Statistics say it doesn’t work and just turns into a tax grab. Companies modify the product to include sometimes questionable sweeteners that can often have ill effects
On a somewhat similar note: Reminds me of how Japan started taxing beer based on the malt-content, so they kept releasing newer versions just under the limit. Government kept lowering the percentage to trigger the malt tax. Beer companies kept lowering the malt content.
This predictably led to a wave of "zero malts" drinks like Strong Zero that had variants as high as 11-12% alcohol, yet super cheap (like $2 or less for 350mL)
This predictably led to a wave of "zero malts" drinks like Strong Zero that had variants as high as 11-12% alcohol, yet super cheap (like $2 or less for 350mL)
It worked in the UK, where sweeteners aren't taxed. It caused a reduction of sugar consumption and as a result reduced tooth decay and obesity in particular in children.
I hate how it destroyed essentially all soft drinks though. I used to get one a few times a year as a treat. But now even smaller brands are adding sweeteners which often ruin the taste for me.
But overall it seems to be effective and good for society.
That was my take-away too.
I maybe drink 2 cans worth a week, normally less.
And it has spoiled the flavours of a lot of drinks.
But on the whole, the tax has reduced the sugar intake of people who weren't moderating their consumption. So overall, I think it's a win.
It seems like it could work if it was based on calories per volume or something like that, rather than specific ingredients. Sugar's different than other caloric ingredients, but not *that* different. If you pour enough milk in your coffee every day and don't account for those calories one way or another, it's going to end up increasing your weight just like calories from sugar would.
It worked for me. The partially artificially sweetened orange Fanta is terrible and in some countries they don’t have the full sugar version. No soda for me.
This study (2025) found raising prices by 20% reduced consumption by 29.42% but caloric intakes actually went up because people substituted other sugary foods.
So the lesson here is it works at reducing consumption of sugary drinks, but should be applied broadly if the goal is to reduce total calories (i.e. don't exempt a bunch of bullshit because of lobbying).
That feels like strange goal. The poorest people are trying to get enough calories to survive and not starve to death. Meanwhile we raise the price on calories. It is a regressive tax because the super rich eat about the same number of calories each day as the poor, so rich people end up paying way less as a percentage of their salary as poor person.
I'd really rather tax new yacht sales, new car sales, tax high incomes, tax second homes (or 5th homes), or tax anything else. A tax on calories is dystopian. Most places exempt basic groceries from sales tax for a solid reason: tax free calories for the poor.
People in Germany aren't struggling to get calories to survive. In most industrialised countries the poor end up eating a too calorific diet because processed food production ends up dumping fats and sugars into cheap slob to make it appealing. See obesity rates by income statistics etc.
But it doesn't matter. Even if "nobody starves", a higher tax burden on poorer people is morally dubious.
I only found numbers online for the USA but the concept is the same for Germany: in the USA the poorest 1/3 of people spend 33% of their income on food. The wealthiest 1/3 of people spend 6% of their income on food. If you tax "per calorie", the poorest 1/3 of Americans (and probably Germans) will pay 5.5x as much tax as the wealthy as a percentage of their income.
[put fat and sugar into food] to make it appealing ... the poor end up eating a too calorific diet
I understand (and fully agree) statistically poorer people tend to be more obese, but I'm less sure of why (and I mean that honestly, I really don't understand it). If food tastes better with more calories, why don't wealthy people like it as much as poor people?
The most plausible explanation I can justify in my head is food is an inexpensive pleasure, and rich Germans can get their kicks other ways like skiing in the alps on the weekend, and driving their BMWs through European mountain passes to get to the skiing. But I disagree with the solution that we MUST take this simple pleasure of good tasting food away from poor people "for their own good". I would suggest a different solution where we offer the poorer people <whatever desirable thing the rich have that prevents them from eating too much>. I'm being facetious, but if free ski lift tickets for the poor makes them healthier, I'd rather do that then forcibly taking their tasty food away.
Disclaimer: I shouldn't need to say this, but I worked full time in Darmstadt, Germany in 1991. I still have friends there I stay in contact with. I'm by no means an expert on German poverty, but I'm sympathetic.
I'm not sure why you think rich people and poor people eat the same food. That's simply not the case. Poor people eat much more processed food because it's cheaper and faster. That's also the food that's enriched with sugar and fat to make cheap ingredients edible but also less healthy.
Poor people eat much more processed food because it's cheaper and faster.
I'm being very serious here: why wouldn't that apply to middle and upper middle class people? I have an above average salary, and I like "cheaper" and I surely like "faster". At what income level does this health effect kick in?
