Cities face budget crises, and the nation faces an obesity epidemic. So it's hardly surprising when government officials want to fight obesity by raising taxes, especially by taxing sugar-sweetened beverages -- a so-called "soda tax." Many public health advocates have thrown their support to what seems to be a political two-fer: more city revenues and less obesity.
If only science wouldn't get in the way. But it does. We got a whiff of this when a bunch of New York City government emails were released through the state's Freedom of Information Law a few weeks ago. The city's Health Commissioner wanted to post a video on YouTube saying that drinking one sugar-sweetened beverage a day -- shown in the video as a sort of fat sludge rather than an ordinary drink -- would cause a teenager to gain 10 or 15 pounds in a year. This would be a nice statistic in support of a soda tax. But even the health department's own nutrition experts and their outside academic consultant balked. They pointed out that the calories in one soda per day could easily fail to generate anything like this weight gain, because overall diet and exercise are hugely important and some lucky souls (good genes!) can ingest extra calories with impunity, anyway.
There is no getting around the basic truth that what counts for obesity are total calories along with energy expenditure through exercise. It turns out that there is practically no reliable scientific support for using soda taxes to fight obesity. That's clear from the research literature. It is easy to cite simultaneous upward trends in body weight and soda consumption, but the connection between the two is far from established. Instead of being a cause, extra soda consumption may be a result of ingesting more calories for reasons that have nothing to do with any particular beverage. Moreover, if a penny per ounce tax pushes soda consumption down, there's no guarantee that calories go down. That's partly because people tend to compensate, maybe by drinking an extra high-calorie fruit drink or two. This compensation phenomenon has cropped up over and over again when scholars track prices, taxes and consumption patterns through time. Even if a tax did cut out a 12-ounce sugar-sweetened beverage every day, the impact on total calories could be trivial.
In health policy, we're always running into situations where research generates mixed results. The usual recourse is to run randomized controlled experiments, which allow us to be reasonably sure of what causes what. This is standard practice in assessing pharmaceuticals. A correlation between drugs and disease, or even between vitamins and disease, is all very nice, but experience has shown that correlations often turn out to be spurious when we get results from rigorous clinical trials.
In the case of diet and obesity, research based on correlations has provided contradictory evidence on the impact of soda prices or taxes; the most rigorous statistical studies tend to find no impact at all. Most important, there's also evidence from a half dozen or so randomized field experiments in which information, access, or prices were controlled in order to reduce soda consumption while researchers also measured the impact on weight gain. What happened? First, consumption of the targeted beverage was sometimes reduced, just as intended. Second, compensation among various calorie sources was common as subjects adjusted to the new choices they faced. And third, in each experiment the impact on weight gain was either trivial or temporary, disappearing as compensation and other forces did their work. Conducted in the past half dozen years, with subjects ranging from pre-teens to teens and adults, field experiments that are our best science have cast serious doubt on the use of soda taxes to fight obesity.
The soda tax battle in New York City and elsewhere is instructive for the nation. Obesity has defied decades of drug development, public exhortation and information campaigns such as restaurant menu calorie labeling. It is my belief that the rush to tax is an impulse to generate new revenues rather than a creative application of nutrition science to public health. I believe we should take a close look at what has actually been learned from experience.
John E. Calfee is a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the opinions expressed herein, while exclusively those of the author, are based partly on research funded by the beverage industry.
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The big obstacle to combat obesity is the fact that nearly “everyone thinks he knew†why people getting obese and nearly “everyone thinks he know†what people should do in order to lose excessive body weight.
Luke Tunyich
http://www.biomechanicsandhealth.com/
I echo Luke's point: thinking that HFCS is the one and only cause of our obesity epidemic turns a blind eye to a lot of other unhealthy aspects of the American diet. And the idea that we have to bust our b*tts at the gym "Biggest Loser" style in order to maintain a healthy weight is completely crazy.
“There is no getting around the basic truth that what counts for obesity are total calories along with energy expenditure through exercise.â€
The “basic true†is wrong! The basic science about weight gain/weight loss is based on an embarrassing misconception.
http://www.biomechanicsandhealth.com/calories.htm
http://www.biomechanicsandhealth.com/energybalance.htm
Obesity is not the fault of the people. The obesity is the fault of the medical science researchers and the people involved in prevention and treatment of obesity.
Obesity epidemic is caused by factors that can’t be attributed to life style.
People affected with obesity are the victims of bad science.
