Children's daily sugar consumption halved just a year after tax, study finds
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I'd say let's not pretend that any map made by splashing paint on a paper is the terrain, and go full retard based on that.
But otherwise, individually, why wouldn't they? A lot of people had the sweet tooth, and the money, and they ate this much sugar, or even more.
There were lots of things with small amounts of natural sugars, but nothing like the processed foods we have now.
Secondly the article itself states that it’s the intense exercise that keeps them healthy, not their diet.
In response to the second, do you agree with the original statement that implied sugar was damaging, or do you think it has no ill effects on someone who exercises enough? If walking 8 to 12km a day can completely counteract such large quantities of sugar in the diet, does that not make sugar harmless in many cases?
The statements I was responding to claimed that "until recently it was very expensive to get sugar" and then "honey is not the same as refined sugar". Honey is refined sugar formed by the same process as HFCS[0], and some hunter-gatherers get a surprisingly high amount of daily calories from it with seemingly little impact on their health.
[0] From a different precursor, but the general process of breaking down complex carbohydrates into simple sugars is the same, and so is the output
[1] https://www.thevintagenews.com/2016/01/18/tudor-england-the-...
Indeed, and that has been plenty of time to discover that, in excess, it kills us. Despite intense scrutiny, there is no reason to think that the same goes for aspartame, which is the only sweetener used in significant amounts in soft drinks in the UK, and thus the only one promoted by this levy.
-certain types of cancer, including lymphoma, leukemia, urinary tract tumors, and neurological tumors
-type 2 diabetes
-preterm delivery
-toxicity in the kidneys
-toxic liver disease
-harmful changes to the salivary glands
----
Person: Diet soda is bad for you
Me: It's better than sugar and especially high fructose corn syrup
Person: Just drink water
----
Ok... Such a helpful suggestion. We should all just drink water, just exercise, just save money, just work harder, just put down our phone.
I wonder why we don't all just do all the right things all of the time.
There are no nutrients there and they appear more addictive, which is why I suspect the industry was so accommodating in moving away from sugar
_Massive_ citation needed, tbh. Sugar is highly addictive.
(Also, I mean, even if aspartame _was_ very addictive, to some extent, well, so what? To be clear, soft drinks ~never contain the sugar alcohols that people are talking about above; the sheer volumes would have, well, undesirable digestive impact. They use aspartame, which is pretty well-understood at this point.)
They will have an outsized effect on children (everything does due to their rapid growth, and longer time to bioaccumulate). There is not currently pressing evidence of harm, but little study has been done in children, and some signs suggest there may be issues (see other posts upthread).
A quick look at a few soft drinks I could think of, and their UK sweeteners:
Fanta: Aspartame, Acesulfame
Coke Zero: Aspartame, Acesulfame-K, Enzymatically Produced Steviol Glycosides
Pepsi: Acesulfame K, Sucralose
Irn Bru: Aspartame, Acesulfame K
Tizer: Acesulfame K, Sucralose
Old Jamaica Ginger Beer: Sucralose
Lipton Iced Tea: Steviol Glycosides from Stevia
Ribena: acesulfame K, Sucralose
Must say I wasn't aware there was so much sucralose in use.
Citation? I have a decent number of friends who are sugar-free soda enjoyers. They don't seem to have any adverse effects from these sugar substitutes.
Can you link any papers about these adverse reactions?
But the side-effects of sugar alcohols are pretty well known (especially to anyone who has had the pleasure of eating beyond their threshold). I haven't searched for any papers but I'm sure you'll find plenty that conclude that many people have adverse reactions to sugar alcohols.
Gastrointestinal Disturbances Associated with the Consumption of Sugar Alcohols with Special Consideration of Xylitol: Scientific Review and Instructions for Dentists and Other Health-Care Professionals - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5093271/
Per quick Googling, for adults soft drinks represent only 16% of sugar consumption, although I suspect the distribution of soft drinks consumption itself is quite uneven (as in, there are many adults who don't drink soft drinks, and many who drink nothing but).
Fanta, Sprite, Dr Pepper and Pepsi all reduced their sugar content to around half (~5g/100ml) following the sugar tax. Coca Cola still has it up at ~10g/100ml. They all still have sugar in their nutrional info. I'm not sure that the source of the sugar has changed, but I don't know what the source actually is. I know that in the US they tend to use high-fructose corn syrup because it's cheap, but that the EU restricts import of this. Would be interesting to see whether any changes have happened here as a consequence of Brexit.
