The government has taken measure in reducing the use of sugar by bringing soda taxes in the hope of changing the way the company produce and reduce the obesity in the long run. Water is the best fluid for keeping the body hydrated, it transports nutrients around the body and is involved in chemical and metabolic reactions. Adding nudges to taxes would likely help, but the acceptability of nudging has, until now, been largely unknown. This replicates findings from other studies. If soda becomes too expensive for their liking, consumers may choose to consume another potentially unhealthy drink in its place. Perceived effectiveness was the strongest predictor of acceptability for all interventions across both the US and UK groups. Second, the many available soda substitutes may render soda taxes ineffective, in that consumers will replace highly-taxed beverages with low-tax alternatives with the same health consequences. With sugar drinks, excise taxes would most likely be placed on the volume or weight of a unit of sweetener, such as per ounce or gram of added sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. This led the company to shrink the size of the bottle from 1.75 to 1.50 litre. But consumers aren’t in this alone. Indeed, Irn-Bru has reformulated their drink to halve the content of sugar, as well as companies such as Sprite and Fanta. It has been authorised by the European Union for use in drinks, desserts, sweets, dairy products, chewing gums, energy-reduced, weight control products & as a table-top sweetener. 2. Consumers can read labels and decide for themselves if the product is suitable or not. As cities and states seek to address rising rates of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and obesity, many are looking to sugary drink taxes. This included presenting evidence of taxation’s effectiveness at preventing obesity and other consequences of high consumption. But would we find these changes acceptable? Educating Your Customers and Offering Them an Alternative: People with Diabetes as well as the rest of the population, can consume both nutritive and non-nutritive sweeteners in their diets. Xylitol. It is believed that if customers are required to pay more for a sugary drink, it will cause them to reconsider the value of purchasing it. Last year, Action For Sugar also suggested introducing a sugar tax, but only if other policies were not first adopted by the food industry and the industry refused to comply with them. Most people in the UK are now obese or overweight. Artificial Sweeteners vs Natural Sugar Alternatives. Excess consumption of sugar, including from sugary drinks, contributes to this. Juice: Minute Maid 100% Apple Juice – This 15.2-ounce bottle contains 49 grams of sugar, which is about the amount of sugar in 10 Oreos. Most sugar tax discussions focus on changing consumer choices. Real Fruit Jam. If sugary drinks were sold in smaller bottles, stores stocked fewer of … Comments section policy: Any attacks on BusinessTech, its journalists, or other readers will result in a ban. Education was the most accepted intervention (more than 80% of participants considered it to be acceptable), taxation the least (fewer than 46% judged it acceptable), and the nudge interventions rated between these (range: 51% to 68%). Poor eating habits and lack of exercise are definite contributors to this epidemic. Say No to Sports Drinks (~21g sugar per cup) Sports drinks. This sweetener has up to 300 times the sweetness of sugar. There is substantial evidence that this has happened with high sugar drinks. As a business selling these kind of products, it is important to be aware of and update yourselves and your staff as to which drinks will be taxed from April 2018 onwards. Berries, stone fruit, apples, pears and grapes … While water is the best choice for your customers, we live in an age where choice leads the way and now with the sugar tax levy, encouraging lower sugar / zero calorie drink varieties as well as flavoured or sparkling water is a more sensible move. That typically works out to about 10 percent, says Arantxa Colchero, a health economist at the National Institute of Public Health in Cuernavaca who has studied the tax. “A sugar tax on soft drinks would benefit the health of Australians. The sugary drinks that will be taxed in South Africa, Sugar tax confirmed for South Africa in 2017, Why Gordhan should announce a sugar tax for South Africa. Sugar containing drinks should be consumed in moderation and with a balanced approach in mind. Despite their reputation, natural alternatives such as honey contain similar (or even more) calories than sugar. Attributing obesity to the environment, rather than willpower, also predicted acceptability. Taxes raise revenue for the government. This is crucial to the success of the tax, as there is a viable health problem in the UK. Your consumers need reminders when it comes to hydration and by educating them about the healthier hydration options available, you will increase the probability that they don’t walk out of your store empty handed. By Theresa Marteau, Professor of Behaviour and Health, University of Cambridge. The more people attributed over-consumption to the environment, the greater their support for interventions, particularly the three nudge interventions. There’s a simple alternative to a sugar tax to fight obesity. If you are looking to give up sugar, your … Xylitol … With funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, non-governmental organisations bought prominent advertising space to counter industry opposition to sugary drinks taxes. I’ll start from the obvious: bright … We compared the acceptability of three nudge interventions (reducing the size of sugary drinks bottles, elongating the shape of cans of sugary drinks so they look larger than current cans, and altering where on the shelf drinks were placed) with two more traditional interventions: education and taxation. By using this website, you consent to the use of cookies in accordance with the Musgrave MarketPlace Cookie Policy. “That means less sugar and better health,” Osborne concluded confidently on Twitter. … Food and beverage companies and retailers determine what products they make, market, and sell. The recent announcement of a tax on sugary drinks in England comes with much public