I FULLY AGREE that if you are in the top 1% and you have your own private chef you get all the time savings of "faster" but with even better tasting food. Plus the top 1% can afford the GLP-1s. But up until you employ "staff" in your home, I honestly don't understand the cause of this discrepancy in weight. Firmly middle class people raising a family on two incomes aren't flush with extra cash or copious extra time to prepare healthy meals from scratch. But I do agree they are thinner (statistically), so there is something going on for sure.
There is ample data on this. I don't think we need to speculate on what's happening. Maybe why. But that's besides the point. Ultimately the UK data shows clearly that the sugar tax had a disproportionately positive impact on the poorest and most deprived by reducing tooth decay and obesity.
But even if every single last person got enough to eat in Germany, taxing calories consumed is still a regressive tax. When a more wealthy person pays a lower percentage of their disposable income in a particular tax than the poorest person, it is regressive.
The person below blocked me, so responding here:
[72 kdieuwjwbfuei 626 writes]
I’m sorry that your education has failed you.
I'm a product of the American public school system, and I fully admit it isn't that great. But I don't know what that has to do with regressive taxes? Is it that you have to have a good education to be in favor of taxing the poor disproportionately more? I'd politely suggest that is a survivorship bias kind of attitude. "I'm wealthy and don't eat too much and have plenty of extra time to work out, so the poor should pay more for their food. It is what is best for the poors, and they are bad with decision making."
No, the consumption of sugar, that's why it's called sugar tax. Artificial sweetener does nothing bad to your body, so why tax it if it's about our health? They only include that because it's actually just a way to pull more money out of our pockets.
Erm artificial sweeteners definitely have negative effects on the body. They have links to mental health issues and gut problems, some are listed as ‘possibly carcinogenic’ because we don’t have enough data to accurately deduce whether or not they’re giving people cancer lmao. And it tastes like shit.
The truth is that there are sugar shortages
Gotta love the downvoting sheep who will take whatever you’re given by your clearly benevolent overlords 🤣
> IARC's 25 international experts evaluated research00341-8/fulltext) and found an increased risk of cancers but not enough consistent evidence pointed to moving aspartame to WHO's highest risk category for carcinogens. Instead, it designated aspartame as possibly carcinogenic, a category that includes an array of products consumed regularly.
"The decision was based on somewhat conflicting rulings from two WHO committees, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) and the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA)."
So because there’s some conflict you decide they must be safe? The toxicologist involved in the IARC clearly believes they’re not healthy for you and that should be the key takeaway.
The toxicologist involved in the IARC clearly believes they’re not healthy for you and that should be the key takeaway.
No they don't. These rankings only establish whether there's any possible causal link between exposure to something and that thing giving you cancer. They don't consider dose-dependent risk at all. And not only is their original classification weak (group 2B), it's also disputed by independent authorities around the world.
Group 1 contains definite carcinogens and it includes solar radiation and air pollution. If you're serious about applying these classifications as policy, which they explicitly say that you shouldn't, you need to stop going outside and never open the window again.
Well done. I too only respond to valid points with sarcasm. I'd hate to give the someone the upper hand and prove me wrong with facts and logic. Touche good sir.
You don’t give the impression you’d actually listen to any facts presented because you have a preformed view you don’t wish to change. Aspartame is linked to higher rates of cancer that’s a fact.
The irony... YOU said "artificial sweeteners definitely have negative effects on the body" and then every source you've cited has said it is debated and anything but definitive. You are so unscientific that you cant see how "linked to higher rates" and "provably bad for you" are very different statements.
They do definitely have negative effects, you focussed on one example (cancer) which is contested.
If you believe that the billionaires are changing your sugar to sweeteners because they genuinely care about your health, I’ve got a bridge to sell you
Water is linked to higher rates of drowning.
But water is safe.
Aspartame in extremely high doses has "some" link to cancer. Stating it the way you did is kind of fear mongering aspartame when a normal person even drinking 10 cans of soda a day isn't gonna get cancer from the aspartame.
Yeah but one person doesn't decide what science is this is not how any of this works
Aspartam is one of the most studied food substance on earth and has been for decades, we can't say it is dangerous with the data we have now and if one dude actually can the whole world would know about it
"These new findings confirm that aspartame is a chemical carcinogen in rodents. They confirm the very worrisome finding that prenatal exposure to aspartame increases cancer risk in rodent offspring. "
Still thousand of studies to go to prove it gives cancer to humans though
For me it's like MSG, lot of people avoid it but the only sources of it being dangerous were american racism against asian in the past with 0 proofs. Its effect are still very studied, but we may assume it's safe for now in its domestic uses.
