And consumption of erythritol, xylitol, and other sugar alcohols (maltitol, mannitol, sorbitol...) goes completely unmonitored. It's important to note that in most products sugar was simply replaced by sweetener - not reduced. Are we okay with this large scale natural experiment on children's health? There is building evidence of glucose tolerance, prothrombosis, and cardiovascular risk.
_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.)
Full fat is a Britishism for whole milk and it's used to refer to non-diet drinks too as a way of saying full sugar. Original coke is often called 'full fat coke'.
Real sugar soda tastes like shit by comparison. It's less sweet, and it's got a sour aftertaste as the flora in your mouth begin fermenting the sugar to acid. And you get cavities and weight gain as bonuses.
I'm contradicting the point that people have been eating this much sugar for thousands of years. I'm not claiming the reverse for sweeteners. No population's eaten this much sugar for more than tens of years either.
In response to the first point, honey is predominantly fructose, glucose, and water. If you think sugar hydrolysed by bees is better for you than HFCS hydrolysed by humans, why? Is it the glucose?
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?
Right, so if I drink straight-up HFCS it'll be fine provided I also stick trace quantities of antioxidants and pollen fibre into it? But if I don't do that, it'll be terrible for me?
Honey is formed by the hydrolysis of the complex sugars in nectar into fructose and glucose. HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) is formed by the hydrolysis of cornstarch into fructose and glucose. They're chemically extremely similar, except for differences in the ratio of fructose to glucose, and for small traces of other stuff (pollen etc.).
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
I fail to see how this is relevant, if anything it's evidence of harm. Those people notoriously had rotting teeth [1] and probably a myriad of other health issues (many unrelated to sugar)
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.
I don't have an opinion on the health effects of sweeteners, but as I noted in a longer comment on this page, multiple sweeteners are commonly used together and aspartame is far from universal in the mix.
Research suggests that aspartame increases the risk of:
-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
Your "completely safe without question" additive, sir
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).
Isn't aspartame used 99% of the time in sodas? Despite decade-long doubts, afaik studies have always failed to find convincing evidence of it being problematic.
"First erythritol, now xylitol. This research group followed the same flawed design and ended up with the same flawed conclusions." https://peterattiamd.com/xylitol-and-cvd/
Sugar alcohols will never be as popular as more obvious choices like aspartame and sucralose. Most people have at least some adverse reaction to sugar alcohols. Personally, all of them, used in any meaningful quantity, turn me into a bloated farty mess that ends with diarrhoea. Absolutely terrible stuff.
> Most people have at least some adverse reaction to sugar alcohols.
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?
I have yet to encounter a soda that uses sugar alcohols, most use aspartame, ace-K, sucralose, or stevia. Those don't bother me at all.
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.
This is very easily searchable. Here's the first result:
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/
Virtually all artificially sweetened soft drinks in the Uk (that’s what the levy applies to) are sweetened with aspartame, which is fairly well-understood.
Acesulfame-K and friends is normally used in small amounts with aspartame; individually they both taste bloody awful, particularly Acesulfame K, but together they taste borderline acceptable.
Must say I wasn't aware there was so much sucralose in use.
Huh, how much sorbitol do they put in it?! I thought that one was mostly only used in low-volume applications, because in large volumes, it's a laxative (AIUI this is why you rarely see sugar alcohols used as sweeteners in drinks.)
Misleading headline: it's not total sugar consumption, but sugar from soft drinks that halved after the tax (on soft drinks).
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).
I’d also presume that the consumption of sugar replacements has increased by an amount related that of sugar’s decline. In the UK you’re hard pressed to find any actual real sugar in soft drinks since the tax was imposed. Instead most things are packed to the gills with alternatives.
What do you mean by "actual real sugar"? Do you mean a specific chemical like fructose or sucrose, the source of the sugar, or something else?
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.
People are still buying and drinking fizzy sweet drinks marketed by mega corps, its just that they've been reformulated to be something like 25/75 sugar/sweetener so they aren't subject to the tax. All popular drinks in the UK are formulated like this now, the exception being original coke.
Isn't that exactly the point of the policy? Consumer habits don't have to change but their sugar consumption goes down because of economically rational incentives and they have to make an affirmative change in habits to go back to their previous levels of sugar consumption.
