I'd bet a dollar per gram additive sugar tax in excess of 5g would immediately flatten the chronic disease curve. Maybe double that if it's marketed towards kids. There are a lot of problems besides sugar/HFCS but it's easily towards the top of the list.
Prior to early 2000s when sugar consumption started going down, it was probably a reasonble guess as one of the drivers of increasing disease. But since then sugar consumption has tailed off while disease rates have continued to rise, so I don't think it's plausible anymore.
My bet to flatten the chronic disease curve would be reducing n6 fat consumption, especially from foods fried in vegetable oil.
Provactively, the steep upturn in diabetes rates around 1990 conincides with a broad movement in the fast-food industry to replace animal fats like tallow with vegetable oils.
While I don't disagree that omega-6 oils are suspect - especially when heated/reheated - the evidence for sugar being bad for you is still far greater than the evidence that seed oils are bad for you.
The US State system lends itself to natural experiments so I'm all for iterating on what taxes incentives actually lead to the desired outcomes (higher healthspan and lower healthcare costs).
There very well could be multiple contributing factors to the epidemic- generically if the behavior increases chronic disease burden on the population it needs to be disincentivized via taxes so that you can incentivize moving to alternatives without the negative externalities.
Are there any chains that still use tallow to fry food?
I love fried food and would pay a premium for high quality oil options. Most of the time you don't know what it is, at best it's peanut (five guys). I'd much prefer avocado oil or tallow.
The only one I know of is Popeyes -- they famously never stoped frying their chicken in beef tallow. Probably unhealthy for about a million other reasons, but hey, at least it's not fried in vegetable oil!
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
about 40% of adults in the US are obese. Doesn’t seem that crazy to me (as an experiment one could run for a couple years, to see if it has a positive impact on society)
No, that is an incorrect reading of the result. San Francisco is not a neighbor of Berkeley, and nobody started traveling 15 miles to SF to save a dime on Coke. The 4% increase in the comparison cities was exogenous.
I don't think we can attribute causality to the decline in Berkeley any more or less than we can attribute causality to the increase in comparison cities. If it was causal in Berkeley, it was causal in SF and Oakland. (Whose rates actually went up by like 20%? But at some point that gets cut down to 4%, I'm not sure why.)
And still: Among low income households only. We don't know what the effect was on the whole population.
Anyway, I'm sympathetic to the idea that sugar taxes work, just being critical of this particular study and your claim which is stronger than the actual study outcome.
> I'd bet a dollar per gram additive sugar tax in excess of 5g would immediately flatten the chronic disease curve. Maybe double that if it's marketed towards kids. There are a lot of problems besides sugar/HFCS but it's easily towards the top of the list.
It doesn't, it doesn't even discourage the purchases unless (perhaps?) universally adopted: Boulder, CO has had a sugar tax for a while now, and all it does is punish not curtail the consumer: often the poorer ones most as it accounts for a larger part of their income/wages. If they are so motivated they continue to buy said sugary drink at an inflated price with no benefit, or simply go 6 miles out of town and purchase in bulk if they are committed to said behaviour. I've seen it all too often,and have even managed to 'hack' the system by buying things that contain sugar but somehow flew under the radar (San Peligrino fruit flavored sodas).
It's all just window dressing and shows just how poorly educated the average consumer is in measuring the necessary caloric intake relative to their lifestyle(s), but perhaps more importantly how food has been weaponized, mainly in the US, which has a direct correlation to type 2 diabetes being so prevalent in the first place.
It's hard to blame either or entirely, but I'd saw its a 30:70 with the former and latter respectively.
The truth is I stopped drinking soda after peaking in my early 20s to late teens, I still have a relatively fast metabolism and an active lifestyle to supplement it, but the feeling you get from the sugar high of continued use has gone from energizing back then to feeling ill for hours now.
I occasionally drink soda with specific meals, often for nostalgia to this day, but its hardly a daily or even weekly thing for me anymore.
Ultimately, if your reasoning/logic were true we would see a dramatic drop in fast food consumption due to the higher prices but that simply isn't the case and corps in the fast food industry are reporting record profits YoY in this market despite the increase in price.
