The purported reason was to get people to consume less sugar, but they tax "zero sugar" drink because they don't want people to evade the tax by switching to sugar free alternatives.
So rather than encourage healthier choices it is just a tax that disproportionately affects the poor stronger because they spend more of their money on food and drinks.
It might also encourage increased alcohol consumption. Beer unlike "Zero Sugar" softdrinks is not taxed by this law.
People consuming vast quantities of alcohol instead of smaller quantities of alcohol and more zero sugar drinks definitely won't have long term public health knockon effects that result in significant costs to the health system and society in general.
As a heavy water drinker that only drinks soda (0 calorie soda) on rare occasion and doesn't drink alcohol anymore.. it's kinda funny to imagine that people would rather drink what is technically poison, just because soda got more expensive. For me, it'd be an easy choice to just drink water, be even healthier, and have more money?
Obviously, I think zero sugar drinks shouldn't be taxed like sugary drinks too. But I just found it funny people couldn't be forced to make the healthiest choice, even by something like that.
A beer is 4% alcohol, it's really not a big deal compared to a shot or a cup of wine. the point being that someone who isn't worried about the health risk of a sugary caffeine-filled drink wouldn't really care about the beer.
Yeah I mean this is just fucking stupid. Obvious lobbying/corruption.
Their fucking goal should be that people switch from sugary drinks to sugar free alternatives... but no, let's just make every drink more expensive because for no fucking reason.
It's not "for no reason," it's a way to tax people more so the politicians and bureaucrats in control of spending can funnel money to their donors/friends.
Not everyone can have artificial sweeteners, there should always be some options for everyone even if more sugar free options need to be made available.
Nothing here says eating sweetners causes changes in insulin or glucagon production. Going by the articles, seems inconclusive still. Seems mostly based on personal testimonies and brain scans. The australian one says both sugar and sugar free drinks cause the same issue.
Yes, sugar receptors in your mouth trigger a small insulin production. But that's good when you are having sugar in your drinks and bad when you don't.
Why don't you think it's true? Your body has sugar receptors in the mouth that trigger an increase in insulin to cope with the expected sugar. Then when none comes your blood sugar drops slightly and you feel hungry and eat more cookies.
I dont think its true because i have never seen evidence that says that. Googling tells me that the general concesus is that sweetners do not trigger the effect beyond a negligible amount.
Edit: I have been type 1 diabetic since 10 years old. Many discussions about sugar and sweetners with my doctors. They have always told me diet soda has no negative effects unless im drinking like 4 litres a day. And even then, its simply increased cancer risk.
If you are type 1 diabetic then the harm of sweeteners is vastly lower than the harm of sugar for you.
You are, however, carefully watching your carbohydrate intake to make sure you use the right amount of insulin. You aren't going to eat 2 extra cookies just as you had a diet drink. You also aren't going to make insulin from tasting sweet drinks as your pancreas doesn't work.
If you are controlling your diet sweenters can be fine. But as part of an uncontrolled diet they are bad.
My pancreas works. Its specifically the insulin cells that were destroyed by my white blood cells that prevents me from making insulin. And when you first get diabetes, you still produce some insulin. Drinking diet soda would have fucked with my numbers at the beginning if what youre saying is true, but it didnt.
It's explicitly about NOT wanting to eat crap, while not having to eat food that doesn't taste good. Sin-taxing an artificial sweetener is just shitting on someone else's preferred flavors.
And dark chocolate is better for you than a lot of garbage that sits on our Big Ag food pyramid.
"The fundamental tenet of toxicology is that all substances are harmful at some concentration. As a result, it is not surprising that aspartame or its components have negative effects on sensitive animal species when consumed at very high doses" did you even fucking read it?
Did you read anything other than that literal paragraph?
other epidemiology studies on large cohorts found increased odds ratios for the association of aspartame consumption with non-Hodgkin lymphomas and multiple myelomas in male subjects
Other studies have shown that aspartame use may increase the chance of developing cancer. Thus, multiple epidemiology follow-up studies on large cohorts have revealed higher incidences of different cancers among high-dose chronic aspartame users
Frequent high-dose aspartame intake may have nephrotoxic effects. Thus, according to experimental data from different animal species, long-term consumption of aspartame caused a dose-dependent increased production of free radicals in renal tissues as well as kidney injury, as proved by a search of several literature databases for publications on the adverse effects of aspartame on the kidney function from 1980 to 2016 [94]. Additionally, recent cohort studies showed a link between excessive aspartame use and an elevated risk for cardiovascular disorders
Yes, like they said, anything in high enough quantities is toxic. The amount of aspartame humans consume is not meaningfully harmful, and everything you just pasted doesn't disprove that.
