To think there's never a bad time for a sugar tax

[Time2Rise]

I just heard a(nother) politician on the radio say now is not the right time for a sugar tax, due to the cost of living crisis. At the same time, he was expressing outrage at the high rates of tooth decay in children and pledging tooth-brushing lessons in primary schools. Surely a cost of living crisis is a perfectly reasonable time for a sugar tax? When families are struggling financially, it's irresponsible to appease them with cheap sugary treats that damage their children's health.

Ironically, more impressive with the likes of McDonalds and Burger King who have managed to keep the price differential to disincentivise sugary drinks, i.e. meal deals that only include low sugar drinks where you have to pay more for a fizzy version.
What's ironic (or surprising) about fast food outlets incentivising the least healthy option???
Also my local Waitrose implement it as well. 🤷‍♀️

Utterly bemused at the posters saying it has to be sugar or artificial sweeteners, how about we wean ourselves off foods that need added sugar or sweeteners?

I would like all junk food to be less easily available. Yes people should take responsibility for their own health- but many many don’t!! Hence our obesity crisis.

This might be missing the point but what we need isn't tooth brushing lessons in schools, it's supporting parents to cook cheap healthy meals on a budget. Cooking meals for a family really, honestly does not need to be expensive. Giving families a food parcel is such a blunt instrument approach. If they don't know how to cook half the ingredients will be wasted.

Yes I know that. I didn't say it had. I think however a study needs to be done to see if the recent price increases have already had an affect.

People aren't obese because junk food is cheap.

There obese because healthy food is too expensive and they need to work every hour of the day to pay extortionate rent prices and general living expenses so when they get home they just want something filling and convenient rather than cooking a homemade meal.

Women used to stay home and homecook/bake.
Now they work full time and are expected to still do that.

Sugar tax debate is a smokescreen to cover for the fact that affordable dental simply isn't available for a lot of people

But you’ve proved my point in a way, junk food is cheaper than healthy food- so what do people on a low income buy? Yes the junk food! I agree wages are crap compared to cost of living, everyone should be able to afford to eat a decent diet. But the Government let the food industry get away with creating this situation because of their mates/back handers etc..
But we can see from this thread that lots of people would resent any political moves to redress this anyway.

This is exactly my point, the focus on sugar hasnt resulted in the removal of sugar from foods that are not meant to be sweet, its only resulted in swapping for sweetners

Some foods are unecognisable these days

If you impose a sugar tax, manufacturers will use chemical sweetener to replace it. No thanks.

I already have to home make lemonade because finding on without aspartame is getting hard.

The way to deal with this is education in nutrition, oral hygiene and exercise for parents, via health visitors and children via schools.

Rather than taxing the product, how about educating the consumer???

If someone taxed my chocolate, I'd be pissed... but if someone said I'll live five years longer by cutting my consumption from 100 g a day to 80... hell yeah.

They eat it because it's cheaper.

You think taxing junk food so ALL food is unaffordable is in the best interests of people?

How about instead of making junk food more expensive (believe me people will still choose convenience food) we work on bringing down the costs of healthy food and the cost of living so people don't have to work themselves to death to be able to afford a watermelon.

My familys fruit consumption has probably dropped 75% since covid.

We used to love strawberry, raspberry, melons, pink lady apples. I'd buy punnets and punnets of cheap fruit.

I can't remember the time we had anything other than tangerines and the cheapest apples.

The 1lt bottles of lemonade from m&s are good, all their flavoured lemonades are diet though.

Society is educated to within an inch of their lives. There isnt anyone who doesnt know the basics about diet and nutrition (LD withstanding), people know how to eat well

We just dont always do that. Humans are built to seek out high calorie foods and we have created ways to make them convenient, cheap and easy to eat, we're richh enough in this country to make it also freely available at any time, anywhere

The consumer is educated.

A crap food tax maybe including articial sweeteners but no more tax on actual sugar as a cooking ingredient please.

Do people really not know about healthy eating?

Sure people eat whatever they want healthy or not but is there really anyone who is not aware a salad is healthier than a pizza?

People know they just ignore it

And what's replaces the fruit as snacks?

26p packets of bourbon biscuits. 39p packets of bread sticks. Pieces of toast with 50p jam on.

I can't spend £3 on a tiny punnet of strawberries so they get 5 each and are still hungry.

Junk food is NOT cheaper than healthy food. It costs us £25 per adult per week, eating a mix of meat, fish, eggs and fruit & veg. That includes snacks for a teenage boy.

I couldn't provide 7 days junk food for £25.

However it requires a little (very little) education, a Baby Belling or equivalent (yes, remember them) and about 30 minutes per evening to get decent food from the carrier bag to the plate.

The only time it is an issue is when families do not have the facilities to cook, and there are far too many of those right now. A sugar tax won't help anyone.

Stressed out human seek out easily available calories.in their environment. We have an environment that is entirely saturated with easily available calories. I don't think tax is going to be the thing that subverts the loop.

I have 4 kids. Baby Bells are now about £2.50 for 6. To give them all a baby bell each evening as they snack would require 28 baby bells a week or 5 packs. Which is £12.50 a week. Or £50 a month.

And before you say, well you can get them cheaper in bulk or find where they're on offer, not everyone drives to be able to visit multiple shops to source the best deals from each.

I just came here to write about T1, my DP has it and we just need to have sugar in the house. Ugh.

I think it was Labour’s Wes Streeting you heard. They’re cautious about proposing any new taxation ahead of the election, so I think the “not the right time” answer was a way to avoid it without disagreeing with the principle of the thing.

I mean they’re getting accused of “nanny-statism” just for the tooth brushing in schools idea. Given we teach children all sorts of things in schools that are arguably the responsibility of parents from citizenship to bikeability, I don’t understand why adding toothbrushing is particularly contentious, when it’s a simple intervention that could improve dental health of disadvantaged children considerably.

It wasn't to teach tooth brushing in schools, the proposal was to implement daily teeth brushing in schools.

@WandaWonder I think the issue is, people don't know how to make healthy and filling food. I eat healthily but wouldn't last the day on a salad in winter.

Rather than a sugar tax, I'd push for supermarkets to promote wholemeal bread, pasta and couscous. More fibre, slower to digest, keeping people feeling full for longer, and better gut health. Most people will tolerate that easy swap without issue. At zero cost.

I'd have supermarkets promote a weekly 'supper pack offer' for children. A pack with the ingredients for jacket potato with beans and cheese, or with sausage rolls, cherry tomatoes, a cucumber and a yellow pepper.

Easy things for after -school tea, that take 5 minutes and are cheap to prepare.

There is plenty we can do without taxing people.

I'm a T1 too and the last sugar tax happened when I was pregnant and having constant hypos. I was in the middle of a hypo in the street when I discovered that Ribena now had 20g of sugar instead of 40g.