A Big Fat Tax On Carbs
September 22nd, 2009 · 18 Comments · Posted in food news
How much would you pay for your next Coke?
An idea that’s gaining increasing currency lately is a possible tax on soft drinks as a way to raise money for health care and perhaps discourage people from getting fat drinking too much soda.
A recent study by the University of California at Los Angeles found that adults who drink one or more sodas a day are 27 percent more likely to be overweight than people who don’t. Among teenagers, 62 percent fall into the one-or-more-sodas-a-day category, meaning they are consuming the equivalent of 39 pounds of sugar a year. That can’t be good for the youth obesity epidemic.
Even President Barack Obama has suggested that a surcharge on sugary beverages might be worth serious consideration. In a recent interview with Men’s Health magazine, he said: “There’s no doubt that our kids drink way too much soda. And every study that’s been done about obesity shows that there is as high a correlation between increased soda consumption and obesity as just about anything else.”
As you might imagine, the soft drink industry tends to take a different view. Kevin W. Keane, a senior vice-president for the American Beverage Association, put it this way: “The bottom line is that the tax isn’t going to make anybody healthier. It’s not going to make a dent in a problem as complex and serious as obesity, and we’re certainly not going to solve the complexities of the health care system with a tax on soda pop.”
I agree. A tax on soda pop alone won’t cure what ails America. We need to consider taxing a much broader range of carbohydrates. As Mr. Keane put it, “When it comes to losing weight, all calories count, regardless of the food source.”
The apparent villain where sodas are concerned is the sugar in the soda. Sugar is a carbohydrate–a simple one, to be sure–but you might be surprised to learn that all carbohydrates, upon entering the mouth and being swallowed, fairly quickly turn into sugar in the form of glucose. Glucose can either be used for energy, or stored in the body as fat. The question becomes, why just focus on the sugar in soft drinks?
I think we should broaden our tax approach to include sugary foods of all kinds. Perhaps the best way of doing that would be to use something called the glycemic index, which is simply a measure of how acutely certain carbohydrate foods tend to raise the sugar level in your blood.
Here’s another shocker for you: table sugar hardly holds the top spot on the glycemic index. In fact, many common foods score much higher. In effect, they are more sugary than sugar. So if we are going to be levying taxes, sugar–with a glycemic value of 64, about the same as Coca-Cola (63)–would be just a starting point.
Using this scale, we would also have to add a tax on cantelope, which has a glycemic value of 65, as well as pineapple (66) and watermelon (72). You can bet that most breakfast cereals would need more taxing as well. Puffed wheat tips the glycemic scales at 74, Rice Crispies at 82 and corn flakes at 83. You’d definitely need to slap a surcharge on white bread (71), as well as doughnuts (76), pretzels (81) and baked potatoes (85). Jellybeans might be a great revenue enhancer, since their glycemic value is 80. But here are some champion glycemic foods that you might not have thought of, but certainly deserve special treatment in any revised tax code: French baguettes (95), parsnips (97) and dates (103).
What do you think would be a fair tax for frozen tofu dessert (glycemic value 115)?
I’m not an economist or a mathematician. But I’m certain that if you begin to translate these glycemic values into tax values, we could probably pay for the whole damn U.S. health care system. On top of that, this method of taxation is much more likely to win widespread support, since it does not single out any one segment of the food industry (love ya, Coke and Pepsi) but spreads the pain around to just about everyone, even elements of the produce section (sorry, Mrs. Obama–apparently not all vegetables are so healthy after all).
Deployment of the federal tax code along these lines would have the added benefit to society of heading off any future obesity epidemics caused by runaway consumption of parsnips.
Come to think of it, a new glycemic surcharge might be just the thing to resolve our rancorous health care debate. How about it, America? Is taxing couscous (65) not the best public option ever?
Yikes. I love canteloupe.
I learned something interesting about sugar from Michael Pollan: we process all sugar the same whether it’s from a fruit or high fructose corn syrup. I also read (in What Einstein Told His Cook) that almost all raw sugar is even more processed than white sugar since the molassas is sprayed back on after it’s taken out. Bummer – there’s no safe way to a sweet tooth.
If the glycemic index truly indicates a propensity for obesity then taxing based on GI to pay for socialized healthcare seems like a good idea. I would certainly be more likely to cut down as long as Uncle Sam keeps his hands out of my pockets!
