Should sugary foods be regulated and taxed like alcohol?

Health: US Scientists Urge for the Regulation and Taxation Sugary Foods


"A group of scientists have called for regulation and tax on sugary foods. The American scientists have said that that the increasing use of sugar in processed foods may cause significant danger to human health and have argued for the regulating the sale or sugary foods to children under 17 and a large tax increase.


Robert Lustig, Laura Schmidt and Claire Brindis of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), have stated in an article for the journal Nature that global sugar consumption over the past 50 years has trebled.  Their article states that sugar, which authorities consider as 'empty calories', triggers processes that result in liver toxicity and other chronic diseases. The scientists assert that sugar can be as damaging to the liver as alcohol and is leading to major public health problems such as obesity and certain types of liver diseases.


United Nations statistics reveal that long-term diseases such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes are now causing more fatalities than infectious diseases. The figures there used stated that long-term diseases cause 35 million deaths annually. The UCSF scientists stated that there are now 30% more people who are obese than those who are undernourished. They strongly called for food regulators to focus on “added sugar” apart from fat and salt. They also want public health-related International bodies to regulate people’s intake of sugars such as fructose, high-fructose corn syrup and sucrose. The researchers further linked sugar intake with ‘metabolic syndrome’, including high blood pressure, diabetes and accelerated ageing. Preliminary studies have also linked sugar consumption to cancer and cognitive decline.


The UCSF scientists have suggested the imposition of taxes on processed foods which contained added sugars including sweetened fizzy drinks, other sugar-sweetened beverages and sugared cereal. They included the regulation and limitation of the sale of drinks with added sugar to children below 17 years of age.


Sugar Nutrition UK, a group funded by sugar producers, stated through its spokesman that the claims are unfounded. They stated that many expert committees, including those formed by the European Food Safety Authority and World Health Organization to scrutinise the scientific evidence related to sugar consumption, had failed to link sugar with any of the ‘lifestyle diseases’ such as obesity, diabetes, coronary heart disease or cancer.


However, Dr. Julie Sharp, Senior Science Information Manager at Cancer Research UK opined that foods containing high sugar levels contribute to weight gain and obesity, in turn, is linked to up to 17,000 cases of cancer annually.


Businesses that profit from the high sales of sugary foods will more than likely place a lot of pressure on the international community to ignore or discredit the results of the report. We shall see if this is the start of a health revolution, or whether a backroom handshake will stop any hope of reform."


http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/46191


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