I always happily pay extra for original coke, but so often with other brands I can no longer find the full sugar versions in stock
Still, it seems in general things are moving to this direction as only normal drink I see on fountains is now Coca-Cola...
Personally I'd argue sugar is worse for adults (sedentary lifestyle, means to buy it) than kids (fast growth, little money).
I spent some time in Mexico and all of the packaged foods have a big warning if they're too sugar-heavy. It instantly changed my shopping habits because it made me question foods I had taken for granted. I'd argue that's a better use of government power than a tax. The former approach requires business to bend to the public will, while the latter manipulates the public at their own expense.
- cans of sugary drinks got smaller, to avoid the limit that was taxed, so some people bought cans with less sugar in
- some people bought more artifically sweetened drinks
- some people paid more for the same amount of sugar
Not a huge fan of the sugar alternatives, but it definitely beats sugar, which is proven to be addictive, destroys your teeth and your health in general.
One of the main effects of the sugar tax was that so many manufacturers just changed their recipe to avoid having to raise prices. So the option to pay more in the shop isn't even there. Coke and Pepsi are the notable counter examples.
Imagine a kid drinks one small (0.33L) can of soda, every day, all year round.
A regular Cola/Fanta/Sprite/etc. usually has around 10 grams of sugar, so 33 grams of sugar for every can. One gram of sugar is roughly equivalent to one gram of carbohydrates, which has 4 kcal of energy pr. gram. A small can comes to 132 kcal.
Consuming that every day of the year, comes to around 48000 kcal of excess energy (12 kg of sugar!). One kg of bodyfat is roughly equivalent to 7700 kcal.
If this kid lives a very sedentary lifestyle, so that every can that's consumed is excess calories, the worst case would be 5-6 kg of extra bodyfat in year. Luckily it is more complex than that, and the weight gain would likely be much less. But still, over the years a habit like that could easily lead to many kg of extra bodyfat.
Now if you go for a lighter alternative, like those drinks that mix sugars and sweeteners, that could cut down sugar intake by half (to a quarter). Or diet soda, which is close to zero calories.
The best would of course to teach your kid to exclusively drink water when they're thirsty, and keep the soda as a weekend treat.
Bad habits die hard.
Best way is don't keep these drinks in school and at home. Don't buy in bulk. You buy at once max one can per person and consume it.
Sadiq Khan did this for TfL, and there is some evidence that it has worked to some extent: https://evidence.nihr.ac.uk/alert/advertising-ban-was-linked...
Of course, there was absolute _outrage_ (certainly entirely grassroots and not instigated by agribusiness, dear me no), so it would be politically sensitive to expand.
I guess the UK has health care.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/06/health/xylitol-heart-atta...
Sweetener mixes are made so that most people will not taste a gross aftertaste. Some people will experience a bitter aspartame taste, and others will experience a very chemical aftertaste for other sweeteners, but the majority of the market doesn't.
[1]: https://academic.oup.com/chemse/article/38/5/379/360864
Story of my life.
To me, sugar drinks feel displeasing. Aspartame doesn't taste like sugar, but it's sweet and that's fine. Most of the taste is the sour one from CO2, citric acid and phosphoric acid anyway.
Though I prefer actual sugar, some low-sugar drinks use stevia, which doesn't have the same drinking-chemical-runoff taste of aspartame.
It's fine that they exist but presenting them as being full sugar when they aren't is false advertising.
Xylitol seems to be common in candy (especially chewing gum) and deserts, but I don't think that's relevant to a soda tax.
Perhaps you know of a commercial soft drink sweetened with xylitol that I don't?
I believe the general consensus is that they are healthier (but like vapes and cigarettes if you can avoid both from the start or use the harm reduction one to taper off entirely you're winning) so why are you trying to suggest otherwise without evidence?
People are eating about as much sugar per capita now as they were in the early 70s, yet they're fatter and more diabetic than ever, even than when they were consuming significantly more sugar 24 years ago. A tax on added fats (oils, butter, lard) and excessive sodium makes much more sense, but good luck getting such a measure enacted given how effective the propaganda from Big Fat (the dairy and beef industries and people promoting high-fat diets like keto and Atkins) has been.
USA is the major outlier and they have it at the sub-federal level.
The level will rise over time but it's already been effective in many domains, the UK phase out of coal for example.
We should strongly question why this is the most effective means rather than blindly pursuing that it works and digging ourselves a deeper hole.
People aren't going to will themselves to personal responsibility
Sugar is for the rich.
Making unhealthy food too expensive for poor people is a blunt instrument of course, but it does have an empirical case.
