways.
True fact: poor people in the US suffer obesity at higher rates than rich people do because cheap foods are more packed full of sugar. Unregulated pollution of the poor diet is a class equity issue. The market response when sugar is penalized _correctly_ is that cheaper foods become more healthful, not that the price floor increases.
Instead it's a regressive tax on the poor and gives the government even more power over controlling the daily lives of it's citizens.
I could get behind subsidizing fresh meat and vegetables. But artificially making food more expensive seems ridiculous.
There is a real limit to how much food expenditure in general can increase. If prices had safe room to go up, they'd already be higher. You can see this by just looking at the price differences between poor area grocery stores and wealthy area grocery stores. There's a reason why poor people don't shop at Whole Foods, and it isn't because they don't like mochi ice cream and espresso bars. A very large percentage of people in the US actually don't have extra money to spend. On top of that, you're imagining that literally everything has and needs to have a bunch of sugar in it when that's just not true. What people will do first is switch to foods with less sugar, even if they don't like it as much, because the vast majority of grocery buyers are both extremely price sensitive and also adaptable.
> I could get behind subsidizing fresh meat and vegetables.
1. We do that already.
2. You're the only one suggesting that a tax on sugar can't go directly and completely to additional consumer-side price subsidization of fresh meat and vegetables. I think that would be great and fully inline with the goal of taxing sugar in the first place.
The fruit juice problem is that fruit juice is basically just sugar water but nobody in the general public seems to realize or care and medical associations continue to drop the ball. The American Academy of Pediatrics only recently started saying to not give children juice. The American Heart Association should be hammering that drum loudly when talking about sugar in drinks...but they don't.
> At the end of the day, it's a sugary beverage. Why shouldn't it be taxed in the same way as any other sweet drink.
Correct, it _should_ be taxed. But municipalities keep exempting it despite extremely high sugar content because people are brainwashed into thinking that fruit juice is healthful and magically forgetting all the sugar.
The other thing that amuses me is the size of juice servings in the US vs UK. I enjoy a glass of OJ with breakfast. In the UK, that's a little "half-size" glass and in the US it's a full-size water glass (pint?). I much prefer the UK size (though admittedly, I'm also consuming coffee and water at the same time).
Also it seems a little more complicated than gp pointed out: natural sugar in fruit doesn't (as far as I remember) have the same impact that the sugar in juice made by the same fruit would have. Something about the sugar being digested slower because it is bound in the fibers that are destroyed when the fruit is made into sugar.
Do you never eat candy bars or sugary pastries but enjoy soda sometimes? You get taxed. Do you eat piles of candy bars and sugary pastries everyday but never drink soda? No tax for you! What?
The real reason for targeting sugary drinks vs. fancy patisserie is that the drinkers of sugary drinks tend to be less well off than the eaters of fancy patisserie and less likely to have a political lobby.
To effect the largest impact with the smallest policy change. Bakers aren't going to oppose a tax on sugary drinks, but would oppose a tax on baked goods. Further, why try to change a behavior that isn't significantly contributing to the problem?
> The real reason for targeting sugary drinks vs. fancy patisserie is...
I don't think you can assert this so definitively. Just because you can't think of another reason doesn't mean there isn't one.
This is almost exactly what I wrote, which you claimed I couldn't assert. You just switched my rich-people-who-love-patisserie to the-people-who-sell-rich-people-their-patisserie. Either way, there would be more opposition to doing the right thing, but more opposition does not mean that it wouldn't be the right thing to do.
> Further, why try to change a behavior that isn't significantly contributing to the problem?
But... but... there are obese and diabetic people out there who love cake but only drink Diet Coke. Also, again, "largest source" doesn't tell you whether it's "the only significant source" (say, 90% of total sugar consumed from sugary drinks) or just barely "largest among different groups, if you group them just right" (say, 34% from sugary drinks vs. 33% from pastries and 33% from candy). I don't know which of these extremes is closer to the real values, but I know that only one of them is consistent with your argument, and I haven't seen data to support that.
