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Soda Taxes Seem to Cut Soda Drinking
- dmritard96 11y agoAs a diet soda addict, I was always surprised that soda companies haven't just started pushing diet drinks more. Until the additives are deemed to be carcinogenic, the health benefits over regular soda are plain as day light and they can really mitigate the public health push back they are getting on their nondiet brands/varieties.
- chipperyman573 11y agoIt's probably something to do with money - either they find that people are less addicted to them than the regular ones or they cost more to produce.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoOr maybe it's just hard to change what people are already used to. Switching from sugar to sweetener can take over a week of drinking a beverage every day before your brain finally starts liking the sweetener more than sugar. It's much too long for people - "trust us, you'll like that in a week" doesn't really work as a sales pitch. Doesn't mean companies don't try though; in my city (Kraków, Poland) there were already several Coca-Cola campaigns trying to switch people to Cola Zero. One of them included disguising cans of Zero as regular Coke, attempting to show people that they probably won't even notice the difference if they don't know they're drinking a sugarless coke.
- eru 11y agoAnd if you are making that kind of effort, might as well switch to something sensible.
- danso 11y agoI always had thought that I could never get used to the taste of Diet Coke...but I worked at a place where the fridge was entirely stocked with Diet Coke and I grew to be just fine with it. I guess it's an affirmation of the saying, "you like what you eat, not eat what you like". My favorite drink these days is the Dr. Pepper Ten...Diet Dr. Pepper has always been my favorite tasting of the sodas, but "Ten" purports to fit a good amount of sweetener in 10 calories...which to me, is just about as good as 0. But yeah, I feel if they pushed diet sodas half as hard as they did regular drinks, the companies would eventually make a stable profit from it. But maybe it's too hard, institutionally, to purposefully cut into a profit center...in the same way that it was probably difficult for newspapers to try to compete with Craigslist because no ad manager would idly sit by and let his profit-making department be slashed.
- zzleeper 11y agoIsn't there a large body of research that show unexpected negative effects of diet drinks? EG: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/03/17/bad-news-diet-soda-drinkers-your-favorite-beverage-may-lead-to-more-belly-fat-as-you-age/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/0...
- nommm-nommm 11y agoYeah and it may alter your gut bacteria in terrible ways http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/artificial-sweeteners-may-change-our-gut-bacteria-in-dangerous-ways/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/artificial-sweeten...
- rcconf 11y agoMost of the research I've read has said the opposite. http://examine.com/faq/is-diet-soda-bad-for-you/ http://examine.com/faq/is-diet-soda-bad-for-you/ http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/3496 http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/3496
- ejcx 11y agoNo. You're actually wrong. The verdict is still out on diet soda and artificial sweeteners. This[1] is required reading. [1] - http://examine.com/faq/is-diet-soda-bad-for-you/ http://examine.com/faq/is-diet-soda-bad-for-you/
- jacobolus 11y agoInstead the soda companies have switched to making crazy amounts of money from bottled water, and also increased their sales of “sports” drinks, “energy” drinks, iced tea, fruit juice, etc. cf: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_brands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dr_Pepper_Snapple_brands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dr_Pepper_Snapple_bran... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_PepsiCo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_PepsiC...
- tachyonbeam 11y agoAFAIK, studies show that drinking diet soda does not lead to weight loss, it seems to lead people to eat more. Though of course these studies might be bogus, as many studies in nutrition are. There seems to be a huge will to demonize artificial sweeteners, people are convinced that there can be no free lunch.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- masterleep 11y agoEminently logical. The question is what right does the government have to penalize a person for drinking soda, and the answer is "none whatsoever."
- zzleeper 11y agoTwo things: 1) In countries where health costs are at least partly absorbed by everyone, then it does have a right. 2) In the case of the US, the answer would be what right does the govt have to subsidy soda drinks (due to corn syrup, the main ingredient): https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/United_States_farm_subsidies_%28source_Congressional_Budget_Office%29.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/United_S... (note how there are no subsidies for fruit or veggies)
- nickff 11y ago1) By that logic, the government could expand its moral authority by absorbing the costs of certain behaviors. One could argue that because STD/STI treatment "costs are at least partly absorbed by everyone, then it does have a right" to tax or ban homosexuality. 2) The fact that a government does one thing wrong does not mean that it somehow gains the right to commit more wrongs.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago1) It may as well have a right, but just because it has, doesn't mean it should act on it. Those types of decisions are in fact complicated trade-offs. What you're trying to do here is equivalent to binary perception of risk, aka. "it's dangerous outside, so let's all stay in caves". People don't work like that. 2) Many, myself included, disagree that the government is commiting a wrong by penalizing sodas.
- Frondo 11y agoWell, but that's why we talk about it and decide this democratically. Where are we drawing the line on what the government does for public health? Right now, we're not banning sodas, but a tax on them seems like a relatively benign way to curtail the public health hazard sodas represent. It isn't a slippery slope so much as a discussion we have as a people. After all, there's very little debate over how much right the government has to nanny-state us with all these traffic lights and traffic lanes (where in the constitution does it say that the government can tell ME where and when I can drive my car??), because we're generally OK with that kind of government-dictated restriction of freedom to move.
- willidiots 11y agoOr perhaps the soda tax and reduced consumption both stem from the same body of scientific evidence and anti-soda narrative? As a whole, consumers are shifting to healthier eating trends, soda's one of the obvious things to cut. I agree with the last paragraph, the studies to date haven't shown much. It'd be interesting to compare state-by-state changes over the past 10 years.
- linkydinkandyou 11y agoIt's not fair to responsible people like me, at 5'10" and 155# (at age 53) to be taxed because other people are irresponsible. Why don't we tax obesity? Also, many "healthy drinks" from fruit juice to smoothies have even more calories! And health nuts who hate HFCS think honey and agave nectar are healthy alternatives even though they have even _more_ fructose?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]