New evidence suggests that Seattle’s soda tax is working well

When I arrived to the UK, a can of Coke was about £0.45. They kept increasing the prices each year and now it's probably about £1. It's not that I couldn't afford a can, but for me, paying a £1 for it became much less attractive and I only bough it a couple of times over the last two years.

It's possible the decrease is driven largely by spending habits of low-income families:

> Last year, researchers at the University of Washington found that low-income families in particular saw a significant decrease in soda consumption following the implementation of the tax. The findings were based on a survey of residents, meaning that it relied on self-reporting, which is less accurate than sales data.

This leads to interesting policy questions. For example, some people might complain that the tax is regressive and hits poorer families harder. A rebuttal to this is that obesity is also regressive, and if you wish to fight obesity you need to change behaviors of the people whom it afflicts. One way around this knotty issue is to take the money from this tax and use it for public services that disproportionally benefit the populations from whom it is generated. (I have no idea what the tax revenues in Seattle are used for.)

The early seasons of The Sopranos almost always featured a lot of soda especially during family meals!! I don't see much of that in TV anymore.

I’m skeptical too, but.. The data set is too small? It sounded enormous:

> The data set itself—gathered by marketing insight firm Nielsen—was huge, representing 45 percent of all food store sales in the city for 2017, 2018, and 2019.

One thing I’m curious about is whether they looked at adjacent cities. Seattle isn’t exactly an island, did the soda purchases just shift outside the city?

Did they look at restaurants and coffee shops or only grocery sales?

> Why not include the top x cities, instead of just one 200 miles away? Because it rains a lot in both?

You can find the source here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2020.100856

To quote from it:

> Portland, OR, was selected as the comparison site for Seattle, WA, based on Mahalanobis distance matching to evaluate the four largest municipalities in each of Washington and Oregon as potential comparison sites [etc]

They had more of a reason and included the model they used to pick the city.

It's also quite beneficial to keep the areas somewhat near in that there will be less variance in the number of item codes between close locations (i.e. different drinks are sold on the east coast vs west coast since some brands are local)

From a different section:

> Custom-ordered data were provided from store outlets geocoded within the boundaries of the taxing jurisdiction of Seattle, WA, the comparison site, Portland, OR

I suspect they didn't have enough funding to afford more geocoded scanner data given that it sounds like they had to pay for custom data at a rate per-geocoded location... or didn't have the funding to process that much more data.

It wasn't clear how much of the dataset labeling was manual, but it sounded like the study's authors may have had to sift through several thousand barcodes by hand.

People in Seattle with more money are already avoiding sugar for health reasons. The tax seems to be aimed at poorer consumers who would be influenced by it. Or it’s just a money grab by the SCC.

> I'm...skeptical. Mostly that in a city where houses stretch into the millions now, people forego a can of Coke over a 20 cent price increase.

How can this possibly be your argument? Are you suggesting that prices have no effect on consumption when there are high prices in a completely different market? Your default hypothesis has to be that higher prices lead to lower consumption.

I heard sweeteners are actively used in piglet farms as fattener.

Artificial sweeteners also prompt insulin rise and promote insulin resistance: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7014832/

So, yes, if it is not water, with or without CO2, it should be ingested with caution.

If they still eat as much, at least they don't get the additional sugary calories from the soda. So a big win, wouldn't you say?

That's kind of a click baity interpretation of the study. What really happened in that study was that the subjects were given a diet vs regular soda, then allowed to eat as much as they wanted. In the case where they drank diet soda, they did eat more calories, but the total calories consumed including the drink itself was still lower for the diet soda case.

For further discussion on this study (and others like it) I highly recommend the stronger by science podcast [1]. And [2] is a link to the study details (to avoid whatever misleading spin npr might be giving it).

[1] https://www.sbspod.com/episodes/reverse-dieting-bodybuilding... (starts around 1:49:39, it's the second last topic)

[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

This makes zero sense. A gallon of gas is about $4.00, the idea that someone would spend all that gas money to avoid a tax of 1.75 cents/oz just doesn't pass the sniff test.

Based on a 1.75 cents per ounce tax and CVS's prices, here is the increase:

20-ounce bottle of Coke: $2.50 --> $2.85.

2 liter (72-ounce) bottle of Coke: $2.70 --> $3.96.

If you drink a lot of soda, it can definitely add up.

I might be an outlier, but I usually only add some milk. If not I take it black, no sugar.

You wouldn’t want to put sugar in coffee.

Had increasing the tax on cigarettes caused people to buy fewer cigarettes?

Because 55.88% of voters (1,721,487 people) voted for it.

Note that the initiative banned "local government entities from imposing any new tax, fee, or other assessment on grocery items" in general, not just from sugary drinks.

I guess people did not want more expensive groceries. This may in the future be compensated by more expensive healthcare, but such is the human species. Short term gain > long term loss.

Because it's America.

1.75 cents/oz.

It is a sugar tax, not a soda tax. All drinks, that are sweetened with a caloric sugar based sweetener that are not milk based, are taxed. There are a few other exceptions such as alcohol, 100% fruit juice and anything with calories fewer than 40 per 120 ozs.

The majority of the proceeds are supposed to go into expanding access to healthy food a well as education, asking other things

>> It is exceedingly likely that people just ate more fat instead of sugar..