Yeah, it's definitely seems it's this from my perspective. The companies reformulated and reduced our full-sugar options, all so they didn't have to put their prices up, at the cost of the tastes of their products and consumer choices. And then the last few years hit and they massively up their prices anyway.
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
The tax is at most $0.31 per sugary drink (18 or 24 pence depending on sugar content) and it only applies to beverages. Impressive if such a small and niche tax had that big of an impact. I imagine the raised awareness caused by passing the law did as much as the tax itself.
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.
We've also had those macro nutrient warning flags on all packaged food for quite a few years in the UK. The sugar tax is on top of that.
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.
There was also a decrease in sugary foods despite no tax (per the article) though it also says there's been a downward trend in overall sugar consumption since 2008.
I really dislike the expression “artificially sweetened”, it makes it sound like putting 10 or 20% sugar in a drink is “natural”… The sugar they put in is also highly processed, nothing very natural about it.
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.
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.
I believe in sugar free soda as an alternative to regular soda, however the "experts" in this article are completely off base to say it is a no brainer to tax other sugary items. Sure, reduction of sugar intake -via soda- was reduced per the article, but sugar intake is not even the right measurement of success. The right measurement is health, were BMI, obesity, diabetes, heart problems, or overall mortality rate reduced. You can cut all the sugar you want but if you are consuming other carbohydrates or calories as a replacement, then you are doing all for naught. Not saying its true, but imagine someone whose hunger is satiated by consuming small amounts of sugar resulting in overall lower calorie intake. Again, sugar intake is a meaningless stat without the resulting health impact being taken into account.
I wonder how much of this was due to the tax and how much about it being in the news a lot at the time. The article seems to suggest this was just 2019 results I wonder how the trend has continued.
Also if we have just moved people to sweetener then are we just going from one health issue to another?
An interesting correlation none the less. It would also be interesting to see if the health of people had changed over time as well. If all we have done is remove some sugar from drinks and people are getting just as sick then it feels like an unnecessary pain point.
I do feel that longer term education would be better, that and banning advertising of high sugar items as we did for tobacco. For instance all the bus stops near me are plastered in junk food and high sugar items which just make them feel normal. Bring back the veg marketing board!
i'm certain it's neither, what actually happened was basically all popular drinks in the entirety of the UK except for coca cola and pepsi (which cost more) just stopped selling non-diet versions of their drinks to avoid the tax, it's not that people are choosing to avoid sugar, they literally just can't buy it.
> I do feel that longer term education would be better, that and banning advertising of high sugar items as we did for tobacco. For instance all the bus stops near me are plastered in junk food and high sugar items which just make them feel normal. Bring back the veg marketing board!
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.
Glorification (propaganda) of taxation or regulation looks reasonable. What about personal (patents) responsibility and information about consumption unhealthy food/drinks?
But Aspartame tastes like ass to me. It leaves that nasty chemical aftertaste in your mouth. I have no idea how people can't taste the difference between sugar and aspartame.
You're just unlucky. The taste issue is determined by genetics [1], although the grossest taste is often the result of sweeteners combined with aspartame, like Ace K.
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.
It's just how much you are used to it/individual preferences. Same thing as with any other taste, e.g. spicy food.
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.
Same here. It's not even the difference in sweetness, it's just the disgusting aftertaste that lingers forever. I've never gotten how people can drink Coke Zero voluntarily. Too bad they only sell caffeine-free Coke Zero and not the caffeine-free regular where I live, so I gave it another chance not long ago, but noped out after the first sip. It's undrinkable.
Though I prefer actual sugar, some low-sugar drinks use stevia, which doesn't have the same drinking-chemical-runoff taste of aspartame.
Yeah this is really starting to cause problems as things like this sugar tax push companies into adding sweetener to their "normal" versions. I now can't simply buy a Coke and know it will taste like Coke - I need to inspect the packaging and check if it will taste disgusting or not.
It's fine that they exist but presenting them as being full sugar when they aren't is false advertising.
I've never seen a soft drink sweetened with Xylitol. Is this a store brand thing? Most soft drinks I encounter seem to be sweetened by a combination of aspartame and acesulfame K.
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?
Your article makes no claims either way as to whether non-sugar sweeteners are more or less healthy than sugar.
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?
This is about soft drinks (that's all the levy applies to). In 99% of cases the substitute is aspartame. I don't think it's ever xylitol, is it? That's normally used to substitute for small amounts of sugar, not the huge quantities found in soft drinks. The digestive effects of that much xylitol would be unpleasant.
