Bringing the idea of a sugar tax into the public discussion

It seems like there’s an increasing amount of articles and general chatter about the sugar tax, which I wrote about here.

I first came across “Let Them Drink Water” from Daniel Engber over at Slate about two weeks ago.  If you call a sugar tax a fat tax, it’s pretty clear where your loyalties stand: a “sin tax” or “health tax” sounds more palatable.  He then references some literature which tries to reconceptualize sugary food as a drug, just as we now see cigarettes and alcohol as drugs.  I agree that sugary foods are not equivalent to cigarettes; yes, we are wired to like food that is bad for us, but the food is not laced with nicotine or marketed as health food.  And General Mills was just scolded by the FDA for promoting dubious health benefits of Cheerios.  The article is pretty balanced, but the author’s leaning is pretty clear:

A fat tax, then, discriminates among the varieties of gustatory experience. And its impact would fall most directly on the poor, nonwhite people who tend to be the most avid consumers of soft drinks and the most sensitive to price. Under an apartheid of pleasure, palatable drinks are penalized while delicious—or even hyperdelicious—products come at no extra charge. What about the folks who can’t afford a $5 bottle of POM Wonderful?

Contra Engber, Rudy Ruiz has a guest column at CNN supporting the idea of a tax on unhealthy food.  He has the standard point that there are health benefits to consuming less empty calories, but he also makes a more subtle and effective point about subsidies, “And since the government’s current subsidy system enabled our transformation into an obese nation in the first place, why shouldn’t the government implement a corrective course of action encouraging families onto a healthier track?”  As free marketers are wont to forget, our market is supported by the government; McDonald’s is cheap largely because we subsidize corn, have tariffs against sugar, and don’t support low-income workers.

As the beverage industry wants you to believe, calories are calories and we all should choose how to get the calories.  As this article, the one that started the current flurry, in the New England Journal of Medicine demonstrates, however, that’s just not true.  For humans, all drinks complement, instead of substitute for, calories, i.e. we don’t register the same satiation from Coke calories as we do from the same calories from broccoli.  Or:

Intake of sugar-sweetened beverages may cause excessive weight gain owing in part to the apparently poor satiating properties of sugar in liquid form. Indeed, adjustment of caloric intake at subsequent meals for energy that had been consumed as a beverage is less complete than adjustment of intake for energy that had been consumed as a solid food.²⁵ For example, in a study involving 323 adults, in which 7-day food diaries were used, energy from beverages added to total energy intake instead of displacing other sources of calories.²⁶ The results of a study of school-age children were consistent with the data from adults and showed that children who drank 9 oz or more of sugar-sweetened beverages per day consumed nearly 200 kcal per day more than those who did not drink sugar-sweetened beverages.

Worse, the calories we’re getting from drinks increasingly come from sugary drinks.

Finally, the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale has this fun revenue calculator for soft drink taxes.