5 ms·

I'd bet a dollar per gram additive sugar tax in excess of 5g would immediately flatten the chronic disease curve. Maybe double that if it's marketed towards ki

I'd bet a dollar per gram additive sugar tax in excess of 5g would immediately flatten the chronic disease curve. Maybe double that if it's marketed towards kids. There are a lot of problems besides sugar/HFCS but it's easily towards the top of the list.

jopsen 2y ago
Shops will just sell the sugar and the soda separately, mix it yourself :) Or people will pay more.
- bitmasher9 2y ago
  I bet adding the sugar yourself would reduce consumption considerably. Which would be the goal of the tax.
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Unfortunately Internet people like to point out the hypothetical 99th percentile person who would evade/be immune to such incentives and suggest that therefore, it would not be worth doing. It’s such a common and lazy pattern on HN :(
    - Someone1234 2y ago
      When I read those, I don't actually think those people believe their own arguments. They started with a conclusion, like "sugar taxes are bad," and then worked backwards to find an argument to fit it. That's why when you challenge them they just shift the goalposts.
- PaulRobinson 2y ago
  Not what has happened in the UK, where sugar tax has been a thing since 2018. It's now actually quite hard to find a sweetened drink - almost all soda-style beverages now are "zero sugar", sweetened with artificial sweeteners. Nobody is buying sugar and pouring it in. Nobody. It's a little too early to determine if this has slowed the prevalence of diabetes in the population. One problem is that other studies have shown that drinking artificially sweetened beverages with foods means many people end up eating more calories of food - the brain is looking for calories indicated by the sweet taste its not getting from the beverage, so compensates. It's a complex picture, but sugar taxes seem to be a reasonable way to get sugary drinks off the shelves.
  - Melting_Harps 2y ago
    > It's a complex picture, but sugar taxes seem to be a reasonable way to get sugary drinks off the shelves. As a person who is indifferent to the prospect, I fail to see why? When I lived in the UK a lot of people who couldn't afford real juice would buy 'squash' and drink it as a replacement for juice. I personally found it entirely revolting and way too sugary but on occasion used it in my teas to flavor them: I just can't see why the consumer should be punished with less options, or worse those made with things like aspertame, then simply rely on the consumer to use said product responsibly. I guess one can say with things like the NHS the consequences are socialized, but even that is a stretch as the British diet is a near mirror image of it's American counterpart in it's wide use of highly processed and refined foodstuff. Besides, if you go to the smaller shops run by non-Anglo merchants you will find every conceivable item you can imagine: I personally think Turkish food has way too much sugar in it's diet, but as I found out from our baker they make the most amazing fruit syrups to make deserts with, which incidentally make for good tea enhancers as well! Again, maybe I'm just too biased given my lived experience in this space, but nothing has yet to convince me that price alone serves as a real deterrent to really solve this issue, only an improved lifestyle choice where those calories get effectively used end up really solving the core issue.
    - frameset 2y ago
      > When I lived in the UK a lot of people who couldn't afford real juice would buy 'squash' and drink it as a replacement for juice. I personally found it entirely revolting and way too sugary Are you aware that you're supposed to dilute squash to taste? It's just concentrated juice. If it's too sweet, you haven't added enough water.
      - Melting_Harps 2y ago
        Yes, even then the horrid taste left a terrible feel in my mouth, which is why it was only palatable with fruit tea and with additional citrus juice for my tastes: and even then I still don't want it removed from the market if it serves a specific demographic.
  - 2y ago
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  they'll optimize the packaging to help you out. My mom tells me about how margarine used to come with a yellow color packet to mix into your white spread. The dairy board lobbied to make it illegal to sell yellow margarine because "it looks like butter". Didn't seem to hurt Oleo much... https://www.cbc.ca/archives/when-consumers-had-to-diy-for-their-margarine-buy-1.5436629 https://www.cbc.ca/archives/when-consumers-had-to-diy-for-th...
- sushid 2y ago
  Both would reduce demand so a sharp drop off would still be fairly realistic. Of course, getting anything done at the federal would be impossible in the US today.
Melting_Harps 2y ago
> I'd bet a dollar per gram additive sugar tax in excess of 5g would immediately flatten the chronic disease curve. Maybe double that if it's marketed towards kids. There are a lot of problems besides sugar/HFCS but it's easily towards the top of the list. It doesn't, it doesn't even discourage the purchases unless (perhaps?) universally adopted: Boulder, CO has had a sugar tax for a while now, and all it does is punish not curtail the consumer: often the poorer ones most as it accounts for a larger part of their income/wages. If they are so motivated they continue to buy said sugary drink at an inflated price with no benefit, or simply go 6 miles out of town and purchase in bulk if they are committed to said behaviour. I've seen it all too often,and have even managed to 'hack' the system by buying things that contain sugar but somehow flew under the radar (San Peligrino fruit flavored sodas). It's all just window dressing and shows just how poorly educated the average consumer is in measuring the necessary caloric intake relative to their