#464: Do Sugar Taxes Work?: Evidence on Potential Policies - Kathryn Backholer, PhD

Sigma Nutrition Radio

Danny Lennon

Sigma, Dietetics, Evidencebased, Nutrition, Training, Health & Fitness, Science, Diet, Fitness, Evidence, Bodybuilding, Health

4.8 • 626 Ratings

🗓️ 20 December 2022

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

The current food environment is continuously highlighted as a problem for public health. And so there is a strong focus in both public policy and research circles to determine which strategies could lead to a healthier food environment.

One potential strategy that is widely recommended by public health experts is the use of fiscal/taxation policies to decrease the consumption of unhealthy foods and beverages. By making unhealthy foods and beverages relatively more expensive than healthy foods and beverages it is hoped that this would alter the composition of the average diet in a favorable manner.

This is based on economic theory and evidence showing that most foods are relatively price “inelastic”. This means that increases in the prices of particular foods can be expected to lead to reductions in the purchase of those foods.

But there have also been some concerns raised about the potential effectiveness of strategies aimed at taxing a certain nutrient (e.g. sugar) or a group of foods. There are worries that such policies wouldn’t lead to healthier diets; with people either not changing behavior or just substituting in other processed foods that industry has formulated to avoid a specific nutrient tax.

So what does the current evidence say?

With a number of countries having implemented a range of taxes or health levies, what lessons can we learn from these? And what does the best public health nutrition currently tell us about the likely effectiveness of different policies or interventions?

To get to some evidence-based answers, Dr. Kathryn Backholer, an Associate Professor at Deakin University, is on the podcast to discuss the current state of the evidence on various taxes and levies on different nutrients and unhealthy foods.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Sigma Nutrition Radio. This is episode 464 of the podcast. You are very welcome. My name is Danny Lennon, and today we're
0:24.6	going to be having another conversation with an academic about some research and how that
0:30.1	applies, particularly in the area of public health policy, as we'll be getting into today.
0:36.1	Today I'm going to be chatting with Dr. Catherine Baccholer,
0:39.2	who is an associate professor at Deakin University in Australia, and their Dr. Bacchola is
0:45.7	co-director of the Global Center for Preventive Health and Nutrition, and she leads a program
0:51.3	of research that is focused on the social, commercial, and cultural
0:55.5	determinants of population health.
0:57.5	And it's particularly interested in the interdisciplinary solutions to these various complex
1:03.4	public health problems that we are facing.
1:06.7	And we're going to dive into many of these topics around public health policy.
1:11.6	And in particular, we're going to focus in on interventions or policies that have some degree of taxation.
1:18.6	And as we'll discuss, this comes under different types of names, whether that's a tax or a health levy, and there's different forms of those. And it's an area where we have
1:29.2	touched on in some previous episodes of the podcast, but it never have focused in on some specifics
1:34.8	and maybe drilled into some examples and really clarified what these different types of
1:39.5	policies might look like. And even more so, what actually the evidence says on these different types of
1:45.1	policies, and going forward, what might be needed to make sure that if these policies are
1:50.5	used, they are going to be effective. And so Dr. Backhuler is the perfect person to be able to
1:56.2	answer some of these questions. And of course, this episode actually ties in nicely with some recent episodes
2:02.8	we've had, for example, with Professor Emma Boyland or Dr. Georgi Skrinnis, as well as past episodes
2:08.6	of the podcast, like with Professor Karina Hawks as one example. And so I'm going to put a list of
2:15.7	relevant episodes that are related to this topic in the show notes that you can go and click through if you haven't listened to them as well.
	...

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