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.
The Boris Johnston government tried to hide a government report on the succes of this tax as, like many in this forum, his part of the party is heavily influenced by US corporate propaganda ( sometimes misleadingly called "libertarianism")and the success of popular taxes isn't politically correct for them.
In a country with taxpayer-funded healthcare, taxing things which make people unhealthy is just basic economics. The only problem with this tax is that it doesn’t go far enough. There’s definitely other product categories it could apply to.
If single-payer healthcare means that I have to now monitor my
- city
- county
- state
- federal
entities to see if they will be levying individual food taxes... I don't know - I don't want to have to do that. That is just making life even more exhausting than it already is.
That's precisely why healthcare shouldn't be taxpayer funded. It's a total outage.
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.
The largest forms of tax revenue in the UK are, in order:
* 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.
If you're allergic to the word tax, then think of it more as a fee. If you want to sell a soda in the UK that is greater than X% sugar, you pay an additional, relatively small, fee. There are a lot of externalities from having an unhealthy populace, this fee can help to counter that.
yes this is very basic economics. this is literally the "draw a supply and demand curve" example and intro 101 economics classes talking about elasticity and substitution. or you can model it using elementary game theory.
That is not what I am asking. I am asking if we can say "sugar consumption halved" just because both consumers and producers found ways to circumvent the tax, e.g. consumers bought sugary drinks from neighboring areas with lower or no taxes, or producers reformulated their products in ways that technically avoid the tax but do not necessarily result in a healthier product.
So you're of the opinion that people who engage in voluntary activities for personal pleasure that put a higher burden on the health system, that those who are more wise about their choices have to use, should not have to pay thier way?
Or are you of the opinion that someone should be denied emergency medical care because they had some sodas on the regular?
You're missing the point. Those who pursue voluntary activities that "burden the health system" don't "pay their way".
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.
Of course! I mean, yeah, sure, taxes on unhealthy products may increase the average health of a population, which results in reduced healthcare costs, greater economic productivity by reducing worker sickness, and may save thousands of life-years across the population and increase their quality of life. But does that really justify the state taking a percentage of the price I pay for a pack of cigarettes?
So your gripe is with the type of state intervention?
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.
And yet many alcoholic products are full of sugar and a majority of adults all around the world are alcoholics.
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.
this just means taxes are too low, not that taxes don't work. In a normal way the tax for these should offset the healthcare burden that these produce in treating diseases/accidents caused by alcohol/tobacco consumption. The same way a sugar tax should at least cover all govt diabetes expenditure, but there are other factors that can be covered too.
> a majority of adults all around the world are alcoholics.
... 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.
> Is this tax sized to cover for that 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.
It's not good enough to just ask questions like that - what alternatives are there? The information that too much sugar is bad for you isn't exactly hidden away, yet rates of obesity, tooth decay and diabetes are still going up.
What if we added some sort of additive to the sugary drinks that made people become fat and get tooth decay, wouldn't that dissuade them? (/s fwiw, I don't think there's a "solution", people should be free to mess with their health)
Without a counter-argument it just becomes a statement of faith, of the "it's so obvious that god exists that I don't have to prove it" variety. You're entitled to your opinion, but expecting others to take your word for its value isn't going to get you anywhere.
Yes absolutely. It's not a tax aimed at consumers, or even raising revenue. It's to
incentivize manufacturers to reformulate their drinks to be less harmful and seems to have worked. An alternative might be a straight ban on high sugar drinks which seems blunt and less fair response.
I doubt anyone is "blindly pursuing" this. There are many alternatives, but they all have their own downsides:
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.
> despite cow milk being much less healthy than soy milk
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?
Seals, Lions, Platypus, Dolphins, and Koalas are also mammals that produce milk for their infants. All of their milk is bad for humans. While cow milk is better for us then the milk of most animals, it's not human milk. So why would it be healthier than (essentially) water with some plants in it?
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.
There's no reason to think that dolphin milk for example is bad for humans. It has just a bit more fat than lactose. In a balanced diet it could be perfectly fine. It's just inconvenient to acquire. Humanity milks basically any milk that is convenient to milk. And uses it as food since the beginning of animal domestication with amazing results.
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"?
