Why tax fattening food and drink components....

Today's Post: Monday, 2-6-2012

UCSF is the University of California medical school campus in San Francisco.

It is at the state of the art in many areas of medicine and preventive medicine. And, since I live in the area it’s local to me. So I see information often about their research.

Dr Robert Lustig, a doctor specializing in obesity studies, and health policy researchers Laura Schmidt and Claire Brindis authored an article in the journal Nature that appeared last Thursday, February 1, 2012.

It was covered in the online health news that day and the following Friday.

Their article highlights the cost of treating obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and cancers caused by excess sugar intake.

They explain that taxing sugars would reduce the amount of such diseases that recent increases in sugar intake have caused to go up. And, they point out that the money raised can also help pay for the costs of treating these diseases.

We’ve posted on this before. A study was done that found that making healthy foods less expensive caused people uneducated on this issue to buy more sugary treats with the money saved!

In contrast, increasing the cost of the sugary treats caused people to buy less of them and buy more health supporting foods. And, no time consuming and inefficient educational efforts were needed. So the effect was virtually instant.

That study supports their position!

I’ve also posted that today most governments are short on revenue and that virtually all other taxes slow the economy and cost jobs.

In contrast to that, taxing harmful food ingredients saves so much in the medical costs avoided that:

TAXING HARMFUL FOOD INGREDIENTS RAISES MONEY FOR GOVERNMENTS BUT DOES NOT SLOW THE OVERALL ECONOMY. (This is also true for taxing tobacco products of all kinds.)

That was their point in their article.

The United States federal government is apparently considering a soda tax that would raise the price of a can of soft drink by around 10-12 US cents, bringing in about 14 billion dollars a year.

The authors say that the statistical analysis they used suggests that the price would have to double to significantly reduce soft drink consumption – “so a one-dollar can of soft drink now should cost two dollars.”

No, having a tax of 10 cents an ounce for both regular and diet soft drinks, wouldn’t raise ten to 12 times as much because people would buy and drink less.

But the cost of the treating the diseases now produced, currently about $165 billion a year would also drop that much.

So instead of $165 billion a year in health care costs and no tax, we might have something like $70 billion a year in yearly tax income and have the health care costs drop to $82.5 billion a year.

It’s important that the tax per ounce on soft drinks include diet soft drinks since despite their zero calorie content they act as a strong drug boosting sugar cravings reliably increasing sugar intake as much or more than the regular soft drinks multiple studies have found! (Literally tens of millions of people who do not yet know this now drink diet soft drinks!)

Comparable taxes on sugar and other sweeteners by themselves and as ingredients in other foods make sense as well.

The comments in the news coverage focused on soft drinks; but their underlying focus was on the health harm from fructose which is in both regular sugar and high fructose corn syrup.

They did not cover the comparable health harm from eating refined grains. But the glycemic effect of refined grains is actually higher than sugar delivers!

So comparable taxes on refined grain foods also make sense.

Imagine if both all states and the federal government imposed taxes on all soft drinks, all sugars, and all refined grain foods and those drinks and foods all cost four times as much.

The governments would rake in some serious money. And, the amount of these things people would buy and ingest and be harmed by would drop like a stone.

These foods and drinks would still be available. But they would be the occasional treat people have a few times a month or a year instead of the two or three times a day intake some people now have.

The coverage of the article didn’t cover the specifics of why sugary foods and refined grains in excess cause disease.

But the research shows these effects, though little known by most people, are quite real.

Eating lots of sugary foods and refined grains in massively excess quantities reliably cause dramatic increases in triglyceride levels and substantial decreases in the beneficial HDL cholesterol.

But that effect, researchers at Harvard found, means that the small particle LDL that causes heart disease goes up that much too. So eating lots of sugary foods and refined grains in massively excess quantities is heart attack starter just like eating trans fats and hydrogenated oils is.

Secondly, research has found that the high triglyceride levels and roller coaster blood sugar levels eating lots of sugary foods and refined grains in massively excess quantities causes insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.

So, these three authors are quite right.

Cutting back on how much of this stuff people ingest by taxing it enough would dramatically cut the amount of people with heart disease and type 2 diabetes and the medical costs we now are paying to treat them.

By the way, I personally love sugar and the treats it’s in. But after learning this information I’ve cut back by over 8 to one in how often I allow myself to eat it. And, I drink no soft drinks as a firm policy.

These taxes are for the people who don’t know this information or refuse to believe it or can’t get themselves to cut back even after they find out.

And these taxes are for the cash strapped governments that now are paying for some of these avoidable health care costs!

The evidence shows they are badly needed; long overdue; and should be enacted immediately!