Sugar Tax - Obesity

If they put up the price of sugar then food and drinks will become more expensive.
Wouldn't it put up the price of alcoholic drinks as well?

And I doubt if it would make any difference whatsoever to people's intake.

A tax on sugar would need to be part of a strategic taxation of different foods e.g. salt and fat.

Won't ever happen, as government just lurch from one knee-jerk reaction to another - their latest being sugary drinks.

At least if we are out of the European Community we will be able to determine our own policies, though.

well - we're doomed.

Childhood obesity is already falling rapidly without (or before) extra taxes on sugar and soft drinks.

Look at the graph at the bottom of this article (ironically saying we are all doomed). Peak chubbiness was in 2004.
.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-37108767

That graph does seem to suggest that obesity among children is falling rapidly since a peak around 2004. But if you look at the actual study that news article was based on, obesity in 2-10 year olds increased from about 11% in 1995 to about 17% in 2006 and then fell to about 13% in 2013 and appears to be increasing slightly. I think that whether it is 10% or 17%, it’s appalling that at the very best 10% of very young children are obese and that at best it has plateaued.

But look at 11-15 year olds, especially boys – 15% were obese in 1995, the peak in 2004 was around 22%. That then fell but increased again to 20%, where it has remained, roughly. Girls in the age group are coming back towards the boys’ level of obesity after falling to about 16% after the peak in 2004.

Fact remains that for the last 20 years at least 15% of children were obese. If 15% of children were catching some debilitating virus from overseas, tables would thumped, ‘something must be done!’ would echo around.

Don’t forget, these figures are just for obese children, overweight children are, apparently, around 30% of the total.

That said, I still don’t agree with the sugar tax. The solution in my admittedly unrealistic world is to make parents cook for their children with meat and vegetables so they can know what real satiety is.

The raise and fall of the percentages year on year suggests to me that the sample size is not big enough.

If I have understood the spreadsheet from which the graphs were taken, there were only about 500 in the sample of 11-15 year olds and 1300 overall?

and yet...and yet.....consumption of sugar has been falling in the UK since the 70s.........

But nevermind, let's make food more expensive and less tasty. That's bound to help.

Jack,I don't know what you're looking at, but the Health Survey 2014 relating to my post the figure was 2003 children between ages 2-15.

FM, I downloaded it and don't have the link to hand, but....

2014 report showed 1338 in total.

Boys    141    142    153    94    149    680
Girls    140    162    127    96    133    658
All children    281    304    280    191    282    1338

Even 2003 wouldn't be enough for me.

I reckon trends in this sort of thing are generally smooth and if ragged, the data is suspect.

I've never seen so many fat people about.

It's unusual to see anyone over the age of thirty who isn't enormous.

As for retired people. It seems standard for nearly all of them to be many stones overweight.

People on benefits can afford to go abroad for their holidays these days. So I don't think a sugar tax is going to put them off their grub in the slightest.

2000 people seems reasonable to me, Jack, considering the circumstances. It’s a yearly survey that has been running over 20 years. Furthermore, there's a clinical element to it. A lot of studies are based on questionnaire answers, people just don't get it, the science is often shakey when it relies on what people say they are doing. Taking and actually measuring weight, BMI etc of 2000 kids and doing it yearly is, in my opinion, about as good as you can get. To do more (don't forget there's 8000 adults involved) would probably be prohibitively expensive.

There’s  also consistency to it and I don’t see any wild differences in the numbers. The percentages rose steadily in boys 10-15, for example, over 10 years, then started to fall more quickly before reversing and starting to rise again

As for ‘sugar consumption has decreased’. Food manufacturers took the sugar out of food because they had to. In its place they put high fructose corn syrup. The body sees it as just another form of sugar and blood sugar increases the way table sugar does. Maybe they should put proper sugar back in though as it seems to not stimulate appetite quite so much.

Sorry, should have been "consumption of sugars has decreased" so as to include HFCS

@Dr Crippen -- I've never seen so many fat people about.

Agreed. But adults, not children, at least round here (and there are four schools within half a mile). This makes me suspect that the problem with children is either regional or exaggerated because the standard weights have not been adjusted for the secular increase in height over the past decades. But yes, the parents include some right porkers.

Care to provide any sources, room0182?

The high carb/low fat diet has a lot to answer for.

So many products are labelled low fat but if they take fat out they add sugar.

Low fat, 'healthy' yoghurts can contain up to 10 teaspoons of sugar.

Sugar and carbs are the problem. Fat is our friend.

50 years ago we sent a man to the moon, yet in 2016 we can't agree on why we are obese?

Conspiracy theorists should be concentrating more on this.

The survey I always put up whenever there's one of these moral panics is produced annually by DEFRA since 2002 I think:-

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/485982/familyfood-2014report-17dec15.pdf

Page 30.

