Forbes’ Trevor Butterworth points to a story about David Allison, a biostatistician who appears to buck the consensus on soda and obesity and is paying a price for it. But according to Butterworth, he’s actually doing no such thing:
Allison has said such studies haven’t been rigorous enough to prove soda contributes to obesity, but critics say his skepticism stems from his financial ties to entities such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi and the American Beverage Association, who, critics say, have paid Allison to poke holes in the scientific consensus.”
Sounds appalling, doesn’t it? Until you find out that the scientific consensus isn’t what ABC News claims it is, and that the nation’s leading experts have reached more or less the same conclusion about soda and weight gain as Allison has – independently.
It is commonly said that soft drinks are “empty calories.” Not just devoid of nutritious content, but is also comprised calories that don’t even fill you up. Therefore you can get rid of the soft drinks without feeling more hungry, shedding yourself of tons of sugar content along the way. Would that it were so simple. Often, getting rid of soft drinks ends up ramping up your sweet cravings. And so the end result can be that instead of drinking sugary drinks, you’re eating sugary candy bars that are loaded with saturated fats.
My experience with dieting is that it’s like whack-a-mole. There’s never any one thing, because when you bash it, something else will typically take its place. I know that for my part, when I do miss my soft drinks, I do start to feel hungry. And it’s not just in my (conscious) mind, because I will sit in the evening wondering why in the world I am so hungry and then realize that I haven’t had a soft drink since breakfast. And nearly every conscious diet I ever embarked on involved giving up soft drinks first. And all of them failed. My weight loss actually came by accident, and with copious amounts of soft drink consumption. And when I tried to cut down from 3-5 soft drinks a day? I ended up drinking 2-4 soft drinks a day… plus a caramel mocha. Hit this mole, there comes another.
Dietary politics is full of silver bullets. People who are heavy drink a lot of soft drinks, so we should tax drinks. But it’s often the case that heavy people are heavy because they have sweet tooths, and it’s that which draws them to the soft drinks. Whack this mole, and another will come.
Much of the time, at any rate. The evidence does suggest that for the severely overweight, reducing soft drink intake is moderately helpful. Not as much as one might think when you’re talking about recuperating hundreds and hundreds of calories. The problem is that everyone is different. And what hinders some people, helps others. In my own case, I think my failure to eliminate soft drinks actually helped me eliminate other, more problematic habits. The hunger that came with getting rid of the soft drinks lead me to hunger and overeating. Hunger management, in its own way. Not healthy, to be sure, but conducive to weight loss as it turned out.
Which brings me to a sidepoint, where I find myself frequently at odds with those that are really anxious about our obesity rates. The notion that the only way to stay trim is to eat their way and if you’re not trim, it’s because you’re not doing so. You can read more about it here and it’s touched upon here (starting at around paragraph four). Food intake management is complicated business.
I really thought that I would have given up soft drinks by now. It was always “the next step,” but over and over again I end up making the change somewhere else. But I’m here, alive, and 25% lighter than I used to be.
I remember having a talk with a guy who is a trainer, lamenting that I needed to lose weight but didn’t want to give up on ice cream (a big weakness of mine). His response was, “There’s nothing wrong with eating however much ice cream you want to eat. The question is, are you willing to add the additional exercise to keep it from creating a health problem?”
It may be an overly simplistic way of looking at sugar intake and potential obesity, but it personally helps me a lot.
That being said, thinking a tax on soft drinks will curb obesity is silly.
Not that I disagree with you about the silliness of a tax on soft drinks, RTod, but let me play devil’s advocate for just a moment.
Hasn’t cigarette use declined as the prevalence and stiffness of tobacco taxes has risen? It might not be a direct relationship, but as taxes on cigarettes began increasing in a serious way, driving the price up, use began to decline. No one seriously doubts that cigarettes are addictive, not just desirable. But could it be that there is a price point where the demand curve begins to elbow downward?
And if so, why wouldn’t the same thing happen with an ostensibly less addictive substance like sweetened, canned fizzy water? Wouldn’t you think twice about buying a pint of Ben & Jerry’s if you had to pay $15 for it?
Again, I don’t really think a soda tax would reduce obesity — but I could be persuaded that a soda tax would reduce (not eliminate) soda consumption.
Bingo. Gas isn’t six dollars in Germany ’cause it’s that expensive. Gas is six dollars so people ride the train, take the subway, etcetera.
I think that the tax would be successful if the goal were fizzy sugary drinks. Tax the fizz, people will ditch the fizz and drink sugary fruit juice instead. That’s the real problem. There are so many substitutions in play. It’s likely that you would have to tax sugar additive itself (which, if we’re talking that, how about we stop subsidizing it first, but I digress…). (This leaves aside for the moment that diet soft drinks may be nearly as bad.)
With tobacco, there is no good substitute.