Soft drink sales appear to be declining since 2010 or so. I think the writing is on the wall, but companies like coke aren't just selling sugary sludge while calling it a beverage...they are selling American culture and American exceptionalism. Therefore, Coke can't just go bankrupt and disappear globally, because it would be the equivalent of admitting the decline of American exceptionalism and culture.
But taxing soft drinks sets the stage for some serious face saving when the market inevitably dries up and bankruptcies start, again not just face saving for the beverages and companies, but face saving for American culture. In other words in the future you will see the Coke executives not admitting they were hocking sugary sludge that caused health problems all over the world which people rejected as they became more educated about the health issues cause by consuming these products, rather the executives while floating down on their golden parachutes get to falsely claim they were regulated out of existence through taxes.
That said, there are research that shows that sugar in drinks does not trigger the same biological saturation triggers as sugar in food. The example I have heard is that eating an apple is completely different from drinking the juice of a pressed apple. The act of chewing and the fibers acts as a ques for the brain in order to know when the body has enough. The health risk of eating too many apples is low, but drinking too much apple juice is easy.
We are, but it's got some paradoxical warts: a bag of pure sugar is not affected. Yet a sugar-free(!) soda is. It kind of makes a mockery of an otherwise good idea.
That may be a debate worth having, but the sugar-tax debate was framed entirely in the context of the negative health effects of sugar. It's then dishonest and unconstructive to apply the tax to sweet sugar-free products.
Perhaps so. But to lump it under a sugar tax seems dishonest to me, and may provide real and significant fodder for those who fight against such tax altogether.
This is "whataboutism" at it's finest; taxing soda results in health gains so we should do it. Maybe we should also tax those other things but no health gains have been show (at least in this article).
That's not an objective value. If it's relatively simple to tax and direct funds from 'A' to treatments...like cigarettes. We can (and do) tax lots of sources of cancer, but convenience is relevant to forming public policy.
On the other hand, forbidding a thing altogether seems to have disastrously ineffective results too (see: the prohibition, war on drugs, etc.).
Maybe a better solution is to simply forbid companies from putting addictive things in their products to sell them, but keep the addictive thing legal, e.g. don't put too much sugar in the soda you make (so people won't expect too much sugar as a matter of course) but let people add sugar to the soda if they really want to. In other words, regulate companies' practices but not individuals'.
First, there are healthier alternatives. Sugar-free sodas are probably not ideal but they can't be worse than sugary drinks.
Second, while sugar may be addictive, it is not that addictive. Some people would murder to fuel an heroin addiction, but no sugar addict would walk a mile to get their fix instead of drinking water. And if they did the exercise would burn some of the calories :)
They are very much, comprehensively, most certainly, for sure far better than sugary drinks.
Aspartame is safe. The acidity remains an issue for dentition. But the sugar is the real killer.
Not to say this is in any way comparable to a heroin addiction, but sugar urges can be strong and compelling.
Eating sugar and other processed, simple carbohydrates such as french fries, chips, and soda while sedentary is a great way to become obese and diabetic.
At least in Chicago, they included diet drinks in their tax.
Not necessarily. Maybe the goal was to discourage people from the habit of drinking sweetened drinks in general, instead of just encouraging them to drink Diet Coke instead. It would probably be better for everyone except the drink manufactures if everyone just switched to plain water.
I don't think you have experience with a sugar addiction. I've done this more times than I can count and hate myself for it every time.
Well, that is not clear:
Companies squabble over nuances that less impact them, and more greatly their competitors, implemented through their political pressure on representatives.
Which is why historically most democracies have trended laissez faire on directly compelling specific supplier behavior. Demand-side modification has the same dangers, but to a lesser degree.
Sugar seems to me more insidious, in that at first it doesn't really make you feel all that great. But there's a convenience factor. Sugary foods are usually "easy to eat", they're "right there". In this, I would argue this addiction gets built up over time.