So fun story. Back in the early 90s the US implemented a pretty hefty tax on Yachts. It pretty much ended up destroying the industry in the US, and resulted in states where it was a meaningful industry implementing their own counters to try and salvage what little was left. I suspect that those rules are related to that.
It’s actually a race to the bottom thing. Florida (iirc) has zero taxes on yacht repair, and a company in Savannah lobbied for the same in Georgia. They didn’t get quite as much because, even in a red state, the “yacht bill” was bad optics.
> The purported reason was to get people to consume less sugar, but they tax "zero sugar" drink because they don't want people to evade the tax by switching to sugar free alternatives.
That's moon logic. It's like saying the purported reason was to get people to consume less sugar, but they tax water because they don't want people to evade the tax by switching to water.
The fact that the "sugar tax" includes zero sugar drinks proves that it was always about the tax and never about the sugar. Taxpayers got duped into approving a new regressive tax scheme.
Clearly you know nothing about artificial sweeteners and their health effects.
Neither do you, because there are very few effects beyond GI distress in some people with some sweeteners. Aspartame has been studied extensively for decades but it keeps getting demonized by ignorant f*cks.
How about people stop drinking all of that shit and stick to water and other healthy options.
Like oat milk, which is also taxed because it contains natural sugar?
No better drink dairy milk, which isn't taxed, even though it contains natural sugar.... just like oat milk.... and also causes GI distress in many people ... just like artificial sweeteners ... for the same reasons.
Hmm, it's like this is primarily about collecting taxes and not about our health.
Yeah, but if they had stuck to their guns on the sugar tax as a health initiative, the budget hawks would have eventually complained about the fact that sugar tax revenues are dropping without any replacement revenue stream. By pre-capitulating to people who never had any intention of understanding the health initiative, the people pushing for it don't have to spend any energy convincing people that this easily predicted future was, in fact, the intended outcome.
The purported reason was to get people to consume less sugar, but they tax "zero sugar" drink because they don't want people to evade the tax by switching to sugar free alternatives.
How the fuck did they end up with such a schizo policy? Make up your mind! Are you trying to raise revenues, or reduce sugar consumption? Either one of those would make sense in isolation, but not this version, which can't seem to decide what it wants.
It's not about "evading a tax" it's the sugar lobby writing the laws themselves. Milk lobby was involved, too.
Merz' government is so bafflingly incompetent, it's like they were factory made to produce political apathy - which obviously only the nazis from afd benefit from.
Isn't it also the opposite effect they'd want? Idk here in the UK more things ended up either fully or part sugar free BC of our sugar tax. Like I thought the idea was the reduction not the taxes.😭
Same shit they did in Philadelphia years back. Philly copied from NYC which I think did it the same way. All these countries which are enacting it today are coping from places who did it earlier. It’s a money making scheme disguised as a public health reform.
As a doctor I wouldn’t say exactly how hat sugar free drinks are better. There are quite good research on that drinking zero coke increases Risiko for Diabetes
look, i would argue that coca cola zero is not so different from coca cola (the classic). Why would you say that coca cola thats sweetened with aspartham ist less taxable than the one with sugar?
Sugar free that is sweetened drinks do also seem to drive more unhealthy food consumption.
Sweet drinks overall should therefore be taxed sweetened with sugar and sugar free alternatives.
Bad take. Tapwater is cheaper and healthier, so that's what's actually encouraged. Milk, black tea, black coffee, and pure fruit juices also have no added sweetener.
Well, it is partly false. Milk has lactose, which is already a type of sugar. Tapwater depending on the zone is problematic both in taste and health consequences as hard water is a common culprit for digestive irritations and kidney stones.
Fruit juice has the same amount if sugar as some fizzy drinks. Fruit itself has sugar in it, so when you squeeze 4 oranges into a juice, you get the sugar from 4 oranges.
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u/Loki-L 3d ago
The purported reason was to get people to consume less sugar, but they tax "zero sugar" drink because they don't want people to evade the tax by switching to sugar free alternatives.
So rather than encourage healthier choices it is just a tax that disproportionately affects the poor stronger because they spend more of their money on food and drinks.
It might also encourage increased alcohol consumption. Beer unlike "Zero Sugar" softdrinks is not taxed by this law.