What about taxing high sodium, frozen prepared foods?
edit: I appreciate the downvotes, but I feel they have just as much of an impact on public health as sugary drinks.
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.