Now I've never tried heroin, but from what I understand the effects are much more pleasant in and of themselves. Addiction sets in much more quickly.
All this is to say that maybe banning sugar would work. If the convenience factor goes out, and if there's no "wow factor" to trying it, there's much less potential for abuse and for addiction.
"the rule of thumb in the United States is that a 10 percent price increase on a pack of cigarettes results in anywhere from a 2.5 percent to a 5.0 percent overall decline in smoking, with most studies showing an average 4.0 percent drop" from https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hpb20160919.471471/...
Data and analytics for this are worth reading about - I find geographic issues (low-tax areas across state lines, total numbers of retail locations selling tobacco products, etc) along with concepts of price elasticity to be interesting modeling problems.
You might want to check out:
https://publications.iarc.fr/Book-And-Report-Series/Iarc-Han...
It has a bunch of freely-available chapters talking about this area of research.
You should disavow yourself of this notion. Taxation on cigarettes is highly effective at reducing the rate of tobacco consumption [1]. Increasing prices of heroin is less so, because heroin is extremely addictive and therefore price inelastic. This is a very thoroughly studied area in economics, typically referred to as a Pigouvian or "sin" tax [2].
Sugar is not going to be anywhere near as price inelastic as heroin so it is likely that there will be a strong decrease in sugar consumption if such a tax was introduced. The issue at hand is whether this is _fair_. Sugar consumption is only a problem if there is misuse, not if it is consumed per se. This is fundamentally different to tobacco consumption (every ciggy you smoke is bad for you + others + healthcare system).
[1]: https://www.tobaccoinaustralia.org.au/chapter-13-taxation/13...
I would be surprised if taxing had this effect (see research cited by others claiming otherwise), I think in particular low income people respond a lot to price incentives[0]. They are the most at risk from obesity. Moreover, you can redirect those taxes without much controversy into other efforts, like educational material, or just public healthcare (which is a "victim" of obesity epidemics).
[0] I highly recommend the book from recent Nobel Prize winners, 'Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty', there are several experiments showing how extremely poor people respond to incentives (much more rationally than it appears), though I'm not sure how this generalizes to low-income americans.
This is a general problem with regressive taxes (eg. sales taxes). The way to mitigate this is to give some fixed amount back to everyone. It can even be made fully revenue neutral (ie. all collected revenues are returned as a tax credit). That way, people are still incentivized to stop consuming sugary products, people aren't left with a hole in their wallets if they don't change their habits.
>Maybe a better solution is to simply forbid companies from putting addictive things in their products to sell them, but keep the addictive thing legal
I'm not sure how this would work. Maybe they will stop adding sugar directly, but they might something that's 90% sugar (eg. apple juice concentrate). We already see this play out in nitrite-containing foods. Basically what happened was that nitrites in food was found to be bad for your health, so food companies switched from adding nitrites directly to adding "celery juice extract", which is a natural source of nitrites. Nothing really changed, except now there's no "nitrites" in the label, and the company can call it "all-natural".
I think unlike heroin, smoking is probably easier to quit, and (because you know the size of the dosage for certain) easier to decrease your consumption.
I don't know the answer, maybe accept that some people are going to be unhealthy and, when you create public health systems some of those who have healthy habits are going to pay for those who have unhealthy habits and, while not fair, that is the price to pay.
Otherwise the question quickly becomes where do you draw the line? Mandatory weight control and mandatory calorie restrictions if found overweight?
I never thought about it, but now that I do, vice taxes shouldn't go into the public coffers to prevent a conflict of interest. It should have a mandatory use in reducing the vice, or directly paying for economic externalities caused by the vice, and if not possible, should get donated to charity.
