Sugar Helps Cause Obesity - Let's Tax it!
Channel: Daily Insight
Date: 2017-06-08

Added sugar seems to be in everything. I was at the supermarket yesterday trying to find a healthy snack for the children and they wanted something sweet. So we decided to buy a watermelon (only a small one) and it ended up costing $10.23. A single watermelon cost more than 10 bucks! For comparison, chocolate biscuits (150 g) at Aldi imported from the UK cost 75 cents. Per 100 g, they contain 2092 kJ (499 kcal) of energy and 31 g of sugar. Per 100 g, the watermelon contains 127 kJ (30 kcal) of energy and 6.2 g of sugar. Of course, every other sugar or salt laden snack was dirt cheap, too. Veggies and fruits were almost all expensive. So what’s going on here? Why are healthy, nutritious foods so expensive, yet unhealthy, refined snacks so cheap? Most snacks in Australian supermarkets are less than $2. Many are less than $1! Most fruits and vegetables cost more than $5 a kilogram, often a lot more. No wonder we have an obesity and diabetes crisis. What we need to do to fix this problem is to implement a tax to change people’s behaviour. I’m not a big fan of taxes (nor capitalism for that matter), but if that’s what it takes to make eating healthy easier, then I think we should do it. If something is cheap, people will buy it more often. I don’t blame any parent for choosing a “fruit bar” over a real piece of fruit if the fruit bar is a quarter the price. I’m a parent and I’ve fallen for it many times. A big bag of chips often only costs $1.59 at Coles or Woolworths. The kids like it (as do we) and it makes us feel happy (although fleetingly). However, we also like eating watermelon, but at $10 a pop, it’s an expensive habit. So how would a tax work? Many people in the last five or 10 years have spoken of a “sugar tax”, but almost every politician gives in to the big corporations and refuses to implement such a thing. Nobody likes to rock the boat and the sugar industry certainly doesn’t want any policy that affects their bottom line.

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