The amount of sugar consumed by children from soft drinks in the UK halved within a year of the sugar tax being introduced, a study has found.
Children’s sugar consumption halved since tax announcement, study finds
I wish Germany would bring its sugar tax that we abolished in 1973 back. To be fair a lot of people are agreeing it has to come back by now, so chances are good that we'll soon have one again.
Why was it abolished?
Not being German, I maintain I am still accurately guessing that it's because corporations waved money under politicians' noses and their brains turned to mush and they said, "yes, masters."
That's not because the sugar tax was enough.
It's because the drink manufacturers mostly just stopped selling the full sugar versions, which kind of sucks for anyone who hates the taste of artificial sweeteners. Even squash like Robinsons became undrinkable. It tastes like battery acid.
There's only really Coca-Cola left that tastes the same as it did before. Lemon and lime drinks like 7-Up or Sprite almost cover the taste of it, so they'll do in a pinch. Otherwise I just drink water and cider. Apparently alcoholic drinks don't need to tell you how many calories are in them either, so I'll assume it's none and carry on looking confused when I get on the scales.
It's because the drink manufacturers mostly just stopped selling the full sugar versions
Which was a result of the sugar tax. They didn't just suddenly drop the sugar content for no reason.
So now people are avoiding sweet drinks not because they cost too much in taxes, but…because they taste like battery acid.
That’s still achieving the overall goal.
It's still the manufacturers decision to change the product
In fact, the only ones that do tell you seem to be the ones aimed at calorie counters who still want to drink, mostly hard seltzers like WhiteClaw, Truly, etc.
White claw smaller can at 5% is 100-110 calories a can.
I said this in another comment, but trying to find drinks that don't use sweeteners is painful nowadays. I can no longer drink most squashes, and my soft drink options are pretty much limited to coca cola (normal pepsi now has sweeteners), sainsbury's high juice, or rose's lime cordial...
It worked so of course they didn't extend it to other things with more hidden sugars (things like pasta sauce, flavoured yoghurts etc)
gtfo of here with sugar in my pasta sauce. It makes no sense and tastes bad.
And boxed macaroni and cheese, hamburger helper, etc. NoW wItH AdDeD SuGAr! Get all the way out of here with that nonsense. Stopped eating it a while ago, but people depend on cheap easy meals.
Great! Let’s do the States too!
Philadelphia has a "soda tax" that is effective, but the sugary beverage lobby has spent millions in attack ads and disinformation campaigns. I can't imagine the shit fit they would throw if it were attempted federally.
Don't forget the agricultural lobbies, which are huge but rarely talked about. They've lobbied for massive subsidies for corn and as a result corn syrup is cheap and used everywhere as a sweetener. A bill restricting it would never make it through the corporatist Congress.
Cook county tried it in Illinois a few years back, and it really made no sense.
It didn't apply to juices (even though juices are loaded with sugar) and it taxed sugar free sodas the same as their sugar sweetened versions. They charged 1 cent per ounce for the tax. It was repealed 4 months after initiating it.
So they didn't try a sugar tax, like Finland didn't try basic income because opposing politicians sabotaged the trial in the planning stage to make the results worthless.
Even starting with HFCS would be a major positive impact
The comments here are incredible. Are we being botted by Big Sugar?
A billion dollar industry would never do such a thing.
That, and sugar is insanely addictive.
No, people are just gullible and love to feel like they know something everyone else doesn't
back to brown ale, then, Timmy
With my ADHD just cutting on sugar seems to be the best diet change in my life period. I mean, of course there's sugar in lots of things, but at least not putting it into tea and not eating Snickers improves everything.
Who would have thought?
Cough Cough... Now follow suit America. I am sick of seeing people being so unhealthy and addicted to this drug.
What do the kids drink instead?
As someone with an intolerance to artificial sweeteners, I'll never forgive Jamie Oliver for pushing the sugar tax, alongside his insistence on "improving" school meals that resulted in mass outsourcing of school food to the lowest bidder.
Kids aren't drinking less soft drinks than before, the drinks themselves have just replaced sugar with chemicals and byproducts that aren't particularly healthy themselves...
The point that should be taken from your comment is not that they replaced the sugar with something else because we dont yet know if the aspartame is better or worse than sugar, though we do k ow that sugar is bad in large quantities.
What should be noted is that the study found that sugar consumption has halved, which seems to be a no brainer as the majority of soft drinks either contain half the amount or no sugar. I belive in the UK at least pepsi has half the sugar and almost everything else has no sugar. Coke is the only one that still has the full sugar content it had before. But they sell coke zero at such a low price now and push it with alternative flavours that it is being consumed in higher quantities than ever.
The point being, yeah, the tax stopped drinks makers using sugar so the sugar consumption dropped.
Like i stopped using salt to season my food and i found that my salt intake lowered... wow. Thats crazy.
True, and in typical UK fashion, the costs didn't go down, but up despite using a cheaper amount of sweetener to get the same sweet effect.