I've noticed after the UK brought in the sugar tax the formulations for a lot of drinks changed to have a lower sugar content with sweetness boosted with artificial sweeteners. This allows them to avoid the sugar tax as they are now lower sugar. I realised this as occasionally when I was in England I'd enjoy something like an Irn-Bru (orange Scottish soda made from girders), but a few years ago I noticed it now tasted horrible to me as I really can't stand artificial sweeteners. Coca-cola seems to be a notable exception that didn't change their formula.
Denmark also has a sugar tax (higher than the UK's) but the market kept the existing products and just charged more for them. An interesting example is the original formula Ribena (blackcurrant cordial) is made in England and freely available in Denmark, but the new formulation (less sugar, more sweeteners, less fruit juice, more thickeners) is the only one available in the UK.
It'd be interesting to see if there was an effect from sweet drinks now being a different thing in the UK and if that's a positive outcome from the legislation. I certainly avoid most soft drinks now when in the UK.
Coca Cola is an interesting one in that the Coca Cola Zero Sugar introduction seemed to have been mostly about introducing a replacement for Coke Zero that had labeling making it easier to confuse with regular Coke, with the design dominated by the "regular" red and just some black added (in Europe; in some other markets the design is more distinct from regular Coke)
> blackcurrant cordial
Interestingly, blackcurrant is almost exclusively a European thing (99%+ of production).
It's a UK thing as far as I am aware. Never seen it in any quantity outside of the UK.
Creme de cassis is a strong liquor. It's quite expensive due to being alcohol (alcohol taxes and regulations) and generally being a luxury mixer at that.
It's never drinked alone. It is not drinkable, it's very strong and it has a thick consistency akin to a smoothie. (You could try a sip but you're definitely not going to down a glass of that).
Main use is a mixer for cocktails. The most common is "kir". Put a bit of creme de cassis at the bottom of the glass and fill the rest with a white wine. The fancy version is the "kir royale", using champagne in place of white wine.
It may well be uncommon in parts of Europe too, but not to the extent of particularly the US where most states banned it for nearly a century because it contributed as a reservoir to diseases that threatened white pine, which made it uncommon enough that most Americans have never tasted it.
Quote from the article: "Marvin Pritts, a professor of horticulture at Cornell University, asserts that less than 0.1% of Americans have likely ever eaten a blackcurrant."
Being exposed to it as a child makes it easy to detect it, but for the 99.9%+ of Americans who've never been exposed to it what do they experience? Another berry? A wine flavour they can't quite describe? Do they miss out on it altogether?
In practice, it's a failure every time.
Not every sin need be taxed.
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/the-evidence-is-...
Absolutely... as long as every individual is willing to pay the full costs of their sins.
Making each and every individual responsible for the cost of their own "sins" completely removes society's responsibility for creating the circumstances in the first place.
The study literally came to the opposite conclusion:
> Three types of taxation on sugary drinks lower healthcare costs, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes, but some – such as taxing sugar content – perform even better than taxing based on the volume of the beverage.
I had hoped that the article would be about real world results, but it's really about comparing different results theoretically. Which is also helpful, but not nearly so helpful as data.
Actually gathering data is hard. The effects of sugar in the diet take decades to show up, and there are millions of variables and compounding factors. So it's not really a surprise that the article is theoretical rather than practical, but it is disappointing that the headline doesn't make that more prominent.
The real-world experiments will be policy, and those policies will have to be driven by these models ahead of there being experimental results. So we have to do it. But we won't know how good they were for a long time.
A lot of these issues are offloaded to healthcare. It is the government's job to figure out strategies to reduce the load on healthcare systems. It's definitely a hard problem to solve, it could all end up in a failure, but it's important to discuss it before stamping "FAILURE" on it. Maybe there are good strategies that do work?
To give an example of what works: when I was young we had many lessons about what smoking does to you. We discussed the effects of it and were shown pictures of gnarly lungs. That, plus how my parents smelled after smoking, definitely helped me make up my mind about smoking. Sugar is way more difficult than that, as you get addicted to it before you ever realize the effects of it. After years of just eating sugary foods and drinks, regular food starts to taste bland. I remember as a kid I hated the taste of water - how insane is that?!