I am definitely not for an expanded tax that covers food I generally consider to be healthful, ie potatoes and fruits. Furthermore, I believe we need to change the way people live: reduce sugar consumption in general, exercise more, eat smaller portions, focus on consuming more vegetables. I run a lot but I also eat a fair amount of carbs (obviously in support of my running habit). I am not even remotely close to being obese, but would probably pay just as much in additional tax as the obese person eating handfuls of cookies and pretzels washed down with Coke.
I believe carbs have an appropriate place in everyones diet, and that place is determined by your genetic makeup (ie propensity to obesity) and activity level.
kim, I don’t eat sugar and I try not to eat very many carbohydrates at all, so I think taxing carbs is a great idea.
Emma, fair is fair. If we’re going to tax sodas, I think we should tax all carbs equally and the glycemic index seems like a really fair tool. We could say, for instance, that anything with a glycemic value of 60 or higher would be taxed on a sliding scale. The revenue that would generate to pay for a health care system is almost unimaginable (wink, wink).
I just found this blog today. I am a registered dietitian who works with obese teens in the Bronx. I just taught a lesson on the sin tax yesterday and I love your post. I found an old post about a marshmellow activity for teaching kids about processed foods, can you please tell me more about that?
GI is NOT a good tool for this. a) It is not accurate. b) it is misleading. The GI is supposed to be a measure of how fast a food enters the bloodstream as glucose relative to glucose itself. Pure glucose therefore has a GI of 100. Now as an example, sucrose (table sugar) has to be split into one glucose molecule and one fructose molecule before it can be absorbed into the blood. That takes some time, therefore the GI is somewhat lower than that of pure glucose. Glucose doesn’t have to have anything done to it at all – you just eat it and it gets absorbed. All very well and good, I can hear you saying – what’s the problem?
Dates. A GI of 103? You have to be kidding. So the sugars in dates are some specially magic sugars that can get turned into glucose and absorbed faster than glucose itself can? The process of turning into glucose takes negative time? You can see the problem here can’t you?
It turns out that the only way they have of testing GI is to get people to eat food and then check their blood glucose afterwards. But “they” don’t have a big bunch of people that they test all foods on all at once, “they” is a lot of different research groups, and “they” use a lot of different small groups of people to test a few foods each, at different times in different countries, and the foods are not standardised either.
Also, you need to understand another thing. A teaspoon of sugar might have a GI of 70 or whatever. However a teaspoon of sugar mixed with a tablespoon of butter will have a much lower GI, because the fat in the butter delays the absorption of the sugar. BUT you’ve still eaten the same amount of sugar, haven’t you?
PS. I suggest you look up glycemic index and glycemic load on wikipedia. It has a fairly good description of them.
Keep in mind, soda is being targeted not just because of its sugar content, but because it is “empty calories.” It is calories with no other nutritional value. Fruits and vegetables might have sugar in them but they also have valuable nutrients we need. So if you were not to target specific products, like soda, but try to create some objective scale, weighing the negative and beneficial qualities of food, I fear it would lead to more “fortified foods,” like breakfast cereal, which is just garbage with vitamins. In general, I don’t object to luxury taxes as a way to fund government operations, and soda is a luxury, not a necessity, I suspect this tax would fall disproportionally on the poor, as they probably spend a much larger percentage of their income on soda than do the wealthy. If the goal is to make Americans healthier, then education and regulations of the manufacturers might be a better way to go.
Bronwyn, you make some excellent points. I’m sure if this issue progresses to the point of legislative hearings, Congress will want to examine very closely exactly how the glycemic index works and how it might be used as a standard for taxing different carbohydrates.
Kaci, I hear you. You seem to be suggesting that while people are becoming obese, they should be picking up some nutrition along the way. I’m all for that, but I don’t think it should stand in the way of a tax on carbs.
Ed, What I fear with a soda tax is that poor families will continue to buy soda, just as they continue to buy alcohol and cigarettes despite high taxes. With more of their food budget going to soda, they will buy less fruits and vegetables, leaving their children even suffer from even more malnutrition. While carbs need to be avoided by adults who are consuming more calories than they burn, children who are active have high calorie needs. Eating too much protein places stress upon the kidneys. Mother’s milk, the food nature intended for children during the fastest period of their growth, the first year, is only 6% protein. Growing children need a balance of healthy carb and protein sources. Encouraging increased activity and healthy food choices would probably do more to reduce obesity than a soda tax would. I would be in favor of a subsidy on healthy food choices, the British government already does this for vegetables. And possibly a tax credit for parents who place their kids in activities that encourage physical fitness, like sports and dance lessons.
