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

[HelenMumsnet]

Hello.

Today, doctors are calling on the government to levy an experimental 20% tax on sugary soft drinks and to make local councils limit the number of fast-food outlets outside schools, colleges and leisure centres - to help prevent the UK's obesity crisis becoming "unresolvable".

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (which represents nearly every doctor in the UK) says it wants measures like these brought in to break the cycle of "generation after generation falling victim to obesity-related illnesses and death".

One in four adults in England is obese, and predictions are that obesity rates will soon rise to 60% of men, 50% of women and 25% of children.

The British Retail Consortium has countered by saying it's wrong to "demonise" fast-food outlets and it's down to parents to help children "build a healthy and responsible attitude to eating a balanced diet overall".

What do you think?

Do we all need measures like the doctors are suggesting to help us - and our children - stay at a healthy weight?

Or should we be left alone to eat - and feed our children - whatever we choose?

[PureQuintessence]

Yes, lets introduce Healthy Snacks, like fruit and Unhealthy snack like chocs, biccies and cripss.

[Tee2072]

Actually, Sesame Street in America sort of does that, PQ.

Except they call them 'sometimes foods'. Fancy way to say 'unhealthy'.

Sorry, Lacka, I misunderstood.

[CarlingBlackMabel]

I agree that sugary and additivey fizzy drinks and all sweet drinks sold in bottles (This Water has as much sugar as pop, but has a healthy sort of image and is still) should be taxed equally - driving people to aspartamane and sorbitol instead of sugar is nobody's victory.

And politicians need to consider this: it's all very well going on and on about healthy food and cooking from scratch, but I heard a politician from S London on the radio saying that the poorest constituents HAVE NO COOKER. Only a microwave.

[PureQuintessence]

Elderflower cordial when mixed with water, has as much sugar as a can of coke...

[TooExtraImmatureCheddar]

I think the fizzy drinks levy is worth doing, if they include diet drinks in that.

However, I'm not sure education is the whole answer. I can cook. DH can cook. We both know how to eat healthily. We just don't do it enough. Chocolate tastes good, as do takeaways/cake/biscuits etc. I'm hovering around a BMI of 25 but DH is somewhere in the region of 28 or 29. Sometimes it is time - if you're tired after a long work day, the last thing you want to do is cook from scratch when you get home. We do try to batch cook at weekends and microwave something, but to be honest, sometimes the chipper has more allure on a dark winter's evening. Hot, instant food.

It's also a bit ingrained - if you have visitors in the afternoon, you offer them biscuits/cake. I buy or DH bakes something specifically for people coming round. Then we eat what's left over the next few days.

Alcohol's a big thing for some people (it's not one of our major vices as I've been pg/bf for the last 3 years) - people put on weight from alcohol, but they also lose inhibitions and maybe buy chips/kebab on their way home, or decide after a few drinks to order pizza instead of cooking, or perhaps they have a fry-up/bacon roll in the morning to deal with the hangover.

Food is really tied up with manners - it's impolite not to accept if your host offers you something, for instance. It's also a comfort thing - we say 'comfort food' all the time. Chocolate is seen as a treat, or a reward. All of these things combine to create a culture where if you like chocolate/cake/chippers and can afford them, then why not?

Is there an answer to well-educated adults making poor choices? How about cracking down on advertising? That might help. Or, as various posters have suggested, banning artifical shite - even when you think you're eating healthily you might not be, half the time. More transparancy of what goes into food to preserve it.

[MadBusLady]

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.

[CarlingBlackMabel]

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.

[CaidenTaylor]

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

[Tee2072]

Does this mean Solent Green is sheeple....

[Kendodd]

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?

[fuzzpig]

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.

[Mominatrix]

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?

[Kendodd]

"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?

[Tee2072]

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...

[swallowedAfly]

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?

[Angelico]

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.

[swallowedAfly]

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.

[swallowedAfly]

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?

[RedToothBrush]

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

[swallowedAfly]

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.

[Tee2072]

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

[fuzzpig]

The singular is Sherson, swallowed :o

[Snog]

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.

[leniwhite]

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!