Luke Tunyich
http://www.biomechanicsandhealth.com/
You attribute that NOT to lifestyle, but to genes?
1 The tax could be used to subsidize the healthy lunches in schools program.
2 Therefore having an immediate and longer range effect on the health of our citizens
3 Children learning good habits will lessen the need for other taxes (as they continue to make better choices themselves, their bodies, their families, and their livelihoods) - due to increasing health care costs and being the top spender for industrialized countries in healthcare.
4 Increased self-esteem due to better appearance encourages people to take more healthy risks, leading to a better economy.
If more leaders were trained to think creatively and learned the state of habitual processing of the mind and the importance of creativity - they would be more inclined to pass bills which tax unhealthy lifestyle choices. Habits are so hard to break any incentive to quit is worth giving a go.
Government subsidy of corn/syrup/beef/ethanol is a large reason why the USA has bad eating habits in the first place.
How else would you explain a society that eats the most high fat proteins, largest amount of simple carbohydrates and drives everywhere?
Parents teach children not government. The biggest subsidy going is our health insurance cost to pay for the medicare % shortfall.
"There is no getting around the basic truth that what counts for obesity are total calories along with energy expenditure through exercise.
Maybe Mr. Calfee looks at metabolism this way due to his economics background. Obesity makes more sense to him in the context of simple deposits and withdrawals. However, this is amazingly short-sighted. There are much more complex neurological and endocrinological (hormonal) systems at play when it comes to satiety, habits and metabolism. A calorie is not a calorie, is a calorie. A piece of bread of the same caloric equivalent as a piece of fruit is received entirely differently, largely in part due to the difference in the subsequent insulin response (glycemic index). High fructose corn syrup has a much more dramatic effect on insulin levels than other sweeteners of caloric equivalency. HFCS results in spiking insulin, which stimulates inflammation and ultimately the hypothalamal-pituitary-adrenal-axis (aka. Sympathetic response). It also down regulated satiety resulting in cravings for more food. Ultimately, HFCS's effect on the central nervous system is one that results in a slower metabolism and more inflammation.
I can't speculate as to Mr. Calfee's motivation to attempt to down-play the significant health detriment brought about by the relatviely rapid increase in the prevelance of HFCS. But, it is certainly beyond his scope to comment on the relavent physiology.
www.ajcn.org/content/76/5/911.full
I'm not worried about Big Brother as much as I'm worried about Big People. Especially people with the moniker "Commonsense333" while spouting off about burning down the government. That's more like Big People with Small Ideas.
Your tone comes off as sneering towards people who find other uses for their time than cooking. It makes as much sense as feeling superior because you like to shingle your own house or tend your lawn compared to people who choose to live in a condominium to avoid those duties.
Sounds like the cigarette industry.
Why not tax all foods and beverages based on their sugar content? That would bring in zillions of dollars.
Of course, that ain't gonna happen in my lifetime.
It is all about overconsumption of everything, not just various sugar waters.
People only want to change when they have a problem. Until that problem occurs they will just pay the tax to get their fix. The tax is just a way of getting more money for an ever bloated government while trying to justify it through doing something good. It would be incredibly difficult to come out and just institute a new tax, but if it is for a good cause then people cannot disagree.
As far as the economics go it fails because it would only affect those who have less money. A fatso who is doing alright can afford a couple of pennies extra for a can of soda. Even the poorest will continue to buy. to get a real effect the tax would need to be something outrageous that would make people think twice about buying instead of be temporarily pissed that their Pepsi is slightly more expensive.
And there is also a cultural effect that would need to be examined. It is not as wrong as it once was to be obese. People still hate fatties, but there are many more people now who are catering to fatsos in all areas. There are magazines (pornographic and not) that are written specifically for fat people. "Big is beautiful" and so on. Bullying obese people is punished.
Sodas are not healthy anyway so I am OK with taxing them.
Just because taxes don't produce immediate results, who knows what the long term effect is? I know plenty of people who have more seriously considering quitting smoking and then did it, due to high cost.
Nooooo, the government corn subsidizing will not take responsibility for it's contribution to the obesity epidemic. This "soda tax" nonsense is just another way into your pockets and blaming the true victims of the high fructose corn lobbies: themselves! Can you say hypocrisy? I knew that you could.
There has been a big shift in the "coolness" of smoking that likely has had more of an effect than the health issues.
Plus I still know people who smoke and are really poor. They just buy the $1 packs on the reservation now.
Times were it was completely acceptable to smoke in one's office or on an airplane. Now neither is acceptable nor legal.