I see food the same way I see drugs at this point, both in excess or when misused can be incredibly dangerous, the best a Society can do is to safely regulate and educate it's populace in the pros/cons usage of both: nothing will stop a person from seeking or abusing either if they so desire. And its is a larger loss in agency for said Society to pretend it can as it often leads to draconian measures with no meaningful or effective outcome (eg sugar tax).
In fact having worked in all aspects of the food industry from farm to table for a significant portion of my life, restaurant culture and the art of cuisine/gastronomy wouldn't even be a thing if it weren't for the debauchery and the unruly excess of the clientele who were ready and willing to drop up to a day's wage on a meal(s) and accompanying alcohol were it not for the 'uninhibited decadence'a of the consumer.
I would expect it to work badly whenever a person could easily cross a boundary. In larger cities -- say, New York -- it would suffer similar, but fewer, problems simply because the average effort of getting outside the city would be higher.
You see this between states when tax regimes differ. Sure, those who live near the border "cheat". But most people live far enough away that they are affected by the tax.
There is lots of counter-evidence to your propositions, notably involving the effect of raising prices on cigarettes, which does discourage smoking.
I'm curious if you have data showing this? Last I heard, which a quick google seems to back up, is that Seattle's similar tax had modest benefits. (https://sph.washington.edu/news-events/sph-blog/sugar-sweete...) Took a brief look to see if there were strong challenges to this, but I didn't find anything.
Regarding the sugar tax? Only empirical/anecdotal, I'm afraid: the fact is, as mentioned in my statement and in a response below, is that it's a geographical based tax, which while annoying can be trivially circumvented. (And even then black-markets emerge to meet that demand, or better known as System-D.)
A better analysis would be the effects of better health and the decrease in tobacco smokers in younger generations over the last decades, which is mainly a product of discretion. I can assure you having lived with a pack a day people no amount of advertising, gross tumor pictures on the side of the box, high costs/taxes came close to people just realizing it's a horrible thing to do to your health.
Arguably this led to the mass vaping trend, and a myriad of other ailments associated to that, but still what remains is that tax while a deterrent is no match for proper market-product-fit--how ever dangerous, or stupid one may think said behavour is.
> There is lots of counter-evidence to your propositions, notably involving the effect of raising prices on cigarettes, which does discourage smoking.
Here is the thing, I spent a lot of time in Europe where smoking is still incredibly prevalent and culturally relevant and the taxes are still incredibly high, the result: people just buy loose tobacco and roll it themselves to bypass the higher tax on pre-roll stuff offered every where.
The ancillary products sold in 'head-shops' become a niche market unto themselves for these people and divert that tax money into another sector, proving that while markets have many flaws they tend to be effective at navigating any and all legislative hurdles even in an incredibly highly regulated market-place.
I think this specific matter seems to be a bigger issue with people who feel the need to judge or deem people's actions 'right or wrong' based on their own subjective values when it comes to personal body autonomy, and think they know better and want to deter them in any way possible which I think this is ultimately what this is about: not Society's health.
If that were the case, I think resources are better utilized in helping people address the MASSIVE mental health crisis in the US.
I'm confused on where the quote on cigarettes comes from? Isn't in my post, is it?
And you didn't address that they did find modest gains to the goals in the Seattle study. I fully agree that, on the merits, this is easy to circumvent. I further agree that this sort of tax is almost certainly regressive. Largely for the reason you give of how easy it can be to get around. The study shows that, despite that, it still saw gains to the goals.
My gut would be some of the gains will have come from advertising around the ideas. Having a tax is one thing. But prices typically go up with people being none the wiser. So, the messaging that went with the taxes could have also given a pause.
That is beside the point, though, being that I don't know why it could have had modest results. Study shows that it did.
> And you didn't address that they did find modest gains to the goals in the Seattle study.
I don't have much to say, other than personally I feel it's a tacit nod to the fact they found the results they wanted from this study, because it resoundingly relies on justifying a higher sales tax and this further encourages other parts of WA to adopt it and further establish it as a form of tax revenue while trying to provide a 'social good' which can be monetized.