Kaci, I’m all for green vegetables. Lots of vitamins and minerals there. But humans did not evolve eating the kind of carbs you’re talking about. Stuffing kids with starchy foods is just priming them for insulin resistance, obesity, diabetes and all the rest. We should be turning the food pyramid on its head–lots more healthy protein and fat. Whether that’s actually feasible is another question, just part of the dilemma our “green revolution” has gotten us into.
Ed,
In primitive hunter gather societies, the majority of the food consumed was plants, seeds, and grains. Meat would not be an everyday occurrence, and when they were lucky enough to secure it they consume every bit of it, as securing enough calories was their biggest struggle in survival. It was not until the advent of agriculture that infant mortality rates declined, as agriculture made it much easier to consume the required calorie needs. The problem today, is not only that we don’t expend many calories in securing foods, but we have managed to process foods to point where we cram enough calories for a full day into a single serving. Calories that are absent the necessarily nutrients and fiber that our body needs to function properly. If children were being served unprocessed or minimally processed whole grains, such as quinoa, millet, brown rice, and oatmeal, they would not see the health issues that result from eating processed carbs. A growing child who consumed the majority of his calories from animal protein and fat, would have health problems as well.
I think the biggest problem in turning the food pyramid into something that actually reflected a healthy diet, is that it would encourage the eating of more unprocessed food, and each step of processing foods, adds a layer of profit. Convincing a society thats operating on profit making model, that they should eat foods that generate less profit would be sacrilegious. A big bag of “old fashion” oatmeal or brown rice, is considerably cheaper per serving than Top Ramen. But you won’t see commercials on TV telling you that. The “Healthy Choice Checkmarks” aren’t on the head of lettuce, it is on the box of cereal that is 45% sugar by weight. We not only need to eat as our ancestor did, we need to find a way to get off the couch and move as much as they did to. Hard to do in today’s society, when you sit behind a desk for 8 hours, in your car commuting for 2 hours, hunting and gathering food, takes little effort in a super market. Without a major shift in American values, I doubt sugar tax will do much to solve the problem, and could make things worse.
Kaci, I think you need to go back to school on that one. Fortunately, there’s plenty of literature on the diet of early man. The grains you are referring to did not enter the diet in any significant way until about 10,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture. Humans have been evolving for 2.6 million years. In the wild, seeds, nuts and fruits are only available sporadically, in season. Besides, carbohydrates are not even necessary for human metabolism–only proteins and fats are. Humans evolved eating what their bodies required: protein and fat.
If our ancestors lived partly on seeds and grains I wonder how our bodies didn’t evolve to accept them nutritionally in their pure form. Or did our ancestors pre-soak them before they were eaten? But that means they would have to cook their seeds and grains and when did we start cooking food? For every answer there are many more questions!
Kim, humans evolved as omnivores, meaning they are equipped to eat meat as well as greens. I think the best evidence is that early man did find leaves to eat, as well as fruits and nuts, seeds and possibly roots. He didn’t learn to cook for a long time, and grains certainly didn’t enter the picture in a big way until the advent of agriculture. Our modern diet heavy on starchy carbs is certainly an aberration, in evolutionary terms.
Check out the composition of human breast milk – twice as much carbohydrate as fat, and seven times as much carbohydrate as protein. And you still say we shouldn’t eat carbs? You think that we have evolved to produce milk that contains a large proportion of a substance we don’t need?
As kaci says, too much protein puts stress on our kidneys. When getting energy from protein (which means turning parts of the protein into glucose) there is a lot of leftover nitrogen that the kidneys need to process and get rid of.
Diets high in protein are also usually high in purines (another nitrogen-containing molecule present in large quantities in meat, fish etc), and a high purine diet predisposes you to gout (a crippling disease that no-one wants) mostly because the kidneys can’t process its metabolites.
Yes, the Atkins diet works. But there is a downside to it. I think I’d rather eat all foods in moderation (although I do try to eat a reasonably high protein/high fibre diet) than suffer from chronic constipation and gout!
Bronwyn, thanks for joining the conversation. I trust you outgrew breast milk at some point.
Certainly I outgrew breast milk. But my metabolism is still much more like that of a human baby than that of a cat or dog.
Good on ya! Totally agree as a way to spur innovation; 1 cent per carb and low-carb foods exceed demand over high carb crap.