sugar tax is not a tax at all.

When I heard rumours of a tax on sugar, I thought it had something to do with disgruntled Apprentice candidates.

It's just a sweetener for the bottled water businesses.

Drink manufactures will just replace some of the sugar with sweetener ie the green Coke that got launched last year

So either people have to pay more or  settle for an inferior tasting product

But it's not a true sugar tax though. It's a tax on the sugar content in soft drinks. That's why they are taxing soft drinks depending on the sugar content and not just taxing sugar. Is the source of your concern the fact that the media have actually mis-labelled something for a punchy headline or caption. Surely this can't be a common occurrence?

Of course it's a tax. Poor people will end up paying more than rich people.

That's tax

It's a tax on soft drinks, and Jamie Oliver has only been banging on about it for the free publicity.

Kids who get some of their calories from the sugar in their drinks will get their calories from another source at best, or simply pay the extra.

It's more money for the chancellor and free publicity for Oliver.

And more expense for the people who buy soft drinks.

people will buy cheaper stuff but it's all cr@p anyway

That's my Sunny Delight shares goosed

Typical knee-jerk reaction.

Why do we never get a comprehensive approach towards taxation of food and drink.

Tax, on some sort of sliding scale, what is bad for us and leave alone what isn't.

a true sugar tax would be aimed at the sugar companies at source.. if they taxed sugar companies all kinds of products would go up in price just look how many foodstuffs contain sugar
an absolute mad idea

A better decision would have been to limit the amount of sugar in products.

If you have glass of pop at home, you'll have to pour in two or three spoons of sugar to make it taste nice.

they said sugar costs NHS 25 billion a yr through various illnesses? so shouldn't they tax someone 25 billion? instead of getting half a billion on a half hearted sugar tax?

Considering how it harms diabetics they should have maybe just put a red x label on things that contain a stupid amount of suger thats only purpose is for addiction.

I think zorro can be turned into a right-winger eventually.

The government should not tax sugar at all. It should stop subsidising it, and then the price will rise of its own accord to what the free market dictates. Then we can look again at whether there is a problem to address.

Giving producers 85GBP/acre subsidy for growing beet, and cut price diesel for their machines, and then taxing the excess production that results is utter madness and a waste of human resources. All the officials involved should have their jobs scrapped and go round the corner to the HMRC office and answer the 'phones.

The whole purpose of the tax is to make parents more aware of what they are giving their children. It's not about what adults have its about educating them.

An 8 year old kid isn't going to say I better not have too much of this lemonade after all it's quite high in sugar that's down to the parents but until recently too many of them simply didn't know or bother to look. Plenty of parents would give their children a can of coke say without even thinking of it. But suppose that same kid wanted a tea and asked for 7 teaspoons of sugar in it. Do you think the parents would give them this no questions asked?

That's why the money generated from the tax is meant to be go to funding for sport in primary schools. The great thing is that all the publicity that this generates will make people look at soft drinks and go cr8p that's high in sugar maybe i should give my kids something different instead.

So how are they going to tax you grabbing 8 sugars in a canteen  ?

I agree with Akabula. Sugar content is the key.  They'll be cutting back on the soft drinks but continuing with Heinz Tomato Soup or Baked Beans (or equivalent) at nearly 5% sugar content.

why is most shop packaged food so sweet to start with ? 

ridiculous sweetness - i have to keep adding lemon to everything to make it palatable

Coach - here's an alternative idea.  Buy stuff with less sugar, you'd save on lemons

It's not just processed food that is getting sweeter. Fruit and vegetables too. New varieties of brussels sprouts are much sweeter than old varieties etc. Will have to start growing my own fruit and veg soon...

About the tax... Unfortunately it seems like all sweet drinks are problematic. That includes artificially sweetened drinks and fruit juices. Just taxing sugar sweetened fizzy drinks is a half measure.

Saw a fat mum with a fat kid at the hospital a while ago. The kid was gulping fruit juice while the mum was telling her how healthy fruit juice was. Made me wonder if her doctor just had recommended drinking fruit juice? Very sad.

blackburn - but they put the sugar in

just as well i love lemons blackbarn.

I bought myself a pack of jaffa cakes  as a one off ,first time in years  -  had to SOAK them in lemons before i could eat them

stuff like  fruit yogurts have  twice the sugar needed ,so how about they just make a fizzy drink with a third of the sugar but without the cancer causing sweetners .

Those low fat yoghurts with 20grams of sugar are healthy, or so they claim..

Thank goodness we can still buy natural yoghurt. The adulterated shoite is several times the price too.
I remember the first time I went to America in 1981 and thinking how sickly sweet the food was. We seem to have caught up and kids become addicted to sweetness from an early age now.