lifestyle(s), but perhaps more importantly how food has been weaponized, mainly in the US, which has a direct correlation to type 2 diabetes being so prevalent in the first place. It's hard to blame either or entirely, but I'd saw its a 30:70 with the former and latter respectively. The truth is I stopped drinking soda after peaking in my early 20s to late teens, I still have a relatively fast metabolism and an active lifestyle to supplement it, but the feeling you get from the sugar high of continued use has gone from energizing back then to feeling ill for hours now. I occasionally drink soda with specific meals, often for nostalgia to this day, but its hardly a daily or even weekly thing for me anymore. Ultimately, if your reasoning/logic were true we would see a dramatic drop in fast food consumption due to the higher prices but that simply isn't the case and corps in the fast food industry are reporting record profits YoY in this market despite the increase in price. I see food the same way I see drugs at this point, both in excess or when misused can be incredibly dangerous, the best a Society can do is to safely regulate and educate it's populace in the pros/cons usage of both: nothing will stop a person from seeking or abusing either if they so desire. And its is a larger loss in agency for said Society to pretend it can as it often leads to draconian measures with no meaningful or effective outcome (eg sugar tax). In fact having worked in all aspects of the food industry from farm to table for a significant portion of my life, restaurant culture and the art of cuisine/gastronomy wouldn't even be a thing if it weren't for the debauchery and the unruly excess of the clientele who were ready and willing to drop up to a day's wage on a meal(s) and accompanying alcohol were it not for the 'uninhibited decadence'a of the consumer.
jeffbee 2y ago
You want a can of Coke to cost $35? In Berkeley we have a 1¢ per fl. oz. soda tax and it cut soda sales by over 20%. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5024386/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5024386/
- loeg 2y ago
  It cut soda sales 20% in Berkeley but increased them 4% in comparison cities (SF and Oakland), among low-income households only.
  - jeffbee 2y ago
    No, that is an incorrect reading of the result. San Francisco is not a neighbor of Berkeley, and nobody started traveling 15 miles to SF to save a dime on Coke. The 4% increase in the comparison cities was exogenous.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - loeg 2y ago
      I don't think we can attribute causality to the decline in Berkeley any more or less than we can attribute causality to the increase in comparison cities. If it was causal in Berkeley, it was causal in SF and Oakland. (Whose rates actually went up by like 20%? But at some point that gets cut down to 4%, I'm not sure why.) And still: Among low income households only. We don't know what the effect was on the whole population. Anyway, I'm sympathetic to the idea that sugar taxes work, just being critical of this particular study and your claim which is stronger than the actual study outcome.
dilap 2y ago
I'd take the other side of that bet. https://imgur.com/a/4b0O4AW https://imgur.com/a/4b0O4AW Prior to early 2000s when sugar consumption started going down, it was probably a reasonble guess as one of the drivers of increasing disease. But since then sugar consumption has tailed off while disease rates have continued to rise, so I don't think it's plausible anymore. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7666899/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7666899/ My bet to flatten the chronic disease curve would be reducing n6 fat consumption, especially from foods fried in vegetable oil. Provactively, the steep upturn in diabetes rates around 1990 conincides with a broad movement in the fast-food industry to replace animal fats like tallow with vegetable oils. https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19900724/1083993/cholesterol-free-oil-for-your-next-french-fry https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19900724/1083993/ch...
- siliconc0w 2y ago
  While I don't disagree that omega-6 oils are suspect - especially when heated/reheated - the evidence for sugar being bad for you is still far greater than the evidence that seed oils are bad for you. The US State system lends itself to natural experiments so I'm all for iterating on what taxes incentives actually lead to the desired outcomes (higher healthspan and lower healthcare costs). There very well could be multiple contributing factors to the epidemic- generically if the behavior increases chronic disease burden on the population it needs to be disincentivized via taxes so that you can incentivize moving to alternatives without the negative externalities.
  - dilap 2y ago
    Yeah, I agree it would be great to do some regional experiments.
- gdjskslsuhkso 2y ago
  Are there any chains that still use tallow to fry food? I love fried food and would pay a premium for high quality oil options. Most of the time you don't know what it is, at best it's peanut (five guys). I'd much prefer avocado oil or tallow.
loeg 2y ago
You're proposing something like a 500% markup on sugar? For context, that's like 400% higher than even the highest cigarette taxes.
- lurking_swe 2y ago
  about 40% of adults in the US are obese. Doesn’t seem that crazy to me (as an experiment one could run for a couple years, to see if it has a positive impact on society)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
lm28469 2y ago
Yeah but then again, selling addictive sugar shit is lucrative AND treating diabetes is lucrative. Very few people in charge care about your health, the world would be a very different place if it was the case. The solutions are extremely simple, and it's the same for many of our modern issues, the will simply isn't there.