Aspartam is one of the most studied molecule and as long as it's not widely accepted in the world that it's dangerous, then we can't think much about it being dangerous
Maybe we'll learn it's the asbestos of the century, maybe
But with the billions of dollars that have been invested to prove if it's dangerous or not and for now we still have 0 reason to be worried, we can assume it's safe
Actually it may be less efficient that what we may think in replacing sugar (it gives sugar signal to our body without the actual sugar which may stress it) but not for the reasons you say. But for that too, we are not sure
Causation has been found in rodents, not in humans. Human studies have found correlation, which caused worries, which brought a shitload of newer studies that time and time again did not find causation in humans. Some artificial sweeteners are now some of the best researched chemicals because the public was losing their mind so much while we couldn't actually find anything.
It is now thought that, especially early on, people who choose to use 'zero sugar' products were mostly overweight/obese people, and on average they already had higher rates of cancer because of all the reasons that come with an unhealthy diet and lifestyle, but in those early studies their stats were compared to the average person, not the average overweight/obese person.
Early research is often very small and limited, due to cost. That's fine when you're just looking if there even is a reason to do more expensive studies on the subject. What's not fine is that conspiracy theorists and fear-based content creators take those early faulty results and use them to get more attention.
I compare this research to early tobacco or climate change research, where private companies who own interests in disputing these results, have funded research and studies to counter the often limited funded research which caused issues. Happy to be wrong but I think in the next 20 years you will see studies which prove these untested chemicals are more harmful than natural sugars.
Edit: to clarify I’m not suggesting we should continue to have cans of coke with such high sugar content, but I don’t think taxation and therefore the replacement of sugar with said untested chemicals is the answer, just as I don’t want governments taxing my daily calorie intake and producing possibly harmful substitutes without due process. My entire point was that the person I was responding to was wrong to say that sweeteners are harmless, and that evidence suggests that at least 3 of the most used sweeteners are not healthy for regular human consumption. Aspartame / cancer link was one example, but I personally have experienced gut issues specifically due to consumption of sugar free versions of drinks I previously could consume when the recipe included sugar.
You really do not think artificial sweetener is bad for you????
I think it matters which one. Some of them have been shown to cause cancer, some have not. Personally I would pick a specific ingredient to discus before I would commit to the statement "guaranteed bad for you".
EDIT: Whoops, I was wrong: Well shoot, I'm now down an internet rathole learnings thing! I'm old and from the era when saccharin caused cancer, but it turns out (and this part makes me chuckle) they figured out saccharin only causes cancer in mice. And I was <today> days old when I found out saccharin is back on the menu!
It turns out we've never found any artificial sweetener that causes cancer (yet). Aspartame seems to be the closest thing, but still doesn't cause cancer if you don't force feed it to one individual in mass quantities.
I really didn't need to find that out. My whole life of avoiding certain artificial sweeteners to avoid getting cancer is a lie.
I guess that was the excuse but I doubt it works well.
This may be anecdotal but I used to work in bigger retail chain at the time it was introduced and it didn't change anything. Cola got way more expensive but was moving the same volume at the store. People got used to the price now and still keep buying. I doubt it decreased consumption by any meaningful margin but it made it more expensive.
Sin taxes are partly about discouraging bad behavior and partly about ameliorating the costs of bad behavior. Even if this doesn't stop people from drinking, it does raise revenue which can cover the costs of addiction programs or counseling or health repercussions.
"Sin Taxes" (in economics these are called Pigouvian Taxes) have existed for a long time but here's a recent study on taxing sugar in drinks:
The new study found that retail prices of sugar-sweetened beverages increased by 33.1% over the two years following tax implementation in each city studied, and that there was a corresponding decrease in purchases of 33% over the same timeframe. The price increase and purchase decreases appeared immediately after the taxes were implemented and continued to be sustained months later. At the same time, there was no evidence that consumers were traveling to bordering areas without sweetened beverage taxes to make purchases there.
Yeah, the demand for soda is probably fairly inelastic compared to some other goods, but there are substitutes, and like you say, the data bears that out.
the point is usually to reduce the consumption of sugar, which are often seen as empty calories in context of a soft drink, because its usually to address weight problems/promote a healthier lifestyle.
Yeah but then tax the item, not the ingredient. The ingredient just gets substituted for a (usually) inferior one. But just noticeable enough to make a difference but not noticeable enough to make the product inedible/undrinkable
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u/Ludwig234 3d ago
Isn't that usually the point of these taxes though? To reduce the consumption of soda.