Feb 06 2012
Public Health
A soda tax to prevent love handles
A dream Valentine’s Day is filled with expressions of love, flowers and chocolates. Fortunately the love handles created by Valentine’s Day candy are fleeting; the bigger problem is our love affair with sugar-laden sodas that promotes obesity.
The added calories in soda come from sugar that has almost doubled over the past 20 years to about 240 calories a day. This is like spooning 16 teaspoons of sugar into your mouth every time you drink a normal 20 ounce bottle of soda, which requires you to walk a mile to burn up those empty calories.
Soda’s been doing us wrong for too long, its the largest source of added sugar in our diet and drinking its linked to greater obesity, diabetes and heart disease, says the CDC. And now a Health Affairs study outlines how a proposed soda tax could prevent 26,000 early deaths and save $17 billion in medical costs.
It’s time to break-up with soda and make a new date with healthier drinks.
Here’s how the tax would work. A penny per ounce would be added to the cost of sweetened sodas in LA County and the 100 million dollars would be used to fund programs that prevent childhood obesity and promote healthy eating.
I understand, people hate taxes – I don’t want you to pay a cent. Just select a healthier alternative drink, or feel good knowing that you helped others stay thinner.
This is something that we all can love.
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Great stuff. Don’t pay a cent, drink water! I think certain advocates are even looking at not taxing things like diet soda; just get people off the sugary crap! Must be partnered (and you mention it) with health education and programs that enable people to do it for themselves. Must balance public health and personal responsibility, but let’s not let total free-market libertarians kid us — if people really practiced “personal responsibility,” we wouldn’t be in situations like this in the first place.
Bobby, I certainly like the drink water approach as well, and I invite readers to visit http://nofizzusa.org/ to see the No Fizz approach to the issue. The is even a study reported today that the water drinking approach is a little better than diet sodas. http://bit.ly/zrsemp
A 100 million dollars could install a lot of drinking fountains.
I haven’t drink this cherry flavor..Looking forward to buy some bottles..But drinking cola is not good for the health..
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