By MARK BITTMAN, New York Times
In their critics’ eyes, producers of sugar-sweetened drinks are acting a lot like the tobacco industry of old: marketing heavily to children, claiming their products are healthy or at worst benign, and lobbying to prevent change. The industry says there are critical differences: in moderate quantities soda isn’t harmful, nor is it addictive.
The problem is that at roughly 50 gallons per person per year, our consumption of soda, not to mention other sugar-sweetened beverages, is far from moderate, and appears to be an important factor in the rise in childhood obesity.
This increase is at least partly responsible for a rise in what can no longer be called “adult onset” diabetes — because more and more children are now developing it.
Attention is being paid: Last week, the Obama administration announced a plan to ban candy and sweetened beverages from schools. A campaign against childhood obesity will be led by the first lady, Michelle Obama.
And a growing number of public health advocates are pushing for even more aggressive actions, urging that soda be treated like tobacco: with taxes, warning labels and a massive public health marketing campaign, all to discourage consumption.
A tax on soda was one option considered to help pay for health care reform (the Joint Committee on Taxation calculated that a 3-cent tax on each 12-ounce sugared soda would raise $51.6 billion over a decade), and President Obama said last fall that such a tax is “an idea that we should be exploring. There’s no doubt that our kids drink way too much soda.”
But with all the junk food and U.F.O.’s (unidentifiable food-like objects) out there, why soda? Why a tax? And, most important, would it work?
Advocates argue that a soda tax would reduce consumption and pay for anti-obesity campaigns.
In an opinion piece in The New England Journal of Medicine last year, Dr. Brownell and Thomas R. Frieden, the director of the C.D.C. and former New York City health commissioner, estimated that in New York State alone a penny-per-ounce soda tax would raise $1.2 billion annually.
Where are our rights to enjoy the persuit of happiness . Do you have to tax everybody who induges himself in d soda.Why not tax calorie intake put a scale on everybody and charge them by the pounds they exceed state standards.
What is the tax rate on chocolate ice cream goimg to be vs . Plain Vamilla I have to budget it in with my other expenses..
I dont know if I will be able to afford it.
As Woody Allen said, “you can live to be 100 if you give up all things that make you want to live to be 100.”
stop drinkin soda its you who choses your life style not ‘society’.
first they taxed cigarettes than alchohl outlawed transfats restricted sodium now sugar what left for the yetzer hora unemployment benefits