There are/were plenty of British YouTuber's doing "how cheap can you eat" meals through COVID and the cost of living crisis, they started at ~£1 for a bare-bones meal for one, they were at ~£1.50 last I looked; that's hopefully improving with the recent falls in inflation, but still and issue for many.
Of course the same demographic who can't afford the ingredients to cook their own healthy meals can often also not afford the time to prepare them either; due to working long hours, not being able to afford care for their children, etc.
Food banks are very much on the rise in many parts of the UK[0] and we have millions of children in poverty[1], a significant and heart breaking statistic for such a country.
[0] https://www.trusselltrust.org/news-and-blog/latest-stats/end... [1] https://cpag.org.uk/child-poverty/poverty-facts-and-figures
I understand the issues with sugar, I have no arguments with it, but it is, as you say, a blunt instrument. Sadly, the opposite case; healthy food, is also too expensive for the same demographic this affects; that's a separate and independent problem though, and the evidence in OP seems to suggest the tax is (somewhat) effective, so, again, no arguments from me.
EDIT: To be clear, I'm talking about in the UK when I talk about a demographic.
Cigarettes and alcohol are heavily taxed. A similar racket?
Or are you of the opinion that someone should be denied emergency medical care because they had some sodas on the regular?
Those who pay are everyone else. Healthcare t's a tragedy of the commons unlike other taxes where it's more difficult to abuse the common resource such as roads and other infrastructure.
Non-sugary foods and drinks are already heavily subsidized - like all agriculture - and that's something necessary to maintain food security. People still choose the unhealthy stuff.
I'm not disagreeing we have problems, but my original question was why the solution is a tax. It's very clear who that benefits and it's also very clear those same people control marketing and education. This is insanity.
Because it works. Source: TFA.
there's no way that can be true right?
And isn't alcohol already taxed a lot for the same reason?
... Wait, how are you defining 'alcoholic'?
Even by the 'regularly exceeds recommended intake' definition (which most medical professionals would not read as 'alcoholic' on its own, btw), this is not true.
> There are a lot of externalities from having an unhealthy populace, this fee can help to counter that.
Is the collected money exclusively used to counter the externalities or is the spending left to the discretion of the government?
I'm asking from ignorance, but if the answer of any of those questions is no then the purpose of the tax is not to make up for the externalities.
No, nothing like it. The final costs to the state of excessive sugar consumption are _vast_. This levy is primarily to discourage people from consuming loads of sugar.
> Is the collected money exclusively used to counter the externalities
While I don't know, I'd be very surprised. That sort of bucketed approach to tax collection/use is _extremely_ inefficient; the only place it can possibly be justified is social insurance.
Can it really?
France: fuel
Luxembourg and the Canary Islands: high-value items like electronics, designer clothing, and luxury goods.
It works because it increases the price, which reduces demand and leads suppliers to change recipes.
What is your concern?
I’m open to the argument that it -is- bad, actually, but a tax seems like a reasonable approach if you want people to drink less sugar.
Strongly disagree. That's the entire point of these kinds of questions.
Probably because we've all been programmed with the neoliberal agenda[1] of less money spent is better (for food, for cars, on taxes, like you've been programmed).
Norway has had steep taxes for ICE cars for ages, and when EVs came along they were taxed very low, and to cite this source [2], 80% of new cars sold are now EV...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-...
[2] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/...
There needs to be a separation of concerns, and do I really need to give a history lesson why taxing the disadvantaged is not a long term solution? History must repeat, but almost always from ignorance, huh?
Please do make your best argument for why taxing horribly unhealthy junk foods will actually harm poor people more than it helps. No sense holding back and merely threatening to make that argument. Do you figure that expensive cola will cause famine or something? I'm eager to know.
Because it isn't the 'disadvantaged', many of whom are going to need it.
* Income Tax
* National Insurance
* VAT
* Corporation Tax
In terms of amounts received, the first is by far the largest and is overwhelmingly paid by 'higher earners'. The top 50 % pay over 90% of it. The top 1% pay ~30% of it.
National Insurance is less progressive. I would argue that should change but it is what it is.
I can't argue against VAT being regressive, but breakdown of 'amount of VAT paid by income' isn't available.
I don't think people's habits will change irreversibly. If you remove the tax, a new cool drink (think Monster when it came out, but for kids) will sweep tiktok, and all the kids will want it.
> the money received from this tax should be directly spent on educating the public about why it's bad to consume too much sugar
Sadly I don't think taxes end up working this way for long. They might or might not start by doing this, but then they just stay forever.