"Total intake of non-milk extrinsic sugars is on a long term downwards trend and fell 9.7 per cent between 2011 and
2014"

Granted, this only goes back to the turn of the century, but there's plenty of other stuff out there if you want to go further back.

Makes sense really - those of us brought up in the 70s were force fed Angel Delight most nights

We're far less active than we used to be, which explains a lot.

carbohydrate is turned into sugars in the body.
so sandwiches, pasta etc even cornflour in soups and sauces.
the body burns this first before any other food.
only after the sugars are burned up, might it turn to fat stores.
I miss junk food so much - it's everywhere.
I have to fkin hunt for good food. In my stay in hospital for a day.
they're pushing carbs big time? If you have a problem with your gut
you are screwd

Weigh Bridges outside Shops IMO ,Hefty fckers and Their kids PAY TAXES ,Fat arse Woman who Drop Chubby and Chubs off at school ,instead of walking half a mile Big road tax ..

Good point about convenience food.

Much higher percentage of our food is now eaten away from home and it is very, very difficult to find
any 'fast' food that is healthy.

Could someone tell me where I could buy anything fast or remotely convenient with any vegetables in?

Programme called The Factory with Greg Wallace where he was at Baked Beans factory.  Five teaspoons of sugar and half a teaspoon of
salt in every tin.  I think the recipe has remained constant, but if you were making similar at home, there is no way you would put
that much sugar in - in fact, I doubt if you would put any in at all!

I mentioned in an above post that science based on people reporting what they are doing is not without flaws. So it is with this Defra report. If you read down there’s even a warning about some of the apparent contradictions and perhaps why they occur (high levels of obesity/falling calorie intake):

It is a widely recognised characteristic of self reported diary surveys ... that survey respondents tend to under report their purchases (and so implied nutrient intakes based on purchased quantities are also likely to be underestimates).

It then goes on to say that there may even be increased under reporting in recent times, and that both these issues should be borne in mind when considering the figures.

Another issue with the report is that it completely ignores milk (in terms of your sugar argument) because it has no bearing on dental health. Milk is loaded with sugars, it surely has a bearing on total sugar consumption and obesity.

The increase in obesity started in the early 1980s, according to the report skimmed milks intake shot up between 1982 and 1994 and has remained stable ever since. Whole milk declined massively between 1974 and 2014. Surely nobody questions that skimmed milks are high in sugars compared to full fat milk and especially cream.

The argument that sugar consumption is falling and has been since the 1970s. I could find no evidence for the 70s. I found NMES from the mid 1980s onwards. It’s hard to be precise because the figures I saw separated men and women and the ones in the report didn’t, but it looks like sugar consumption has fallen about 40g per day since 1986, the equivalent in calories of about two biscuits per day.

Even after the 9.7% drop, the report states that that is still higher than the maximum recommended intake of NMES. Even if that figure is accurate, rather than the result of self conscious underreporting, it is from within the last five years. The obesity problem has been about a lot longer than that and sugar intake was well above the recommended maximum in all those years.

Personally I don’t see how you’ve separated obesity from sugar consumption. Consumption has been high for a long time and abnormal levels of obesity have been high for a long time. One thing doesn’t prove the other, but it is highly suggestive that it is an important factor.

Your 1970s angel delight probably had a lot more saturated fat and a lot less added sugar.

We can argue all day about how much sugar consumption has fallen, but I'm glad we're agreed that it has fallen over the last 30 years(at least). Yet we're also told we're all getting fatter.

So, if sugar was the cause of obesity we'd expect levels of obesity to fall in line with the fall in sugar consumption, yet they haven't.

There's no correlation, let alone causation.

My point is that in tha absence of any evidence a 'sugar tax' won't work and it's just an excuse for power mad public health nazis, idiot politicians and fat f**kwit chefs to interfere in our personal choices.

@Jack Hacksaw -- Could someone tell me where I could buy anything fast or remotely convenient with any vegetables in?

Fish and chips? Especially with grilled fish, this is probably quite healthy, though I expect chips are not what you meant by vegetables.

Some of the chains in London sell soup. See, for instance:
https://eat.co.uk/soups-and-broth-pots

Are these sorts of thing (or ethnic street food) available outside London? If not, there is scope for local entrepreneurs.

Up North we have soup kitchens.

These figures about sugar consumption. Do they include fructose?

Most added sugar these days is fructose.

Lactose (milk sugar) in milk, is not the same as sucrose (table sugar.)

Yes DR C.

Included are all NMESs

"Non-milk extrinsic sugars are a category of sugars that are considered to contribute to dental decay. Extrinsic
sugars are any sugars not contained within the cellular structure of a food, either because they have been added
to a food in the form of table sugar, honey etc.; or because the food has been processed which has released
sugars from the cell structure e.g. fruit juice"

stop using fluoride. Iodine for gums.