support, and the case is made more compelling by recent evidence from Mexico that taxing drinks reduces consumption, particularly among the poor. For our study, we recruited 1,093 participants from the UK and 1,082 from the US. Tax encourages producers to re-formulate drinks - i.e. Health Minister David Clark said the … Xylitol contains 2.4 calories per gram, which is 40% fewer calories than sugar. … as part of a meal deal or using a reward card. In 2010 the ANS Panel concluded that steviol glycosides are neither genotoxic nor carcinogenic. This article was first published on The Conversation. An excise taxes would be Sugar is a naturally occurring nutrient, for example in fruit, as well as a more refined product, as on the teaspoon, but seeking a tax that distinguishes between the … Artificial sweeteners are non-nutritive, which means they provide few or no calories and usually have a highly intensive sweet taste. visible walking in the door of your store or as a first choice alongside the deli counter and check out area. Communities around the country are considering these taxes to raise revenues to address health, education and other important community needs; reduce consumption of an unhealthy product; and call attention to the health risks of sugary … This supports the idea that clear communication to the public of an intervention’s effectiveness – in this case, taxing sugary drinks – can increase public acceptability of the intervention. However, if the primary goal of the tax is improving public health by reducing sugar consumption, governments should consider taxing a beverage’s sugar content. Industry reformulates products to reduce (not necessarily remove) levels of sugar in these products. Have healthy hydration options most visible in-store e.g. What Drinks will and won’t have Sugar Tax? The results of our recent study show that most people find these “nudges” (altering cues in the environment to change people’s behaviour) to be acceptable ways to prevent obesity. But the evidence is now growing that “nudges” as well as taxes could reduce consumption of sugary drinks. If the name rings a bell, that’s because you can already find it in chewing gum. But for both nudging and taxing, the acceptability of the intervention increased the more effective participants judged them to be. This would result in people understanding that much of our behaviour, that is shaped by the environment, takes place outside of conscious awareness. We also decided to increase the size of the 1.75L bottles of Coca‑Cola Zero Sugar and Diet Coke to 2L, so our zero sugar alternatives are even better value for people. 21 Mar 2016 --- Up to 90 percent of consumers could switch from sugary drinks to lower calorie versions in light of the sugar tax introduced in last week’s Budget, according to the former boss of Red Bull, while one beneficiary of the levy is likely to be sweetener suppliers and other sugar substitutes. While trying to encourage healthy food choices within your stores, healthy hydration is also an important component of your health strategy. The biggest thing to remember when it comes to artificial sweeteners, is that they undergo rigorous and extensive safety evaluations by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) prior to being approved for the market. Non-alcoholic beverages have since been separated from the general tax, and in 2017, the tax for sugary drinks was set to 3.34 kroner per litre. The obesity epidemic in this country is similar to that in the UK. Sugary soft drinks provide no nutritional value and evidence shows that people who are overweight are more likely to drink soft drink. The idea behind these proposals is to discourage the consumption of food that leads to obesity, heart disease, and diabetes by financially penalizing their consumption, just like the highly-successful tobacco taxes … Natural alternatives include products such as agave nectar, date syrup, honey and coconut palm sugar. Setting the Record Straight on Artificial Sweeteners. Here are my top three pointers that are worth trying in-store; 1. Not so fast, George. Engage millennials where possible as they are much more aware of the benefits of hydration. The soft-drinks industry has proposed a raft of measures to reduce the daily number of calories consumed as an alternative to the Treasury’s proposed sugar tax. See also: Advantages of Electronic Road Pricing ; Examples. Taxing sugary drinks, however, was only acceptable to a minority. The obesity epidemic has been gripping our nation for several years, with 60% of the adult population now overweight or obese and 1 in 3 primary school children overweight. Individuals reduce consumption of sugar sweetened drinks by reducing amount consumed or switching to healthier choices. Subscribe. Changing the environment could therefore help tackle obesity. For example, we replaced our 1.75L bottle with a 1.5L bottle as a direct result of the tax. This suggests that people are prepared to trade off their dislike of an intervention for achieving a goal they value, such as tackling obesity. Using an excise tax rather than a sales tax means beverage companies have full freedom on how they apply the tax, allowing them to spread the cost across their range of products, including healthy alternatives like zero sugar versions and bottled water (10). In other words, the more effective people perceived an intervention to be, the more acceptable they found it. The Ministry of Health is looking into a sugar tax but the Government continues to rule one out for the time being. Independent: 20% snack tax could have huge impact on UK obesity (2019) BBC: Efforts to cut sugar out of food way off target 2. If sugary drinks were sold in smaller bottles, stores stocked fewer of them, and positioned them less prominently, we would drink fewer of them. Mexico provides an interesting case study. It shows that the sugar tax on soft drinks introduced in 2017 has proved unexpectedly successful and has led to a 28.8% fall in the amount of sugar … Unfortunately, educating people about the health harms of consuming an excess of sugary drinks – an intervention that most people find acceptable – does not reduce their consumption. The tax was designed to reduce obesity, and doing so should be the metric of its success. The two table-top artificial sweeteners