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HowToPreventHeartDisease.com |
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Can Sugar Tax Lower Obesity And Heart Disease Risk? Over the past decade, Americans consumed as much as 13 billion gallons of sugar-sweetened beverages a year. In fact, sugary drinks |have become the largest source of added sugar and excess calories in the American diet. These beverages are also believed to be the culprit responsible for the prevailing obesity epidemic. Percentage of overweight or obese Americans are among the highest in the world and each year, about $147 billion was spent on the medical cost pertaining to obesity. While sugary beverages are generally inexpensive, they actually hide the true costs of health problems associated with them. For instance, they are partly responsible for about $174 billion per year on diabetes treatment costs. A soda tax or soft drink tax is a tax or surcharge on soft drinks aiming to discourage unhealthy diets and offset economic cost of obesity. In 1994 the soda tax idea was introduced and in 2009, 33 American states imposed a sales tax on soft drinks. France had also introduced a tax of soft drinks in 2012 and intended to raise it in 2013. Most health experts and scientists believe the prevailing soda tax is too low to curb the consumption on sugary drinks. But they also do not think that a tax increase might really work as people might continue buying large cheap bottles of sugary drinks.
Surprisingly, what the researchers from Columbia University Medical Center and the University of California, San Francisco have found was somehow different. According to them, if a higher penny-per-ounce tax were imposed on sugary beverages, it could lower the consumption by 15 percent and reduce the prevalence of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Their findings, which were published online in the January 2012’s issue of ‘Health Affairs’, estimated that over a period of 10 years (2010 to 2020), the penny-per-ounce tax could reduce new cases of diabetes by 2.6 percent, and avoid as many as 95,000 coronary heart events, 8,000 strokes, and 26,000 premature deaths. These could not only save more than 17 billion in medical costs for adults aged 25 over the decade but also generate about $13 billion of annual tax revenue. In the study, data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey for the years between 2003 and 2006 and a questionnaire on food choices and frequency of meals were used to examine how lower sugary drinks consumption would impact overall weight reduction and lower risk of Type-2 diabetes. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the American Heart Association (AHA) supported the study. Results of their analysis showed that if sugary drinks could be replaced by water, diet drinks and more nutritious caloric beverages, it is possible to reduce as many as 60 calories for every 100 calories of sugary drinks not consumed. The researchers stressed that even if all the calories saved by cutting soda consumption were replaced and there is no reduction in body weight, cutting consumption would still lower diabetes and heart disease risks. This is because weight gain is just one of the many factors responsible for how sugary drinks contribute to diabetes and heart disease. They also pointed out that the tax on sugary drinks would have the greatest impact among younger adults and men of all ages than older adults and women. Naturally, there are objections about the new findings. People opposing the soda tax believe this would disproportionately burden low-income households, who purchase more sugary drinks than those in the higher-income brackets. But according to researchers, there is insufficient evidence to conclude low-income consumers are more price-sensitive when it comes to those sugary drinks. They also argue that low-income people, who bear a greater burden of obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes, should benefit the most from these tax policy in terms of their health and savings.
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