Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's stop putting sugar in water; that should solve most of the problem.
The "sugar in water" is not a problem, rather a symptom: it is a very effective and cheap way to get calories into a human. Way too many people lack a combination of access to fresh groceries (they live in "food deserts" [1]), enough money to afford these groceries [2], enough time to cook healthy food [3], or skills to cook food [4] - and most often these issues collide in poor and otherwise disadvantaged people...…
Soda is not cheap. A 2-liter bottle of Coca Cola contains 900 calories of corn syrup and costs $2 at my nearest Walmart. For the same $2, you can buy a 4lb bag of sugar and get 3400 calories if you don’t care that your calories are coming from sugar.
If you want something that at least kind of looks like food you could get 1200 calories of Chips Ahoy cookies for that $2 and while that’s not good for you, it’s gotta be better for you than soda. $2 will also get you about 1200 calories of Wonder bread or Great Value granola. Or $2 will get you a whopping 1500 calories of Kraft Mac and Cheese. Soda is a shitty deal in terms of calories. Even milk costs less per calorie than Coca Cola. And don’t tell me poor people are mostly buying off-brand cola because it’s not rich people making Coca Cola billions. (And it doesn’t change much because I was mostly comparing equivalent brands. You can get calories from Walmart-branded bread as cheaply as you can from Walmart-branded soda.)
People buy soda because it’s tasty, convenient, and widely advertised, not because it’s cheap calories.
Obese people are also not in need of more calories so the idea that they are turning to soda because they need cheap calories doesn’t make a bit of sense.
> The thing to tackle is poverty because it sits at the root of all of these issues, not making sugary drinks more expensive - all this does is punish the poor people yet again for being poor!
These are orthogonal. You can “tackle poverty” and also make soda expensive. This isn’t punishing people for being poor. It’s placing a tax on a very unhealthy habit to make it less appealing, exactly as we do for cigarettes.
This argument might be compelling if people actually needed soda for the calories, but they don’t.
> skills to cook food [4]
This is an odd choice of article. It says literally nothing about poverty or why poor people don’t cook. It’s just some random survey of adults who say they don’t cook and only 23% of them said it was because they don’t know how anyway. Of those, there is some unknown overlap with the 51% who say their spouse does all the cooking and undoubtedly some overlap with other groups such the group who live at home with their parents and the group who have enough money to always eat out.