I don't think it is a blunt instrument, in fact I'd say the complete opposite. It's been a nudge of industry in a direction that's better for society, in a way that keeps that playing field level for different manufacturers, reduced their overall tax burden and not cost consumers anything. All this while avoiding any harsh ban, you can still buy high sugar drinks if you wish.
Think about how you’d actually implement that policy. It’d be political suicide. I can see the ‘literally killing children’ headlines already. No law can change anything if it can’t make it through the Commons.
taxes are the most efficient instrument a govt can use. You decrease taxes for things you want to grow in consumption/use and you increase taxes for things you want to reduce production/consumption. Do you want faster transition to renewables and others from fossils? Increase taxes for fossil related stuff and decrease them for production & import of renewable related stuff. Same thing goes for electric cars, same things goes for electric/simple bikes.
The only problem I see is low tax for artificial sweeteners. It would be nice to both limit the max quantity for sweeteners we know and limit the sweetness for all others to avoid high concentration of unknown stuff
You should take a breath and make your complete argument somewhere all at once. Your reactive fragmented answers up and down the tree of comments are still terminally unintelligible, as of this comment.
There are, broadly, four routes to getting people to stop using dangerous consumer products:
- 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.
I'm close to being libertarian in many cases; however, I think that a tax may be a good way to quickly address this issue. I also believe that the money received from this tax should be directly spent on educating the public about why it's bad to consume too much sugar. The tax should be gradually decreased until people's habits change.
> The tax should be gradually decreased until people's habits change
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.
> I don't think people's habits will change irreversibly.
I actually disagree. A great example is smoking. It's been declining for the past 70 years. It just became unattractive.
> 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.
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...
I disagree when it comes to the UK. Healthy food; fresh fruit, vegetables and meat is significantly more expensive than processed food.
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.
I think everyone missed the sarcasm my comment was dripping with, British humour I guess. I'll take the downvotes.
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.
That question is actually leaning towards quite a bad argument, similar to a slippery-slope. Everyone has a threshold somewhere dividing acceptable and other activities. Someone having different standards for different substances is irrelevant. It is similar in character to someone saying a sin tax on sugar is the same as a sin tax on meat. Both in consequence, evidence of harm and in public acceptability those things are clearly different.
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.
An individual could sit placidly in the sun gazing out on a field of flowers and arguably be causing taxpayers harm because they aren't exercising and otherwise bettering their physical health (or maybe the pollen is increasing their risk of an expensive lung cancer, who knows).
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.
You have to prioritize the issues, you can’t tackle them all at once, and inability to address lower priority issues should not be used as an excuse to avoid addressing higher priority ones.
High consumption of sugar is a worse problem than sedentary habits. “You can’t outrun a bad diet.”
It's a market-based solution to a market-based problem.
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.
Correlation. The article notes sugar consumption was dropping for over a decade before the tax. It is also dropping over the same period in comparable non-tax countries.
"Science journalism" is often a net-negative in terms of informing the public.
Was sugar consumption halving every year for over a decade? Whatever the mechanism (seemingly up for debate), a halving post-tax is an outsized change.
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.)
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.
----
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.
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).
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_alcohol#Side_effects
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/
A quick look at a few soft drinks I could think of, and their UK sweeteners:
There seem to be no clear winners, with the most noticeable finding that multiple ones are usually used.Must say I wasn't aware there was so much sucralose in use.
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.
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 always happily pay extra for original coke, but so often with other brands I can no longer find the full sugar versions in stock
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.
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.
- 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.
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...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspartame_controversy
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.
https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/
We should strongly question why this is the most effective means rather than blindly pursuing that it works and digging ourselves a deeper hole.
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.
Can it really?
France: fuel
Luxembourg and the Canary Islands: high-value items like electronics, designer clothing, and luxury goods.
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.
there's no way that can be true right?
And isn't alcohol already taxed a lot for the same reason?
Because it works. Source: TFA.
... 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.
Strongly disagree. That's the entire point of these kinds of questions.
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.
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"?
It works because it increases the price, which reduces demand and leads suppliers to change recipes.
What is your concern?
Taxing isn't ideal and is a blunt instrument at best - but I'm not convinced there's a better (working) alternative.
People aren't going to will themselves to personal responsibility
- 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.
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.
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/...
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.
https://www.bmj.com/content/356/bmj.j163#
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.
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.