Why do you believe this is so likely? To be honest I don't see the connection. People notice in the supermarket that their favorite soft drink became more expensive, and decide to switch to eating an extra hamburger instead?

"exceedingly likely"? Are you taking the "right" thing from these "equivocal" studies? Sounds like you too are mainly expressing your personal and unsubstantiated beliefs. Anyway, it would be pretty weird if decreasing consumption of sugary liquids on average increased the consumption of solid fats. I could see if you were a person doing hard daily labor you'd need to get crazy amounts of calories from somewhere, but you seem to have a theory that there is a caloric balance people will naturally maintain one way or the other, even when they are obese because of excessive consumption. If you know of a study that does show that consumption of fats increases when sugary drink consumption decreases, OMG, that would be really interesting, please share a link since I've only heard of studies suggesting exactly the opposite.

so if people being fat is the problem, why not target it at the root - a fat tax?

i'm jesting of course, but the modern tax system tend to be both a revenue generator, while also being a behaviour modifier, often to the detriment of each of those objectives. I think root cause targeting, rather than try to "incentivize" at the edges, is more effective a social policy.

Lol, that might be tough as Seattle is already ranked as one of the countries healthiest cities.

To be honest your post sounds like it's coming straight out of the sugar industry PR book.

1. Increase burden of scientific evidence/cast scientific evidence in doubt by saying it's not conclusive enough

2. Assert that reducing sugar is not working because people will just get their calorie input otherwise.

3. Blame fat/daemonize fat, that's what the sugar industry has done very successfully over the last decades.

Also, Seattlites aren’t exactly obese on average, it would be difficult to measure a change vs if some small Texan town did this.

A lot of richer people in Seattle avoid sugar as a matter of health, but they pay for it since non-sugar sweetener drinks like super coffee are more expensive. The sugar tax is more aimed down market.

There are more benefits to lowering sugar than weight loss. Diabetes and its related issues for example.

When one drops sugar consumption, it’s generally not replaced by fat. That’s not how obesity usually works.

A tax on sugar's job is to reduce sugar sales. So it's the right metric to see if the tax itself is doing what it's supposed to do. What you seem to be arguing is on a metric of if the tax should have been implemented in the first place.

i.e. If the actual goal was reducing weight, then the obvious thought is all weight increasers should be taxed, not just sugar.

No. No one drinks soda. Coca Cola Corporation’s revenue of 40 billion dollars a year is entirely fabricated. It is the next Enron. When you see a person drinking a soda, try touching them. They are a hologram, an attempt by a fading company to convince people of their relevance.

Having substituted all soda with clear water, humanity has entered a new era of peace and prosperity. War is a thing of the past now that Man is hydrated.

Peace reigns over the Earth as fusion powered reactionless spacecraft take to the skies. Our third space colony is prospering and we are on the brink of conquering Death itself.

Soda is delicious for those of us that like sweet foods. It's certainly not for everyone, but I could honestly drink soda and eat cookies nonstop all day if I didn't limit myself to at most 1 can in a day and purposely don't purchase cookies to have in the house.

> The problem with this sort of strategy is that we make laws by voting, and so it assumes that we can determine what is healthy by popular vote. This isn't true and it is very easily corrupted if the option is open.

Well, we don't really know of any better option for taking collective decisions of high impact. The public and their representatives are informed of the science (and for nutrition information, it's really much more "science" than science at this point) and they decide by voting whether they choose to believe the data presented enough to try to impose tax burdens or other regulations.

What alternative is there? Have nutritionists be able to unilaterally decide what stores are allowed to sell and at what prices? That would get much more easily corrupted, as many nutrition studies have been in the past.

Personally I was against this stupid tax. Of course I drink Coca-cola. But the main reason is because it doesn't really do what they want it to do. It raises a can of coke 20 cents. A glass at the restaurant about 25 cents (of course a glass goes up by that much every year it seems.) As a Coke drinker I would barely see this tax. On the other hand if I drank sweetened ice tea, it works more than double the cost. In fact the less sugar a drink has, the more this tax works increase it, on a percentage basis. Which is ridiculous. What is worse, the funk that has the most calories per ounce, a milkshake, is exempt. Alcohol, also with a high calorie count is also exempt.

> Every time someone vocally claims that a well-targeted tax won't reduce the effect of something harmful, one can be pretty sure it will - those people would not be complaining unless it directly hit their wallets.

The saying goes that the price is right when the customer curses but still signs the contract. So I wouldn't be too sure about that.

Besides the effect is statistical. The reason people buy less sugary sodas might equally be attested to grocers and wholesalers simply filling their stores with more diet sodas, instead of sugary sodas, due to the tax—and not because consumers actually avoid sugary sodas due to the very slight price increase. So there still isn't a clear cause and effect.

This is important, because if it's the former, and the state claims it's the latter, then either they're clearly wrong about the cause and effect, or they're lying; either of which would be bad for public relations. On the other hand, the end result is pretty much the same, but if the effect is due to availability, then perhaps the whole thing could have been solved with regulation instead of taxation.

On the side comes the matter of what the taxed money is used for. Does it go towards better public health care in the region, or is it simply spent on covering various deficits. This is also important, because if the goal is to fight obesity, then how is it morally right to spend the tax profits on other things?