No matter how many times they’re debunked, disproven, or discredited, some policies refuse to die with dignity.
Despite a dearth of evidence from anywhere in the world showing soda taxes reduce obesity, the American Heart Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics continue banging the drum against king Coke.
In these very pages, Natalie Muth and Rachel Johnson claimed we’re not doing enough to save children from the malign influence of soda companies. The argument is that kids are consuming almost double the recommended amount of sugar, with about half of that coming from sugary drinks.
Their solution? Tax hikes, naturally.
I applaud Muth and Johnson for their commitment to children’s health. Alas, such passion often leads people to rely on thin evidence and misleading arguments in service of what they see as the greater good. This is doubly true when the supposed enemies are big, bad corporations who engage in unseemly business activities, such as earning money and spending money on advertising.
Unfortunately, the doctors’ argument is a classic case of policy-based evidence rather than evidence-based policy. The policies have already been decided. Replicate the tactics used against Big Tobacco: higher taxes, advertising bans, product regulation, and social stigma.
For instance, Muth and Johnson seamlessly drift from talking about protecting children to the need to use taxes to reduce the 40,000 adult deaths allegedly due to sugary drinks.
But there’s a problem with this claim that’s ably explained by the study Muth and Johnson link to: “The study’s comparative risk assessment model does not prove that changes in these dietary habits reduce disease risk. Causality is different from identifying associations.”
In other words, we have no idea if reducing soda consumption will save lives. While excess sugary beverages may be associated with 40,000 deaths in a computer model, that’s a far cry from the implication that soda, by itself, is directly responsible for 40,000 deaths a year.
“These policies work. Price increases are associated with decreases in consumption,” Muth and Johnson protest. You don’t need a doctorate in nutrition or economics to understand that reducing sugary drink consumption is not synonymous with lowering obesity. Awkwardly, the paper they cited also says, “Whether these taxes ultimately improve health outcomes remains unknown.” That’s a generous assessment, given the state of the evidence.
In 2018, the New Zealand Institute for Economic Research published a review of 47 studies investigating the effectiveness of sugar taxes. “We were unable to find evidence that any sugar tax actually implemented anywhere in the world has led to improvements in health,” said one of the study’s authors.
To bolster their case, the doctors cite Philadelphia’s soda tax as a success. Consumption did fall in Philadelphia, but cross-border shopping almost entirely compensated for this decline. “As a consequence, we find no significant reduction in calorie and sugar intake,” concluded one study examining the tax.
The city of Berkeley, Calif., is another alleged success story. A study published in PLOS found sales fell 9.6% compared with what they would have been without the tax. But sales also rose significantly in the surrounding areas, and the authors found self-reported sugary drink consumption “did not change significantly compared to baseline,” and “caloric intake of untaxed beverages (milk and other dairy-based beverages) increased.”
Aside from soda taxes failing on their own merits, the case for sugary drinks being a uniquely dangerous contributor to childhood obesity may be even weaker than previously thought.
A study trialed at the recent European Congress on Obesity found children who drank sugary beverages are not necessarily fatter than those who didn’t. The study found no differences between the body mass indexes of children who drank sugary beverages and those who didn’t. There was also “no direct link” between sugary drinks and higher overall energy consumption in children between the ages of 4 and 10.
“Therefore, relying on a single-nutrient approach to tackling childhood obesity in the form of a soft drink tax might not be the most effective tactic,” said the study’s lead author Ola Anabtawi.
With a mountain of evidence ranged against them, one would think soda tax peddlers might reexamine their position. But they won’t. The American Heart Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics won’t stop pushing this policy — not because it works, but because it’s the easiest first step for greater interventions down the road, all of which will be as useless, intrusive, and annoying as soda taxes.
Guy Bentley (@gbentley1) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is director of consumer freedom at the Reason Foundation.
