Soda taxes are meant to discourage people from drinking too much sugar, which is linked to a host of bad health outcomes. Cities that imposed the taxes saw a 33% decrease in the sale of sugary drinks.

Sales of sugary drinks fell dramatically across five U.S. cities, after they implemented taxes targeting those drinks – and those changes were sustained over time. That’s according to a study published Friday in the journal JAMA Health Forum.

Researchers say the findings provide more evidence that these controversial taxes really do work. A claim the beverage industry disputes.

The cities studied were: Philadelphia, Seattle, San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., and Boulder, Colo. Taxes ranged from 1 to 2 cents per ounce. For a 2-liter bottle of soda, that comes out to between 67 cents to $1.30 extra in taxes.

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Kaplan and his colleagues found that, on average, prices for sugar-sweetened drinks went up by 33.1% and purchases went down by basically the same amount – 33%.

  • HiddenLayer5@lemmy.mlEnglish
    61·
    6 months ago

    I encourage everyone who likes sugary soda to at least try flavoured sparkling water. Personally I have replaced nearly all my soda intake with it, and the fruit flavored ones are surprisingly sweet without any sugar or artificial sweetener, and I imagine are way healthier than even diet soda. If you find that you like it, getting a sparkling water machine like a Soda Stream is also more environmentally friendly and more cost effective if you drink a lot of it as well.

    • hydrospanner@lemmy.world
      31·
      6 months ago

      I like both but they definitely aren’t interchangeable for me.

      When I want a seltzer that’s what I want and a coke is too sweet.

      When I want a coke, the seltzer isn’t sweet enough.

      That being said, one of the few healthy changes I made and stuck with was after making my most recent move 6 years ago, I just didn’t buy 2L bottles of soda to keep in stock in the fridge.

      Didn’t boycott them, didn’t avoid them in restaurants or convenience stores, and I still keep a few baby cans as mixers in the bar at my apartment, but in that list of things you just get when you run low to keep a stock…I just kinda took soda off that list.

      Found that I only really missed it a few times a year, and if I was really craving it, I could go get a little can from the bar…but just that one small change probably cut my soda consumption by like 85% and I barely miss it.