> Sadly I don't think taxes end up working this way for long. They might or might not start by doing this, but then they just stay forever. I just described my idea how to approach this. I agree that governments are far from being perfect in this matter.
1. Prohibiting products that have sugar content above a certain percentage.
2. Asking the industry nicely to please favor children's health over profits.
3. Instead of taxing, giving subsidies to products that are "healthy alternatives".
4. Education campaigns telling children and parents to "say no to unhealthy food".
I'm sure there's even more. I don't like taxing unhealthy products, because it creates this weird incentive for selling more of it for the tax gains. Also, products like soy milk are taxed while cow milk is untaxed, despite cow milk being much less healthy than soy milk. But given these four alternatives, I still think taxes are the best way to do it, although I'd love to hear better alternatives.
How could that possibly be true? One is a fluid that exists in similar forms for millions of years in order to supply all growing mammal infants with all the nutrients they need ... and the other is just some plant matter from a random cheaply cultivable plant (by currently dominant species at current tech level) dispersed in water.
Is soy milk healthier in a sense that no food is healthier than too much food for a person who has western diet?
Also, 70% of the human population is allergic to cow milk (as opposed to 0.4% being allergic to soy).
Anyway, there's tons of data public about it that you can easily find, just wanted to respond to your "millions of years" argument.
I doubt 70% of human population is allergic to milk. If you just read Wikipedia article about milk allergy you'll find out that the rate is 3% and 15% of those 3% are also allergic to soy. And that is just about children. Only 0.4% retain milk allergy in adulthood.
I can imagine that 65% people don't have ability to digest lactose because they lost it at some point because of culture and food availability they didn't need to retain it beyond childhood.
The funny thing is that the problem is with just lactose and if you supplement the missing enzyme nearly all people can draw nutritional benefit from milks vitamins, micro elements, sugars and fats.
Could you point me to some research indicating superiority of soy milk over any animal milk, preferably one that's not analogous to "eating Teflon is healthier than eating a burger for the purposes of weight loss"?
- Public education: This is easiest, but not particularly effective. Doctors, and more recently governments, have been telling people to eat less sugar for about a century; meanwhile, in most places, the level of sugar consumption has only increased.
- Taxes/levies: This is thought to be somewhat effective (in particular it seems to have worked in many places for tobacco to some extent), and it has the great advantage that it's _easy to do_; governments typically have a lot of latitude over what they tax and it's quite difficult for the industry to resist through legal means (they can still lobby, of course).
- Ban or restrict advertising: This seems to have been effective for tobacco and maybe alcohol, but certainly in Britain it's currently seen as a bit culture war-y (Sadiq Khan banned ads for unhealthy food on TfL, apparently with some promising results, but the right-wing media had a complete nervous breakdown) and is open to legal challenges. Some other countries, with different political environments, are in the process of doing this for certain problem food products.
- Ban the product: This is practically impossible, even for products which are known to be extremely harmful like tobacco. Just a political death sentence, not worth pursuing.
Given the above, they probably did about the best they could.
On this specific topic someone drinking sugar drinks is clearly less harmful than someone smoking, because sugar drinks have a strictly personal impact. desiredState having or not having a different standard for tobacco doesn't cast a shadow on his opinions on sugar taxes.
Not in this case, as the UK's NHS is tax-payer funded.
There is more of an argument against taxpayer funds for the NHS than anything to do with sugar drinks in that observation. It is inescapably arbitrary what unhealthy behaviours are being subsidised vs. taxed.
That's because your observation is absurd and not grounded in reality. The reality is that obesity rates are too high in the UK. Most of these people overconsume sugary foods and overly processed foods. This in turn puts stress on the NHS, which affects all tax-payers in the UK so it's not a `strictly personal impact'. Overconsumption of sugar leads to measurably worse health outcomes than sitting in a field breathing pollen. The tax is not arbitrary.
High consumption of sugar is a worse problem than sedentary habits. “You can’t outrun a bad diet.”
A classic problem which make markets inefficient is "externalities" -- the cost is artificially lowered because some of that cost is "externalized" away from the people selling the product. This artificially low cost causes the markets to allocate resources in a globally non-optimal manner.
One solution is flat regulation -- you can't have more than a certain amount of sugar in your drink. But that's unreasonable and unpopular.
Taxing is a market-based solution: it forces some of the external cost to be borne by the person selling it. This allows the market to allocate resources based on the actual cost, rather than the artificially low cost, while still maintaining the flexibility and diversity of the market, rather than having to impose regulation.
"Science journalism" is often a net-negative in terms of informing the public.