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Comment by jopsen | Hacker News Reader

Shops will just sell the sugar and the soda separately, mix it yourself :)

Or people will pay more.

Not what has happened in the UK, where sugar tax has been a thing since 2018. It's now actually quite hard to find a sweetened drink - almost all soda-style beverages now are "zero sugar", sweetened with artificial sweeteners. Nobody is buying sugar and pouring it in. Nobody.

It's a little too early to determine if this has slowed the prevalence of diabetes in the population. One problem is that other studies have shown that drinking artificially sweetened beverages with foods means many people end up eating more calories of food - the brain is looking for calories indicated by the sweet taste its not getting from the beverage, so compensates.

It's a complex picture, but sugar taxes seem to be a reasonable way to get sugary drinks off the shelves.

> It's a complex picture, but sugar taxes seem to be a reasonable way to get sugary drinks off the shelves.

As a person who is indifferent to the prospect, I fail to see why?

When I lived in the UK a lot of people who couldn't afford real juice would buy 'squash' and drink it as a replacement for juice. I personally found it entirely revolting and way too sugary but on occasion used it in my teas to flavor them: I just can't see why the consumer should be punished with less options, or worse those made with things like aspertame, then simply rely on the consumer to use said product responsibly. I guess one can say with things like the NHS the consequences are socialized, but even that is a stretch as the British diet is a near mirror image of it's American counterpart in it's wide use of highly processed and refined foodstuff.

Besides, if you go to the smaller shops run by non-Anglo merchants you will find every conceivable item you can imagine: I personally think Turkish food has way too much sugar in it's diet, but as I found out from our baker they make the most amazing fruit syrups to make deserts with, which incidentally make for good tea enhancers as well!

Again, maybe I'm just too biased given my lived experience in this space, but nothing has yet to convince me that price alone serves as a real deterrent to really solve this issue, only an improved lifestyle choice where those calories get effectively used end up really solving the core issue.

> When I lived in the UK a lot of people who couldn't afford real juice would buy 'squash' and drink it as a replacement for juice. I personally found it entirely revolting and way too sugary

Are you aware that you're supposed to dilute squash to taste? It's just concentrated juice. If it's too sweet, you haven't added enough water.

Yes, even then the horrid taste left a terrible feel in my mouth, which is why it was only palatable with fruit tea and with additional citrus juice for my tastes: and even then I still don't want it removed from the market if it serves a specific demographic.

Last time I was in the UK, nearly everywhere that sold soda offered the full calorie, full sugar version of Coke. Pepsi and other drinks were often only available in lower or zero sugar, but Coke was almost always available in the full sugar version, for some reason.

It is a choice manufacturers made.

Pepsi and Dr. Pepper decided to go lower sugar with supplemental artificial sweeteners to keep their price down, whereas Coca-Cola kept the original formula, but it costs more.

To put figures to this:

- Pepsi (11g sugar per 250 ml): 8.8p/100ml

- Dr. Pepper (11g sugar per 250 ml): 10.0p/100ml

- Coca-Cola (27g sugar per 250 ml): 14.2p/100ml

"full sugar" Dr. Pepper also contains: Aspartame, Acesulfame K

"full sugar" Pepsi contains: Sucralose, Acesulfame K

So after the sugar tax some people moved to these hybrid drinks whereas others just moved whole-hog to Pepsi Max and Diet Dr. Pepper which are commonly cheaper and have the same aftertaste as their "full sugar" variants.

It would be interesting to see the effect of a sweetness tax. See if the manufacturers can make desirable beverages that don’t taste so sweet (and don’t have whatever effect triggering sweetness receptors so intensely has).

In Poland there's a tax for both sugary and artificially sweetened drinks since 2021. Also caffeine and taurine.

In one year the effect for beverages over all was 36% raise in proce and 20% drop in sales. Surprisingly sales of energy drinks rose by 4%.

Caffeine drinks can't be sold to non-adults now so that probably dropped too.

In two years 60% of beverages altered their ingredients. Tax income was less than you expected.

I bet adding the sugar yourself would reduce consumption considerably. Which would be the goal of the tax.

Unfortunately Internet people like to point out the hypothetical 99th percentile person who would evade/be immune to such incentives and suggest that therefore, it would not be worth doing.

It’s such a common and lazy pattern on HN :(

When I read those, I don't actually think those people believe their own arguments. They started with a conclusion, like "sugar taxes are bad," and then worked backwards to find an argument to fit it. That's why when you challenge them they just shift the goalposts.

they'll optimize the packaging to help you out. My mom tells me about how margarine used to come with a yellow color packet to mix into your white spread. The dairy board lobbied to make it illegal to sell yellow margarine because "it looks like butter". Didn't seem to hurt Oleo much...

https://www.cbc.ca/archives/when-consumers-had-to-diy-for-th...

Both would reduce demand so a sharp drop off would still be fairly realistic. Of course, getting anything done at the federal would be impossible in the US today.

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