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Chit Chat
sugar tax on drinks? nine sugar cubes in my can of cola?
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11947892/Revealed-Sugar-tax-report-which-was-suppressed-by-Government.html
Published yesterday. |
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Any research been done on the AMOUNT of food eaten today compared with previously?
Never seen any. Food has been made to taste nice in recent times - via a widening scope of international cuisines and more relevantly, the stuff all the food manufacturers add into the food. In previous times, food often wasn't very appetising, particularly for the majority who were poor. Go back less than a century and people were often HUNGRY. They didn't have the money to buy food. They ate less. The subject is a perfect storm. Add in convenience food which is always processed and the lack of home cooking from scratch, the relative cheapness and convenience of much processed food and the fact that so few people eat at home from scratch. I don't believe that kids walk to school as much as they used to. Rubbish. |
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Tate and Lyle - sold a few years ago - to big corps. Borrow money at zero percent and buy a real asset.
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Nobody is saying ban sugar totally, nor salt nor tobacco,
The recommended daily intake is 2.4 grams of sodium. A pretty solid study was done recently (2014) on sodium. Studies that rely on what people tell them, via diaries etc, are not very compelling evidence. This study was more clinically based. 102,000 people’s urine samples from 17 countries were tested for sodium. These people were then followed for 3.7 years and the deaths from all causes and from cardiovascular events was recorded, allowing an assessment of risk of death/cardiovascular event per gram of sodium to be made. The study showed that the lowest risk of death from all causes occurred for those taking 5 grams of sodium per day. Those who ate 8 grams per day had slightly higher risk, while those below 3g of sodium per day had the highest risk of death. Even those taking 12 grams of sodium a day had less risk of from cardiovascular events than those eating 2.4g. |
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Mr Anderson,
I'm delighted we agree that, according to government figures, per capita consumption of sugar in the UK has been decreasing for years. |
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What people eat and drink is their own decision...as long as warning has been given
People should be able to smoke at a reasonable price as long as they have had a clear warning Some people at the bottom of our society, having to survive on £70 a week, these things help These Medical Hitlers, quite an appropriate word here, should stop telling other people what to do If everybody did this in our World, we would have a happier World I would even legalise heroine if it made people happier |
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I will let you into a little secret we will are all going DIE
We can run but we can't hide I would recommend we all live healthily, but please don't flog ourselves like some Ascetic monk, unless people like this sort of thing But we do not inflict this others please Leave it to personal choice, for better or worse |
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The only thing Ebul is that others, ie the healthy, have to pay for those who make poor choices.
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But do they akabula?????
Have you seen the tax on Alcohol and Tobacco, I suspect this vastly exceeds what may be required in extra expense to the Health service. So I would only accept a sugar tax, if there is a reciprocal reduction in taxes on Alcohol and Tobacco Also if you stop people drinking and smoking what do you think they are going to turn to, well eating of course particularly sweet stuff, we do not show much sense at times do we Have you seen the cookery on BBC2, if that is not an incitement to eat more, I don't know what is? |
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There is also something worse here
What is being proposed is we put a tax on the poor(direct tax on sugar) to reduce a tax on the rich(income tax) I am not going anywhere near that...to me this is totally unacceptable I do not believe in societies which are run solely for the benefit of the rich Keep the Red Flag Flying |
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Exactly how much of a tax is being proposed? It would need to be quite steep to make much of a difference in my view. Hard to imagine the average Coca Cola drinker going without their daily fix for the sake of a few pence.
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You only need to take a walk down a typical working class small town high street in Britain to see the obesity epidemic.
it isn't all down to sugar. Although I would be in favour, a sugar tax would be a knee jerk reaction. What the government should do is commission a wide-ranging INDEPENDENT study and report on the reasons for obesity with comprehensive proposals on means to help curb the problem. No expense should be spared in throwing money at this problem. If they spent a billion on a report and solutions that worked, it would save us that many-fold in the future. The problem is that, unless something is done quickly, that the growing acceptance of fat being the norm will continue. Interesting that ebulGery talks about the rich and the poor. Obesity is a problem that affects the poor more than the rich and the status quo is a situation where the poor are buying the carp that the rich (corporations) are telling them to buy. |
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It's an odd stance for ebul to quote the red flag and not be in support of regulation.
To say that junk processed food and sugary drink should be kept low in price because it's a luxury for the poor is in essence social cleansing in itself. We shouldn't allow enterprise to dictate policy when their goal is simply profit. It's Hobson's choice in the end ofc because the politicians are nuts deep into enterprise, but you have to form a logical approach and private enterprise arnt the ones trusted enough to decide that. It's true that the manifestation of a capitalist state doesn't act truly in accordance with the best interest of the people however. Ebul mentioned the tax on alcohol, the figures were released a few months ago, the state is essentially in league with the drinks industry to the tune of around 5 billion net profit a year (the revenue minus cost to treat alcoholism and other drink related problems) But this figure has to be taken in the round. Only a very small figure die quickly through drink, but all have a shorter life than had they not, so the excess of taxation is actually relative to the amount of life that's lost as a collective. |
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Have you seen the tax on Alcohol and Tobacco, I suspect this vastly exceeds what may be required in extra expense to the Health service.
It currently costs the NHS 10 billion pounds a year to treat diabetes and its consequences. That figure is set to rise to near 17 billion in the next twenty years. Now that estimate was made before the figures come out that diabetes had risen by 60% in decade. That’s on top of a 74% rise from 1997 to 2003. The tragedy is type 2, which forms the bulk of the above figures, is a completely avoidable disease by diet. If this goes on how long before the NHS goes broke? I agree with one thing, a tax on sugary drinks will punish the poor most. But what people have is an addiction masquerading as something they ‘like’. If they can’t afford one sugary item they’ll probably buy another they can afford, I doubt it’ll solve anything. What needs to be done is to get people’s appetite in check and that means reducing sugars and increasing fats. It’s not possible to over eat fat, it restores the body's ability to manage its own weight. |
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On a related note, I think we should use prisoners to improve our understanding of nutritional science. Everyone sentenced to more than three years in prison should randomly be assigned an interesting diet. Like the traditional Okinawan diet, or standard prison food, but with water as the only drink available etc. Many interesting opportunities, and the perfect environment for controlling and keeping track of exactly what people eat.
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the food should be measured in sugar cubes. 4g is a level teaspoon. but a heaped spoon could be about 8g. So sugar cubes seems obvious. put how many cubes are in your sweet junk food ye slobs.
don't buy stevia - it is terrible. saving money there. |
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Sugars and edible fats are cheaper than they would be in a notional free market because the agribusinesses that produce them get 85GBP/acre farm subsidies, plus business rate exemptions and cheap red diesel. ( Agricultural assets are exempt from inheritance tax to boot ).
People who want a sugar tax should ask themselves if they are happy to use some of the taxation on the bad thing being taxed to subsidise the production of that bad thing they don't like being purchased. Or to put it another way: "Supporters of ( sin taxes ) should be prepared to explain to what extent they think the aim of cajoling people into adopting healthier lifestyles justifies forcibly reducing people’s living standards." Kristian Niemietz |