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Tax On Fizzy Drinks / Junk Food Ads
Fizzy drinks should be heavily taxed and junk food adverts banished until after the watershed, doctors have said, in a call for action over obesity.
The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, which represents nearly every doctor in the UK, said ballooning waistlines already constituted a "huge crisis".
Its report said current measures were failing and called for unhealthy foods to be treated more like cigarettes.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-21478314
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Some drink products have about 90 spoonfuls of sugar. You never stop people buying products with sugar in.
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This is the sort of thing that people can be up against when trying to enact sensible legislation.
where do you stop? - do this, then we ban foods high in saturated fats, then things with too much salt, etc etc.
Demonising foods/drinks you should have less of in a healthy diet discourages people from thinking about the totality of what they eat. Too much or too little of any food or nutrient is bad for you.
Sugar has crept into our foods so it would be a good thing to bring it back to a more normal and natural level. It's ridiculous not to do something that seems such an obvious solution in fear of where it would stop. We must address the current glaringly obvious problem of too much sugar in our foods and then worry about what comes next.
There is 40.5g of sugar in a can of coke, more than what is the recommended daily intake for both a man and a woman, yet alone 7 year old kids. In a weight watchers dessert that is supposedly to help people lose weight there is 21.9g of sugar.
Agreed.
Well sure, but some people don't seem to care and are merrily eating themselves into poor health.
[sarcasm]Obviously increasing the price of a 60p can of fizz by taxing it will make all the difference. Imagine if they lumbered on a 100% tax. I bet every fatty in the land would immediately start eating nothing but lettuce if they had to (gasp) pay as much as £1.20 for a can of fizz.[/sarcasm]
How many years do GPs spend studying? I just knew all that studying had to rot the brain.
Kids don't do the shopping - parents do, besides define junk foods?
Does that mean we won't see Gary Lineker advertising crisps until after dark? The evil Mr Kipling? or Captain Birdseye if these doctors get their way?
Fizzy drinks already have 20% tax on them - it's called 'VAT' and Supermarkets have recently put prices up on Pepsi and Coca Cola by up to 20% to about £2 for 2 litres. And people are still buying them.
The only viable option is a complete ban on sales - prohibition style, with massive punishments for 'speakeasies' and black market sales. I dare the doctors suggest that. Expect massive opposition from the likes of PepsiCo and The Coca Cola Company.
Anything else would be a cash cow for the Government with no difference on people's health.
It could be done by going on how many grams of sugar or saturated fat are in 100g of the product and differentiating between products that are intended as desserts, so the quota for Mr Kipling would be higher than Captain Birdseye and it would encourage food manufacturers to meet the quota and be able to advertise their foods at any time. The evening slot I imagine is when adverts reach most people, so the food companies would want to advertise the most then.
Bang on the money.
Taxing fizzy drinks doesn't make them healthy all of a sudden. If they contain too much sugar go after the manufacterer and make them change the ingredients. Taxing the consumer is a cop out.
Why should I pay more for the occassional can of pop just because someone has decreed that some numpty somewhere is drinking gallons of the stuff every week?
They can't tax the gas bottle nor the syrup as neither are fizzy at the point of sale!
That's not true, studies show that exercise has only a marginal affect on your weight if you don't also control your diet.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/sep/19/exercise-dieting-public-health
People are overweight for essentially 2 reasons:
1 - Bad eating behavours
2 - Bad genetics.
Of course people with bad genetics can keep their weight under control, it's just more difficult. Anyone who says that is rubbish answer this one question - why do most people get fatter as they get older?
This is a very similar argument to the minimum alcohol pricing one. Yes increasing tax will generally reduce consumption, however it will only affect those who don't have some form of addiction (most obese people). The only thing that will affect them is dramatic increases in prices and reduction in availability (which i wouldn't recommend).
That isn't to say that a small tax wouldn't be beneficial to society - especially if the revenue is put to good use.
The extra tax could be used to further subsidise those very high London rents,then unlike the private sector,council tenants could continue to live in properties they could not afford
It probably should be a tax on sugar-or-sweetener-laden drinks not fizzy drinks. Since it's the sugar/sweetener doing the harm not the fizz. Then they'd be able to get sodastream.
Are they going to include sparkling water in this proposed fizz tax? If so, why?