I'm not really sure why, but it felt like a huge surprise at the time that basically all sodas and squashes just switched sugar out almost overnight. For those with diabetes or intolerances, it was quite a tricky switch, and I've had a few friends that relied on drinks like Lucozade look for alternatives (and struggle).
Fully agree that the amounts are concerning. Removing sugar will have obvious health benefits, but drinking a lot of anything is likely going to be disastrous.
Have you considered drinking unsweetened stuff? Either plain water, or "flavoured" water. Basically soda without any sugar or sweeteners. It's surprisingly tasty, and pretty much as healthy as pure water.
Alternatively there are tons of different sweeteners. Some like stevia should be fine even if you have issues with, say, aspartame.
Sadly, Stevia doesn't agree with me either, although I don't feel as ill as if I have drinks with aspartame, which is what most drinks in the UK use.
I recently bought a soda stream for just this, since I now mostly drink sparkling water. There aren't many cordials here that don't use a sweetener, and many of my previously favourite kombucha brands now use aspartame - but there's enough to have some choice.
bruh just ban all sugary drinks, it's not that hard
They do have their place- just that place isn't "something you can just drink every day without thinking about"
There's nothing inherently wrong with sugary drinks. It's just how often you have them.
Some people don't like sugar free and sweeteners come with their own problems.
Exactly. Dose makes the poison. Also, artificially sweetened drinks are all garbage.
There is something inherently wrong with them. It's liquefied nutrition that's been designed to create an addiction and provide nothing but calories. It's marketed as a companion to meals, or as sports drinks, or as a convenient "pick me up". It's marketed to children, to poor people without alternatives. They are inherently predatory and harmful to your health.
then you'll probably end up with a black market of sugary drinks, and people will go to great lengths to get it.
It's almost as if this happened before with something else
It's more nuanced than that. In the case of sugary drinks however, since they are really easy to make, you won't even need a black market.
Just ban the sale and don’t enforce it on the black market. That would cover like 90%. It’s not like soda would be banned entirely, so it’s not like any other example. Just drink Coke Zero (or your flavor preference)
It's people like you that we can't have nice things. oh some Germans in Germany has started genociding Jews out of existence, so that must mean that all Germans are evil Nazis. you only consider moderation when their is a obvious utility. like oh you don't need alcohol to survive, but because some people get addicted to alcohol. we must ban alcohol, so no one will get addicted ever again. we seriously need to learn moderation and nuance. we really need to collectively agree that I'm not your mom and neither is the government. Otherwise we will be asking ourselves, what is the point of enjoyment? People who are miserable breath just fine, and if you enjoy something too much you might get addicted.
I agree completely with your comment but I think you probably shouldn’t have brought the Holocaust into it really!
Yes, definitely.
and alcohol, weed, meat, and fast food.
Great, now all the undernourished kids with poor parents are going to drink water instead and lose weight to dangerously unhealthy levels.
According to The Guardian (same source as this article), the number of children in food poverty in the UK is 4 million. 15% of UK households went hungry in January. Now, soda isn’t the smartest source of calories in a kid’s diet. It’s expensive and low in other nutrients. But kids aren’t always smart. A poor kid thinks “I’m hungry, I have a few pounds, there’s a vending machine, problem solved”. If the soda is too expensive, that doesn’t mean the kid is going to go to Aldi, buy some potatoes, and roast them for a cheap and nutritious meal. They’re a kid! It means they’ll pay more or go without. Which means you’re making the poverty and malnutrition problem worse.
Food poverty is a problem in the UK but drinking Coke isn't the solution. If you look at the nutrition information on the can of your average soda it's basically either sugar or artificial sweeteners and nothing else. No calories in that there's no proteins in that you can't live off it so who cares if there's less sugar in it?
Also food banks exist, they absolutely should not have to and it's a disgrace that they do, blame Cameron and his big society nonsense, but they do exist and in large numbers. I don't think there's anywhere in the country that you couldn't get free food if you needed it.
This person said the same thing in news and they didn't even look up how much the tax penalty was. It's 18-24p per liter depending on the sugar content and there are a lot of exceptions. Poor people are not denying their kids (apparently necessary) sugary sodas because they can't afford an extra 24p.
I think the stupidest thing about food banks is they give the same random bags of food to poor and homeless people, so I often see carrier bags with tins of beans or dry pasta just dumped by the roadside because what the fuck is a homeless person going to do with 600g Aldi penne pasta?
What source can you cite that shows that children in poverty primarily source their calories from soft drinks/soda and now will be at greater risk of nutritional deficit specifically as a result of this tax?
Food poverty is clearly related to cost of living issues and social inequity all greatly exacerbated by Brexit, not a tax on sugar.
This site provides data and resources for more information.
Thanks for your unbelievably ignorant view!
Imagine what would happen if we taxed capital gains properly 🐸
Or other externalities