Tax on fizzy drinks and curb on takeaway outlets to fight obesity: good idea or not?

I suspect it's more about changing lifestyles: making dinner is about washing and chopping veg for example, not taking a box out the freezer and putting it into a microwave. But if you don't sit to eat dinner as a family because of work commitments, for example, is it too inconvenient to have that sort of a family meal? What is stopping people eating healthily? It's not cost for everyone, so is it lack of time or skills or what is it?

There was a survey recently saying that 1 in 10 adults have done no physical exercise for a decade and 40% of British adults have not broken into a run at any point in the last year. So why not? Lack of time? Lack of facilities (though going for a run doesn't require much by way of facilities...)?

The obesity epidemic is about a lot more than the cost of fizzy drinks.

I don't agree with it - unless the money was directly and solely funding our NHS. Otherwise it's just more government taxation with no reward.

It would be much better for the government to encourage people to grow their own fruit and veg. Additionally, fresh fruit and veg is so cheap on the continent - if good food was cheaper and more widely available (my local Tesco has only a small amount of veg but yet has room for loads of cake, crisps and sugary crap?!) people would be more inclined to eat it.

I would be happy for the taxes on fizzy drinks and takeaway food to go solely on trained coaches to take PE lessons in junior school, after school sports activities and secondary school after school sports activities along with more funding available to set up sports clubs in local communities.

That way it will eventually save money on health care as active children usually stay active

Chip shop meals are already expensive - we can't afford fish and chips for the family in the normal run of the weekly budget!

This would probably be our most regular take away choice - about one every three to four months. I purchase one fish and chips and a small chips - that will feed four people and there is always chips left stuck to the paper It cost about £6.

I refuse to buy any soft fizzy drinks though....

Not their best idea for me.

But then, takeaways are a once a month treat and fizzy drinks are only in the house as mixers when we host parties.

Much rather they slap taxes on the motorway burger vans and service station outlets.

Oh, and a tax on advertising fast food too.

I still find it hard to see how anyone thinks that fast food is in any way cheaper than home cooking. It just isn't!

I see kids everyday eating greasy chicken rubbish and then dropping the waste on the floor and this just didn't happen in the countryside where i grew up because we had no fast food in my village.

Despite parents' best intentions, if kids have these outlets close by, they're likely to go there for lunch or after school. Where I live in London there are fried chicken shops literally next door to each other. We're also lucky enough to have proper greengrocers, butchers, bakers and fishmongers, but they struggle because people can only buy the ingredients rather than crap in a box ready made.

I can buy enough fresh fruit and veg for a week for less than a tenner in the greengrocer, so why would I want to eat grease? However, I'm very aware that many people go for that option because it's there.

It isn't expensive to buy healthy ingredients, doesn't need to be organic, just requires some cooking!

We need more research into the mechanisms of appetite and obesity as this will better inform how to tackle it.

I work in this area and it is certainly not the case that we are all made the same and the overweight just need to exercise more and eat less.

The singular is Sherson, swallowed :o

It used to be a status symbol, being fat. It meant you could afford to eat as much as you wanted.

it is in some cultures (particularly ones with a lot of poverty - fat as a sign of wealth). suppose it would be one way to get rid of the greedy one per cent.

If you can only become obese if you are rich, then wouldn't it make it a status symbol?!

but why angelico - why not stop manufacturers producing and targeting food like at that children? why not ban selling fizzy drinks to kids if they're so bad and we really care about these children's health? why think oh we'll make a bit more money and they'll pay 5p more for their fizzy drinks rather than just ban their sale to kids?

it's like tobacco - why tax the smoker tons who you have already allowed to become addicted by allowing an industry to sell deadly drugs legally on every street corner? the pretense of caring when actually just making revenue is farcical. or taxing fuel guzzling high emission car drivers which just makes them a privilege of the rich rather than banning companies from selling them. or introducing congestion charges that price poor people off the road who can't afford the exorbitant cost of public transport whilst the rich swan around on them in 2l engines.

they never go for the cause - just attack the victims of the cause.

Great idea, long overdue - as long as the money is put into offsetting the price of fruit and veg or healthier foods. But I think this should be extended to cover other foods high in sugar, especially those marketed at parents for young children.

i think what partly actually pisses me off is the idea you will tax people who buy this stuff in the pretense of 'caring' for their health rather than ban advertising and limit how much of what crap they can put it in it if you did actually care about people's health.

this is tokenism aimed at the individuals pocket as usual rather than hitting corporations. tax the people who peddle this stuff - tax the food manufacturers who are making essentially lethal food. why hit the consumer and not the producer?

It says, right in the OP, "...on sugary soft drinks and to make local councils limit the number of fast-food outlets..." (emphasis mine).

No where does it say 'fizzy', 'ban all' or 'diet'.

Perhaps we should all read the actual article rather than jumping on our bandwagons?

Classic example of not reading the OP. Classic...

"Some of the most sugary drinks out there are fruit juices and smoothies - supposedly healthy options. "

Surely they ARE healthy options though? Nutrition's not all about sugar is it?

Terrible idea. Some of the most sugary drinks out there are fruit juices and smoothies - supposedly healthy options. Should they be included then in the tax due to their net sugar per serving levels?

I think lots of things need to be banned - trans fats, the various syrup things people have mentioned, aspartame etc... I don't know how manufacturers have got away with putting so much shit in our food. But it'd need to be all or nothing really, as if you only ban a couple of things they will just find other crap to use instead.

I really detest the manipulative packaging/marketing too. Like someone upthread mentioned the serving size thing. Another one I was contemplating earlier - flavour vs flavoured: something marked 'strawberry flavour' has absolutely no strawberry in it, something marked 'strawberry flavourED' has at some point seen strawberry - manufacturers follow the rules, just like on serving size etc, but it is easy to miss the difference if you're in a hurry or if you don't know the rule.

Sorry, somebody may have asked this already but, I love diet coke and try as much as I can to replace it with fizzy water, will fizzy water be taxed as a fizzy drink? Is it going to be the 'fizzy' bit that's taxed or the sugar content? In that, will Fruit Shoots and Sunny D escape tax, while fizzy water is taxed?

Does this mean Solent Green is sheeple....

Lol,
exactly, the sheeple eat unhealthy food all the time, but they think it is normal and healthy foods because the powers that be tell them so, hence no horse, etc..
xox

The people who are currently a healthy weight are presumably not succumbing to BOGOF offers on massive silo-sized bottles of Coke, or stuffing their faces with chicken and chips from a KFC lookalike , so price and availability can hardly be the whole story. Chip shop meals are already expensive - we can't afford fish and chips for the family in the normal run of the weekly budget! (and I am too fussy to contemplate anyone eating a saveloy in batter).

So, what aer s,im and poor pepole eating? WHY are they not hoovering this stuff up? Rathe than thrashing about for answers, let's look at the habits of the healthy weight and fit, and how they resist the temptations of marketed cheap crap.

Another problem with the whole "ban this, tax that" idea is that the processed food industry is always going to be more ingenious at getting round regulations than a government can ever be at making them.

Huge sums of money are at stake, so the industry employs highly intelligent people to create and market new products that fall in line with current thinking. For years it was "low fat this and that", which turned out to be full of other rubbish. Now you can get "low carb" products.

Anything that is processed offers the chance for (a) high profit margins owing to cheap filler ingredients and (b) sleight of hand with "healthy" messaging. So taxing any one variety of processed food is just going to send the industry scurrying in the other direction. You tax fizzy drinks, they'll just come up with something else - or revamp and remarket the other non-fizzy product lines they already have.