A tax is a worthwhile strategy to explore in my opinion.
I had no idea America was on track for 50% of the population to be pre-diabetic by 2025, and that a vast majority of americans would be overweight or obese in the next 20 years. Its really made clear to me that I need to be 100% about what I'm putting in my body, and if you look at the ingredients of most food in grocery stores, you find it has some level of sugar. Its also drawn my attention to my own sugar and carb addiction tendencies. As much as I know I should not eat that bar of chocolate, even having the option available sways me to buy it.
To round out my own opinions: sugar is the next tobacco and should be regulated as such.
Like this one, they tend to be filled with highly polarized and extremists views and conspiracy theories with very little hard science or data to back things up.
I thought it had already happened, but I hope someday these topics can be penalized from ranking highly like other issues that tend to have very low quality discussion.
Edit: To clarify, I’m referring to the discussion here on HN as opposed to the article.
people just don’t get how harmful it is. sugar and alcohol are two things that - although socially acceptable - everyone should avoid in everyday life.
.. "the principle that the buyer alone is responsible for checking the quality and suitability of goods before a purchase is made."
it’s also shocking - to me - seeing people attempt to minimize the health impact of sugar.
Right after it went into effect. Ribena cut sugar by half in all their drinks, to fall under the floor of the higher tax rate.
I'm saying Ribena because that's the free drinks we had the most of in the company fridges. All other vendors of artificial drinks did the same overnight.
I would prefer to see a campaign of public education and encouragement towards healthier alternatives.
In the US we have had very good success in curbing tobacco consumption without resorting to crazy high taxes like Australia and New Zealand.
However they’ve added artificial sweeteners to make up for the lost sweetness, which I don’t like. I would prefer it just with less sugar and that’s it.
edit: I appreciate the downvotes, but I feel they have just as much of an impact on public health as sugary drinks.
Normal people have ability to filter out sodium from the bloodstream on high intakes without any problem. They might develop problems with the kidney but kidney problems due to sodium is doubtful. I'd say tea is more dangerous for kidney than sodium. But same does not apply for sugar. If you eat excess sugar it will turn into blood sugar, and it will cause insulin to spike. The body eventually stores the excess in fat, but the process is so harsh for the body that it will definitely cause cardiovascular problems and diabetes.
Sodium is problematic because it makes us easy to eat carbs (i.e. sugar) more. Try to eat excess sodium by itself or with protein or fat. You really can't. But with carb you can. Sodium isn't toxic per se. Carb is the problem. Thus the sugar tax.
Lots of innocent food ingredients have been blamed for cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Fat's been exonerated. But I really dobut that sodium is bad for those two. Fat and sodium have the same thing in common. They make carb taste good.
>frozen prepared foods
As long as they use good quality ingredients it's OK. Taxing them would make them less profitable and result to using worse ingredients.
Right, so target drinks.. slippery slope.. all sugar.
Then people buy the cheaper cuts of meat to afford a soda or two. Bacon ends with huge chunks of fat. Congrats, we just swapped one issue for another.
Isn't orange/apple/etc juice full of sugar? What about whole fruits? What about flying in bananas from the other side of the planet? Can we do that with less carbon emissions?
I'm just getting started. :P
We've already seen producers lowering on sugars due to the trend of avoiding sugar. People won't buy cheaper cuts of meat. Producers will try to dodge the tax by using sugar substitutes, and it will result to overall positive effect to the public health. Also, Bacon does not have bad influence on your body. Fat does not cause cardiovascular problems, diabetes or other accusations of diseases it faced in the 70s.
Fruit juices are bad for you because of, you guessed it, sugar. Creating an incentive to swap out juices for real fruits? Or an incentive to drive producers to extract sugar and replace them with sugar substitutes? I'm in.