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.

The tax on tobacco had to get quite punitive before consumption started going down - it's now around 80% of the price. If you treble the price of a chocolate bar then you may well have a similar impact. an extra 30p won't make a dent.

Well yes of course but thats hardly the children's fault is it?

So how do we prevent children's teeth from rotting? bear in mind they will become adults with rotten teeth.

Very children get any sort of preventative dental treatment now, its been poor for many years, but now its almost non existent.

Labour are going to have to be a lot more adventurous on this v important issue.

Wouldn’t it be cheaper, quicker and much easier to dose to just eat 17 spoons of sugar?

Like alcohol and tobacco! I'm not advocating for kids using drugs 😂

@jasflowers

Brushing teeth is just part of it whether it is done at nursery/childminder, school and dentists advice.

Modifying diet is a big part. There is so much sugar in processed food that children eat every day for example yoghurts, pizzas, crisps and other foods that shouldn't have sugar in.

When I met my DP he was giving his DC yoghurt with lots of sugar in it for dessert. He didn't realise it was full of sugar. I got him to change to give plain unsweetened yoghurt and his DC were happy with it.

Absolutely, education is everything but parents who don't give a shit about teaching their children to brush their teeth, wont be bothered about diet.

We have to start somewhere & schools is the best place, i had some work done at a dental school, i was given fantastic advice on how to clean teeth, such as when to clean teeth (so you dont scrub away softened enamel) don't rinse, use an electric tooth brush.

Sugary foods are nothing new, same with bad parents but we never used to have so many children with bad teeth.

Lack of NHS dentists for children and adults is causing huge harm to the country, i dread having to have anything major done, could easily be £1000's.

I don't agree with the sugar tax
My Mum was T1 brittle diabetic and it was hard enough to find a drink with enough sugar in it that she could swallow before she became unconscious
Nowadays even Lucozade is Zero sugar
Diet/ Zero drinks have also increased in price
The Nanny State is taking over

Surely she could just have a carton of orange juice or a bit of a can of coke. My mate carries around jelly babies. It's personal responsibility to make sure she has it (very in line with anti nanny state beliefs!)

I watched an episode of Yes Prime Minister from 1981 recently. Hacker, as PM, appoints a doctor as Minister for health. He proposes a draconian crack-down on smoking, including a ban in all public places, a ban on all
advertising, sponsorship & promotion and taxation to be increased until a pack of 20 cigarettes cost the same as a bottle of whisky.

Unthinkably radical measures for the time, but all of which eventually happened in real life. And they worked. Smoking rates are now a tiny fraction of previous levels.

A similarly radical approach is required to tackle the current obesity crisis which is placing unsustainable pressures on healthcare systems in most developed countries,

Sugar is the new tobacco, and should be taxed accordingly. This sounds radical now, but in 20 yesrs time it will be seen as obvious common sense.

If this is true then why does the WHO say that NSS should not be used to fight obesity?

It's been suspected for 10 years or more that artificial sweeteners are actually a cause rather than a cure for obesity.

Dental health is another thing altogether but that's down to the difficulty in accessing dentists. My children were born in the 1980s. They had sweets and sweetened drinks in moderation as even then I was very suspicious of the safety of NSS. They both visited the dentist regularly and neither of them have any fillings.

@AndThatWasNY
In my DM's case, no she couldn't as she lost her awareness of hypos. I'm talking 25 years ago
The same applies though , a diabetic onthe verge of hypo needs quick access.. even Mars bars have had their sugar content halved
I agree personal responsibility and education of consumers is paramount, but I also believe in freedom of choice
When I was in primary school we did have a rep( from Colgate!) who taught toothbrushing too

I’m really interested to hear from people who think it’s a matter of personal responsibility about what they’d with children who are overweight/obese or are they to blame for the families they are born into?

Did you just suggest there is such a thing as our taxes being used efficiently 😁
I jest, but I would say education and personal responsibility is more important. Same with reducing meat in the diet. I disagree that the nanny state isn’t about curtailing what we do - the very principle of a nanny state flies in the face of people taking personal responsibility by trying to shape (curtail) their behaviour. It’s interfering with personal choice.

I disagree with the sugar tax.

So you are happy for increasing amounts of the NHS budget being spent on people with type 2 diabetes treating side effects/conditions that would be avoidable with more public health measures?

@messybutfun would you like to eat just pure sugar? Also carrying it around is not practical. We already suffer enough! 🤣

So presumably, you re against curbs on speeding, drink driving, gun control, Zombie knives?
& any form of health and safety too?

Personal Responsibility ain't it!!!

Young children don't get personally choice, they are totally governed by their parents choices.

Some people make bad choices for their kids, with education they might make better ones, but some will just keep feeding them crap.

Should we just accept that and also the ensuing costs as we deal with unhealthy children and then adults?

Unbelievably, our children are getting shorter too, a key sign of poor diet and lack of exercise.