Again, it's not entirely hard to bypass and because it 'may' show some minor benefit to justify itself seems like how most poorly formed versions of bureaucratic gate-keeping works.
But, to take the contrarian position [0] to even my own argument it seems that in the 5 states they launched this with income taxes have also 'benefited' from these taxes. But its hard/impossible to properly measure that these consumers didn't just purchase things in a nearby city with no additional tax or just online so I think it's parameters can derive the favourable results it claims. And the following claim regarding 'significant evidence' doesn't really compel me to say it was vastly evaluated:
> But the study also looked at adjacent zip codes to the SSB-taxed cities: finding no statistically significant evidence that purchases had increased in these neighboring areas.
Which is why I defer to my anac-data, which admittedly biased illustrates that its just not effective but is entirely moot without addressing the core of the issue and principal of the matter as a whole: body autonomy.
PS: That 2nd quote was not yours, but the other users who wanted to address tobacco use: I keep doing this having grown up on IRC/forums but since HN doesn't do attribution. I should find a solution to this, but making 2 posts seems tedious, I guess I can pre-fix with @ or something.
Ah, 2nd quote being a sibling post makes sense. I typically look at things in threads after I post, so didn't see it.
I want to stress that logically, I fully agree with your position. I am always hesitant to go with logical arguments that aren't supported empirically, though. Would love to see some critical studies that go into why this stuff isn't the case.
I can say that, at a personal level, we thought we would shift buying of juices and sodas to outside of Seattle when the law passed. We largely didn't, though. Just started getting smaller servings from places in the city. I hesitate to say we are representative, though; as we don't do that much on the sweetened side, all told. Were buying small juices for the kids, but not many of that, even.
> Which is why I defer to my anac-data, which admittedly biased illustrates that its just not effective but is entirely moot without addressing the core of the issue and principal of the matter as a whole: body autonomy.
Can you explain how sugar tax is an issue about body autonomy ? As far as I can see, you are free to continue putting sugary water into your body. Is the argument that even a small increase in tax is an encroach upon bodily autonomy ? Do you consider farm subsidies (e.g. maintaining US corn production) as a bodily autonomy issue then, since it lowers the cost of corn / fructose and making them available in more food ?
> Can you explain how sugar tax is an issue about body autonomy?
Simply put, you are arbitrarily punishing those who consume these products (which I will repeat I do not purchase myself) in often high cost areas (eg Seattle, San Francisco, Boulder) to align with a specific ideology that these areas ascribe to, at least on the surface.
I feel like a boomer saying this and it seems like I'm making a mountain out of a mole hill, because it's something that on the surface makes sense to a degree--relying on the old adage of tax it and you get less of it--and even appears to be well intentioned way to make people make 'healthier' choices, but from what I've seen in practice is a bureaucratic way to modify behaviour in people's everyday lives that ultimately only causes a minor inconvenience/friction for those resolved to circumvent and the initiative's results seem dubious at best and over-reaching at worst.
I genuinely don't think in practice it's about health either as you can easily go around the other aisle and buy all the high sodium, poly-saturated chips with as much or more HFCS and MSG and countless amounts of dyes and food preservatives to your hearts content with no tax implication and are often encouraged to be purchased in bulk, so it seems perplexing that this is really the success they make it out to be.
It seems to me like a bike-shedding initiative if I have ever seen one as it avoids the much bigger issue of how un-healthy the American diet really is.
> Do you consider farm subsidies (e.g. maintaining US corn production)...
Because as you have mentioned, the obscenely lucrative farm subsides of corn for mega farms is the crux of the issue here and by extension all of the lobbying by big business that takes place for these chemicals that are actually shaping what the American diet itself is; I believe we would be better served addressing that obvious and glaring problem, and forcing producers of these products to have to do without these highly subsidized and addictive chemicals in their products and letting consumers decide whether to consume them of their own volition at actual market rates rather than this window dressing approach.
Yeah but then again, selling addictive sugar shit is lucrative AND treating diabetes is lucrative. Very few people in charge care about your health, the world would be a very different place if it was the case.
The solutions are extremely simple, and it's the same for many of our modern issues, the will simply isn't there.