currently on the shelves in Musgrave Marketplace are Canderel (which is made up of Aspartame) and Stevia (which is made up of Steviol glycosides) which are discussed below; Aspartame (E 951) is a low calorie, artificial sweetener which is 200 times sweeter than sugar. “Unlike the sugar tax bill, which taxes water content more than the caloric sweetener content of a particular beverage, under a PHP10 per kilogram tax on caloric sweeteners the price increase on the products will range up to 12%, which may burden consumers less as opposed to a 40-200% increase ,” BIAP said. The key here is real fruit jam. But obesity won’t be cracked by tax alone. It is unlikely that these alternatives will be adopted. This suggests that the public’s judgements of nudging could become even more favourable if we can successfully convey scientific understandings of human behaviour. What consumers drink is almost as important as what people eat. Highlighting the unconscious nature of nudges did not reduce their acceptability. Taxing sugar content could encourage consumers to choose lower-sugar options and possibly encourage manufacturers, distributors, and retailers to stock and market more healthy options. The Conversation 10 June 2016. In an effort to curb the consumption of sugar-laden drinks, Government Budget 2018 have passed legislation to enforce a Sugar Taxation commencing in April 2018. Because they have such an intense sweet taste, much smaller quantities can be used to sweeten food and drinks. Given that introducing these sorts of interventions will probably require regulation, it is important to gauge public acceptability outside of the context of a media campaign in one city. Proposals to tax unhealthy food, and possibly subsidize healthier alternatives, have been a topic of significant controversy over the last few years. Intake from 11-18 year olds amounts to 74.3g per day, or 15.6% of their daily food energy consumption. As a population, we consume too much energy. While water is the best choice for your customers, we live in an age where choice leads the way and now with the sugar tax levy, encouraging lower sugar / zero calorie drink varieties as well as flavoured or sparkling water is a more sensible move. (Wood, 2018 ... What are the alternatives? This may then lead politicians to implement the intervention. It was also concluded that even with high levels of consumption among adults and children, it would still be below the Acceptable Daily Intake. 29 This reduces the price impact of the tax but makes the product potentially worse in terms of its health effect. Nudging is more acceptable than taxation, but the acceptability of both may be sensitive to evidence of their effectiveness. Sugary drinks are consumed more by the poorest in society explaining, in part, the higher rates of obesity in this group. The Mexican tax adds one peso per liter to the price of all beverages with added sugar. In Mexico, the introduction of a tax on soft drinks reportedly led a major soft drink manufacturer to plan to reformulate its recipe to use cheaper high fructose corn syrup instead of cane sugar. In comparison to artificial sweeteners, these have a wholesome reputation that they are better for us, but is that really the case? Steviol glycosides (E 960) are mixtures of steviol glycosides used as a sweetener and extracted from the leaves of the stevia plant. 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We spend an estimated 10% of the NHS budget on treating the consequences. The two main desired outcomes envisaged by the Government from the Sugar Tax levy are: 1. 3. In Philadelphia a judge dismissed a lawsuit opposing the sugary drink tax. make them healthier by reducing the sugar content. Offer a reward system to incentivise healthy hydration i.e. Types of sweeteners that may be added to low sugar or diet drinks include Aspartame, Acesulfame K, Saccharin and Sucralose. Consumers tend to question ‘are artificial sweeteners safe’? Norway has had a generalized sugar tax measure on refined sugar products since 1922, introduced to boost state income rather than reducing sugar consumption. While water is the best choice for your customers, we live in an age where choice leads the way and now with the sugar tax levy, encouraging lower sugar / zero calorie drink varieties as well as flavoured or sparkling water is a more sensible move. But these views may have been influenced by campaigns run by industry-funded consumer groups that placed adverts on billboards and in newspapers asserting that this measure undermined individual freedom. Musgrave MarketPlace have put together a simple document to help you Be Sugar-Tax Ready and you can view it by clicking here. Taxing drink volumes or the sales value of sugary food gives these companies no incentive to develop and market lower-sugar alternatives. These policies included (i) reducing added sugars by 40 percent by 2020 through reformulation of processed foods; (ii) ceasing all forms of marketing of ultra-processed, … From a health perspective, sugar sweetened drinks provide no nutritional value or satiating value and do not fit within Healthy Eating Guidelines, which state that sugar sweetened drink consumption should be limited to sometimes, not every day and only in small amounts. In New York, a recent attempt to cap the size of sugary drinks sold in restaurants and other food outlets elicited a strong reaction from locals. The EFSA’s Panel on Food Additives and Nutrient Sources Added to Food (ANS Panel) have more than 30 years of extensive research on Aspartame and it has been found by the ANS Panel to be neither genotoxic nor carcinogenic and poses no safety concerns for consumers at the proposed uses and use levels as a sweetener. This can be spent on alternatives, such as public transport or the tax revenue can be used to tackle the problems relating to the externality, such as Sugar tax – money goes to health care. The tax would be assessed on fruit juices with no added sugar, vegetable juices without added sugar and even bottled water. 3) Excise Taxes: Excise taxes are placed on the production, sale, or consumption of a commodity and are imposed on a specific type of business. Can already find it in chewing gum Pricing ; Examples people perceived an to. 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