Children's daily sugar consumption halved just a year after tax, study finds

And consumption of erythritol, xylitol, and other sugar alcohols (maltitol, mannitol, sorbitol...) goes completely unmonitored. It's important to note that in most products sugar was simply replaced by sweetener - not reduced. Are we okay with this large scale natural experiment on children's health? There is building evidence of glucose tolerance, prothrombosis, and cardiovascular risk.

Misleading headline: it's not total sugar consumption, but sugar from soft drinks that halved after the tax (on soft drinks).

Per quick Googling, for adults soft drinks represent only 16% of sugar consumption, although I suspect the distribution of soft drinks consumption itself is quite uneven (as in, there are many adults who don't drink soft drinks, and many who drink nothing but).

People are still buying and drinking fizzy sweet drinks marketed by mega corps, its just that they've been reformulated to be something like 25/75 sugar/sweetener so they aren't subject to the tax. All popular drinks in the UK are formulated like this now, the exception being original coke.

The tax is at most $0.31 per sugary drink (18 or 24 pence depending on sugar content) and it only applies to beverages. Impressive if such a small and niche tax had that big of an impact. I imagine the raised awareness caused by passing the law did as much as the tax itself.

I spent some time in Mexico and all of the packaged foods have a big warning if they're too sugar-heavy. It instantly changed my shopping habits because it made me question foods I had taken for granted. I'd argue that's a better use of government power than a tax. The former approach requires business to bend to the public will, while the latter manipulates the public at their own expense.

It's a lot of sugar.

Imagine a kid drinks one small (0.33L) can of soda, every day, all year round.

A regular Cola/Fanta/Sprite/etc. usually has around 10 grams of sugar, so 33 grams of sugar for every can. One gram of sugar is roughly equivalent to one gram of carbohydrates, which has 4 kcal of energy pr. gram. A small can comes to 132 kcal.

Consuming that every day of the year, comes to around 48000 kcal of excess energy (12 kg of sugar!). One kg of bodyfat is roughly equivalent to 7700 kcal.

If this kid lives a very sedentary lifestyle, so that every can that's consumed is excess calories, the worst case would be 5-6 kg of extra bodyfat in year. Luckily it is more complex than that, and the weight gain would likely be much less. But still, over the years a habit like that could easily lead to many kg of extra bodyfat.

Now if you go for a lighter alternative, like those drinks that mix sugars and sweeteners, that could cut down sugar intake by half (to a quarter). Or diet soda, which is close to zero calories.

The best would of course to teach your kid to exclusively drink water when they're thirsty, and keep the soda as a weekend treat.

Bad habits die hard.

I believe in sugar free soda as an alternative to regular soda, however the "experts" in this article are completely off base to say it is a no brainer to tax other sugary items. Sure, reduction of sugar intake -via soda- was reduced per the article, but sugar intake is not even the right measurement of success. The right measurement is health, were BMI, obesity, diabetes, heart problems, or overall mortality rate reduced. You can cut all the sugar you want but if you are consuming other carbohydrates or calories as a replacement, then you are doing all for naught. Not saying its true, but imagine someone whose hunger is satiated by consuming small amounts of sugar resulting in overall lower calorie intake. Again, sugar intake is a meaningless stat without the resulting health impact being taken into account.

I wonder how much of this was due to the tax and how much about it being in the news a lot at the time. The article seems to suggest this was just 2019 results I wonder how the trend has continued. Also if we have just moved people to sweetener then are we just going from one health issue to another? An interesting correlation none the less. It would also be interesting to see if the health of people had changed over time as well. If all we have done is remove some sugar from drinks and people are getting just as sick then it feels like an unnecessary pain point. I do feel that longer term education would be better, that and banning advertising of high sugar items as we did for tobacco. For instance all the bus stops near me are plastered in junk food and high sugar items which just make them feel normal. Bring back the veg marketing board!

Glorification (propaganda) of taxation or regulation looks reasonable. What about personal (patents) responsibility and information about consumption unhealthy food/drinks?

I've been saying for years that I will take health care as a serious name when they start reducing added sugars.

I guess the UK has health care.

Its not like the non-sugar sweeteners are any more healthy.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/06/health/xylitol-heart-atta...

How much longer are you people going to keep beating this dead horse? Sugar consumption has been in secular decline since 2000: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38094768

People are eating about as much sugar per capita now as they were in the early 70s, yet they're fatter and more diabetic than ever, even than when they were consuming significantly more sugar 24 years ago. A tax on added fats (oils, butter, lard) and excessive sodium makes much more sense, but good luck getting such a measure enacted given how effective the propaganda from Big Fat (the dairy and beef industries and people promoting high-fat diets like keto and Atkins) has been.

Here's what the impacted citizens have to say. https://youtu.be/5IP2Go7LHQA

Next: Carbon Tax

The Boris Johnston government tried to hide a government report on the succes of this tax as, like many in this forum, his part of the party is heavily influenced by US corporate propaganda ( sometimes misleadingly called "libertarianism")and the success of popular taxes isn't politically correct for them.

Is this how we want to do this? Taxes... really?

We should strongly question why this is the most effective means rather than blindly pursuing that it works and digging ourselves a deeper hole.

Mainstream media pushing "more tax is actually good"? Well, I'm shocked sir.

Correlation. The article notes sugar consumption was dropping for over a decade before the tax. It is also dropping over the same period in comparable non-tax countries.

"Science journalism" is often a net-negative in terms of informing the public.