jopsen 2y ago

Shops will just sell the sugar and the soda separately, mix it yourself :) Or people will pay more.

bitmasher9 2y ago
I bet adding the sugar yourself would reduce consumption considerably. Which would be the goal of the tax.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Unfortunately Internet people like to point out the hypothetical 99th percentile person who would evade/be immune to such incentives and suggest that therefore, it would not be worth doing. It’s such a common and lazy pattern on HN :(
  - Someone1234 2y ago
    When I read those, I don't actually think those people believe their own arguments. They started with a conclusion, like "sugar taxes are bad," and then worked backwards to find an argument to fit it. That's why when you challenge them they just shift the goalposts.
PaulRobinson 2y ago
Not what has happened in the UK, where sugar tax has been a thing since 2018. It's now actually quite hard to find a sweetened drink - almost all soda-style beverages now are "zero sugar", sweetened with artificial sweeteners. Nobody is buying sugar and pouring it in. Nobody. It's a little too early to determine if this has slowed the prevalence of diabetes in the population. One problem is that other studies have shown that drinking artificially sweetened beverages with foods means many people end up eating more calories of food - the brain is looking for calories indicated by the sweet taste its not getting from the beverage, so compensates. It's a complex picture, but sugar taxes seem to be a reasonable way to get sugary drinks off the shelves.
- Melting_Harps 2y ago
  > It's a complex picture, but sugar taxes seem to be a reasonable way to get sugary drinks off the shelves. As a person who is indifferent to the prospect, I fail to see why? When I lived in the UK a lot of people who couldn't afford real juice would buy 'squash' and drink it as a replacement for juice. I personally found it entirely revolting and way too sugary but on occasion used it in my teas to flavor them: I just can't see why the consumer should be punished with less options, or worse those made with things like aspertame, then simply rely on the consumer to use said product responsibly. I guess one can say with things like the NHS the consequences are socialized, but even that is a stretch as the British diet is a near mirror image of it's American counterpart in it's wide use of highly processed and refined foodstuff. Besides, if you go to the smaller shops run by non-Anglo merchants you will find every conceivable item you can imagine: I personally think Turkish food has way too much sugar in it's diet, but as I found out from our baker they make the most amazing fruit syrups to make deserts with, which incidentally make for good tea enhancers as well! Again, maybe I'm just too biased given my lived experience in this space, but nothing has yet to convince me that price alone serves as a real deterrent to really solve this issue, only an improved lifestyle choice where those calories get effectively used end up really solving the core issue.
  - frameset 2y ago
    > When I lived in the UK a lot of people who couldn't afford real juice would buy 'squash' and drink it as a replacement for juice. I personally found it entirely revolting and way too sugary Are you aware that you're supposed to dilute squash to taste? It's just concentrated juice. If it's too sweet, you haven't added enough water.
    - Melting_Harps 2y ago
      Yes, even then the horrid taste left a terrible feel in my mouth, which is why it was only palatable with fruit tea and with additional citrus juice for my tastes: and even then I still don't want it removed from the market if it serves a specific demographic.
- 2y ago
skeeter2020 2y ago
they'll optimize the packaging to help you out. My mom tells me about how margarine used to come with a yellow color packet to mix into your white spread. The dairy board lobbied to make it illegal to sell yellow margarine because "it looks like butter". Didn't seem to hurt Oleo much... https://www.cbc.ca/archives/when-consumers-had-to-diy-for-their-margarine-buy-1.5436629 https://www.cbc.ca/archives/when-consumers-had-to-diy-for-th...
sushid 2y ago
Both would reduce demand so a sharp drop off would still be fairly realistic. Of course, getting anything done at the federal would be impossible in the US today.