I have one other story about about a fat mum and her fat kid. When I was grocery shopping a fat little girl put some skimmed milk in their shopping trolley. The mum put it back and grabbed some full fat milk instead. Then she told her daughter: "We don't drink water in our family." I bet you don't I thought to myself. I'm not saying that fat makes you fat, and that they should avoid full fat milk like the plague, but they really should let that little girl drink water more often (proper water I mean, not skimmed milk). It's not a bad drink you know?

sugar is as cheap as chips ,so its stuffed  into  'chocolates' and  cakes like its going out of fashion .

British mass produced chocolate style vegetable fat/sugar  bars such  as Cadburys dairy milk must use around 30%-50%  sugar in every bar  .

Cheap rubbish it is 

used to advertise it because of it's 'glass and a half of milk' .

that tells you everything 

sugar is as cheap as chips ,so its stuffed  into  'chocolates' and  cakes like its going out of fashion .

I believe it is as a result of the demonsing of fat. The obesity/diabetes epidemic began when food manufacturers were told to take the fat out in the late 70s/early 80s. The sugar content was upped to compensate for the lack of flavour foods have without fat. I suppose as a coincidence they found that sugar, especially in the form of high fructose corn syrup, stimulates your appetite to keep refeeding whereas fat suppressed it. People bought more and more. It’s so pervasive now I doubt the tax will do much good because those that can’t afford sugary pop will just eat or drink more of something else sugary.

Incidently, Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Chocolate didn’t used to be advertised as a glass and a half of milk, it used to be advertised as a glass and a half of full cream milk.

I was making the point that milk of whatever variety isn't cocoa . We'll stick some milk in that will do  for a good selling point


People will buy any old cr@p if you put a few pretty colours on the box

good point Flower lad  about the fat  .

I was born in the early 60's and was lucky to have 5 veg a week, never mind a day. We had sugar laden things back then but we played out, climbing trees, football, hide and seek.
   Sugar has always been there, exercise is in decline.

Physical activity is unfortunately in decline, but sugar consumption, and consumption of artificial sweeteners, has skyrocketed since the 1960s. There was a massive increase in fizzy drink consumption from the 1960s through the 1990s. Since then it has not increased that much, or even decreased a little in some countries, but it's still way way above what it was in the 1960s and 1970s. Bags of candy and crisps were smaller and eaten less frequently. Generally speaking of course. Plus as mentioned above: In the 1990s (and late 1980s?) fat was replaced with sugar in all sorts of products.

Not this again

Sugar consumption in the UK has been falling for decades and obesity levels are no worse than they were in 2000, but we need a moral panic so that we can raise taxes to fund the parasites of the 'public health' industry. As an added bonus, we can sneer at the poor (see above)

When this fails, it'll be extended to everything else that tastes nice.

imagine the poor kids getting wheened off sugary drinks turning 14 and having a starbucks xmas coffee they,ll all be running round like loonies headbutting the walls,the high st will be like a war zone

What baffles me is that the poor apparently buy more of this shoite than the wealthy.

Therefore the luvvies are furious with the sugar tax cos the poor are penalised.

How the devil can they afford it in the first place???!!!!

Why don't peeps drink water like wot I do. Quenches one's thirst like no other. (ok it's recycled sewage but let's not go there...)

How the devil can they afford it in the first place???!!!!

Do you expect them not to eat or drink? They're poor but they still buy things like other people.

Sugar is a grey area, I was gonna C/P this but it's a bit long for Chit Chatters...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar

It's fair to tax soft drinks imo but should also encompass other things like sweets and chocolate.

I brew my own beer and it's amazing the amount of sugar comes out of a grain of barley. You can't tax it at source or you'd be taxing weetabix.

i have reduced my sugar content down to almost nothing now - was a major sugar fiend. eating a couple of pounds(£) worth of chocolate a day.

there's a guy on youtube - dr eric berg that explains why you get cravings for sugar. He tells you the body wants potassium. Sweets offer the promise of potassium but rarely delivers. You can't eat masses of bananas a day... because of sugars in them. He tells you to eat lots of green/red salads. the potassium in the salad stops the craving. I followed this guys advice and for eight months i had a run where i ate no refined sugar. Couldn't believe how i felt about the chocolate aisles in the shop. The chocs had no hold on me.

i noticed all the fat vanishing and all my muscles firmed up. I exercised for years and got no results. I sat on my arse and it all came together on mr bergs diet?

i hate all that guru crap that surrounds the message he's giving out though. He does acupressure too - i tried one thing on my neck and got a weird vulcan nerve thing in my chin that lasted for months, chin felt cold? - so if you look him up do not do the acupressure? he talks common sense when it comes to diet.

big bowl of salad - fish or peanut butter - oil/apple vinegar dressing(vit c) -

lost 3 stone in nine months. feel fitter.