Everyone's carrying on as though sugar just materialised in the last 10 years. I grew up in the 70s/80s. Plenty of sugary things, not to mention penny sweets, etc. I had then and have now a serious sweet tooth, yet I am not obese, and my teeth are in excellent nick at the age of 50.
Teeth is down to a habit of twice daily brushing instilled in childhood. We say the dentist every six months AND had the school dentist.
I drank squash (still do) because l can't stand the texture of tasteless liquid in my mouth, it makes me gag. Back then, it would have been sugar-filled. As an adult I also had 2 sugars in my coffee (I don't now).
So why aren't l obese with terrible teeth? Is it genetic? Or is there something else at play, here?
In terms of teeth, access to dentists is a huge factor. My DH who is older than me doesn't have great teeth. He wasn't made to brush when young and, crucially, had a fear of dentists so didn't go for years. In our area now, it's a bunfight for dentists. One just opened and it was oversubscribed really quickly. Many have resorted to travelling to neighbouring towns for dental treatment.
Obesity: There's obviously genetics at play with this, but we are so much more sedentary than we were 40 years ago, children included. We feed our children a lot. On MN l have read threads about the fact that we all seem to think our kids need snacks every five minutes. Snacks in the car, snacks after just about every activity.
Contrast that with 40 years ago and 'you will spoil your dinner'. We might have a piece of fruit between, maybe a biscuit, but I don't recall this constant eating. We ate at mealtimes. Breakfast, dinner, tea. Nobody thought we would starve if we didn't eat in between.
It's habit-forming. Kids now habitually snack. It's not great, even if it is carrot sticks, etc, because it builds up this belief that they need something in their mouths every hour or so. When they get older, and maybe time-poor, that need continues, but it will be the crisps or the sausage roll or whatever they grab from the shop.
We have as a nation lost the ability to recognise when we are properly hungry because we stopped allowing our kids time to BE hungry.

Sugar tax won't change a thing. Our relationship with food and exercise has now changed so much that it isn't about the existence of one food group. It's about our relationship with food in a world where it's abundant, available 24/7 and where the cheapest/most filling options aren't the healthiest.
We are time-poor, which results in more snacking and fewer meals.

It would be perfectly possible for food producers to gradually reduce the amount of sugar in most foods without affecting their taste. Imagine a can of coke only having 5 spoonfuls instead of 7, would we really notice?
I hate the taste of sweetners, and have always been suspicious of how they may affect our bodies over a prolonged period.

The reality of the additional charge for sugary content on soft drinks was brands swapping sugar to sweetners. With Ribena, the loss of the natural syrupy consistency was compensated by adding additional thickeners. With increasing concern over UHPFs affecting gut bacteria, and contributing to obesity, and metabolic disease, it's at best no better for health, or worse, encourages continued consumption because people don't perceive the product to be so unhealthy.

Carbonated drinks are still damaging to teeth whatever they are sweetened with. Because people percieve "diet" to be healthier than full sugar, there's less incentive to cut back.

There hasn't been a substantial change in peoples' habits and no improvements to public health/ waistlines. Targeting sugar in foods in isolation is most likely to repeat these patterns agan rather than trigger much genuine improvement in habits and health.

Many people struggle to consume artificial sweetners for a variety of reasons. We shouldn't be living on sugar, but it does have a place in healthy lifestyle and does need to be avaliable.

Public health habits are far more complex than sugar= bad. Ultimately healthy options need to be as avaliable and affordable as processed items, but demonising one ingredient is not the way to acheive the objective of improving public health.

like pp said why would i want to eat just plain sugar, the only real time I'm allowed anything sweet sorry but i don't want to eat spoon fulls of sugar or the chalk (glucose tablets) id much rather have something nicer. A year ago a 5 pack of mars bars was a pound some times they would last a week, sometimes a day depending on my levels, now the mars bars are half the size 3 in a pack and £1.25 and half the sugar, they are to treat a medical condition and if i couldn't afford that then i would be in hospital (which would cost the NHS loads) or dead.

like many T1s on here low sugars is the only time we get to have something sugary (without being naughty). Why should we have to pay more to treat a medical condition that we haven't brought on ourselves, its not in our control if we have it or not. It is in the control of others to reduce their intake themselves. I think this is completely wrong and will cost the NHS more if diabetics cant afford the sugar they need.

Rather than taxing sugar we should be subsidising healthy choices. Make it easier and cheaper to make healthy choices make healthy choices the option for people on low incomes rather than cheap food that’s full of crap

I dont think Ive looked at this in detail, but calorie for calorie, I think junk food is cheaper

So despite all the worries about obesity, you do still need to eat fats, carbs and proteins in some proportions

So a snack of an apple is fine, if you only need that snack to be 60 cals and no protein and no fat

But if you need fat and protein in it, then it becomes harder to do for the price of an apple

Eggs, cheese, milk, fairly pricey compared to cheap crap
Meat and fish, pricey compared to cheap crap

Lentils, beans and legumes, not so pricey but also needing fats to boost them up in terms of nutrition (all being balanced out) and they need time to cook and a myriad of other ingredients with them to make them taste nice and attractive to eat

This is why someone reaches for the pizza and frozen burgers

It's just more tax. People just need to make better choices. I love sugar, but if I ate as much as I might want I'd be enormous and my teeth would rot in my head. So I don't.

If you actually look at the research around the causes of overweight, it is exceptionally complex. If it was as simple as you suggest it would be easy. But it’s not.