Melting_Harps 2y ago

> I'd bet a dollar per gram additive sugar tax in excess of 5g would immediately flatten the chronic disease curve. Maybe double that if it's marketed towards kids. There are a lot of problems besides sugar/HFCS but it's easily towards the top of the list. It doesn't, it doesn't even discourage the purchases unless (perhaps?) universally adopted: Boulder, CO has had a sugar tax for a while now, and all it does is punish not curtail the consumer: often the poorer ones most as it accounts for a larger part of their income/wages. If they are so motivated they continue to buy said sugary drink at an inflated price with no benefit, or simply go 6 miles out of town and purchase in bulk if they are committed to said behaviour. I've seen it all too often,and have even managed to 'hack' the system by buying things that contain sugar but somehow flew under the radar (San Peligrino fruit flavored sodas). It's all just window dressing and shows just how poorly educated the average consumer is in measuring the necessary caloric intake relative to their lifestyle(s), but perhaps more importantly how food has been weaponized, mainly in the US, which has a direct correlation to type 2 diabetes being so prevalent in the first place. It's hard to blame either or entirely, but I'd saw its a 30:70 with the former and latter respectively. The truth is I stopped drinking soda after peaking in my early 20s to late teens, I still have a relatively fast metabolism and an active lifestyle to supplement it, but the feeling you get from the sugar high of continued use has gone from energizing back then to feeling ill for hours now. I occasionally drink soda with specific meals, often for nostalgia to this day, but its hardly a daily or even weekly thing for me anymore. Ultimately, if your reasoning/logic were true we would see a dramatic drop in fast food consumption due to the higher prices but that simply isn't the case and corps in the fast food industry are reporting record profits YoY in this market despite the increase in price. I see food the same way I see drugs at this point, both in excess or when misused can be incredibly dangerous, the best a Society can do is to safely regulate and educate it's populace in the pros/cons usage of both: nothing will stop a person from seeking or abusing either if they so desire. And its is a larger loss in agency for said Society to pretend it can as it often leads to draconian measures with no meaningful or effective outcome (eg sugar tax). In fact having worked in all aspects of the food industry from farm to table for a significant portion of my life, restaurant culture and the art of cuisine/gastronomy wouldn't even be a thing if it weren't for the debauchery and the unruly excess of the clientele who were ready and willing to drop up to a day's wage on a meal(s) and accompanying alcohol were it not for the 'uninhibited decadence'a of the consumer.

jeffbee 2y ago

You want a can of Coke to cost $35? In Berkeley we have a 1¢ per fl. oz. soda tax and it cut soda sales by over 20%. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5024386/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5024386/

loeg 2y ago
It cut soda sales 20% in Berkeley but increased them 4% in comparison cities (SF and Oakland), among low-income households only.
- jeffbee 2y ago
  No, that is an incorrect reading of the result. San Francisco is not a neighbor of Berkeley, and nobody started traveling 15 miles to SF to save a dime on Coke. The 4% increase in the comparison cities was exogenous.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - loeg 2y ago
    I don't think we can attribute causality to the decline in Berkeley any more or less than we can attribute causality to the increase in comparison cities. If it was causal in Berkeley, it was causal in SF and Oakland. (Whose rates actually went up by like 20%? But at some point that gets cut down to 4%, I'm not sure why.) And still: Among low income households only. We don't know what the effect was on the whole population. Anyway, I'm sympathetic to the idea that sugar taxes work, just being critical of this particular study and your claim which is stronger than the actual study outcome.

dilap 2y ago

I'd take the other side of that bet. https://imgur.com/a/4b0O4AW https://imgur.com/a/4b0O4AW Prior to early 2000s when sugar consumption started going down, it was probably a reasonble guess as one of the drivers of increasing disease. But since then sugar consumption has tailed off while disease rates have continued to rise, so I don't think it's plausible anymore. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7666899/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7666899/ My bet to flatten the chronic disease curve would be reducing n6 fat consumption, especially from foods fried in vegetable oil. Provactively, the steep upturn in diabetes rates around 1990 conincides with a broad movement in the fast-food industry to replace animal fats like tallow with vegetable oils. https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19900724/1083993/cholesterol-free-oil-for-your-next-french-fry https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19900724/1083993/ch...

siliconc0w 2y ago
While I don't disagree that omega-6 oils are suspect - especially when heated/reheated - the evidence for sugar being bad for you is still far greater than the evidence that seed oils are bad for you. The US State system lends itself to natural experiments so I'm all for iterating on what taxes incentives actually lead to the desired outcomes (higher healthspan and lower healthcare costs). There very well could be multiple contributing factors to the epidemic- generically if the behavior increases chronic disease burden on the population it needs to be disincentivized via taxes so that you can incentivize moving to alternatives without the negative externalities.
- dilap 2y ago
  Yeah, I agree it would be great to do some regional experiments.
gdjskslsuhkso 2y ago
Are there any chains that still use tallow to fry food? I love fried food and would pay a premium for high quality oil options. Most of the time you don't know what it is, at best it's peanut (five guys). I'd much prefer avocado oil or tallow.

loeg 2y ago

You're proposing something like a 500% markup on sugar? For context, that's like 400% higher than even the highest cigarette taxes.

lurking_swe 2y ago
about 40% of adults in the US are obese. Doesn’t seem that crazy to me (as an experiment one could run for a couple years, to see if it has a positive impact on society)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

lm28469 2y ago

Yeah but then again, selling addictive sugar shit is lucrative AND treating diabetes is lucrative. Very few people in charge care about your health, the world would be a very different place if it was the case. The solutions are extremely simple, and it's the same for many of our modern issues, the will simply isn't there.