Wait, people still drink soda?
New evidence suggests that Seattle’s soda tax is working well
31–40 of 127 posts
Re: New evidence suggests that Seattle’s soda tax is working well
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> It is exceedingly likely that people just ate more fat instead of sugar.. Why do you believe this is so likely? To be honest I don't see the connection. People notice in the supermarket that their favorite soft drink became more expensive, and decide to switch to eating an extra hamburger instead?
You're hungry, so you eat something. When you run low on food, you go to the supermarket. Soda has increased in price, so you spend your soda money on something else. The next time you're hungry, that's what's in your kitchen. This is only better if the thing you replace the soda with is better for you than the soda. Without any data on what that is, you don't know if that's true.
Eating sugar makes your body/mind crave more sugar though… regardless of consumed calories.
Re: New evidence suggests that Seattle’s soda tax is working well
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're hungry, so you eat something. When you run low on food, you go to the supermarket. Soda has increased in price, so you spend your soda money on something else. The next time you're hungry, that's what's in your kitchen. This is only better if the thing you replace the soda with is better for you than the soda. Without any data on what that is, you don't know if that's true.
Eating sugar makes your body/mind crave more sugar though… regardless of consumed calories.
You don't even know that the replacement thing isn't still sugar. People can't spend their soda money on candy?
What if they spend it on cigarettes?
Re: New evidence suggests that Seattle’s soda tax is working well
#34This tax does not apply to diet sodas, [1] which have been shown to prompt food cravings, especially in women and obese people. [2] So it's possible that people just substituted from regular to diet soda, and still eat just as much. 1: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/washington/articles/... 2: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/10/07/1044010...
That's kind of a click baity interpretation of the study. What really happened in that study was that the subjects were given a diet vs regular soda, then allowed to eat as much as they wanted. In the case where they drank diet soda, they did eat more calories, but the total calories consumed including the drink itself was still lower for the diet soda case.
For further discussion on this study (and others like it) I highly recommend the stronger by science podcast [1]. And [2] is a link to the study details (to avoid whatever misleading spin npr might be giving it).
[1] https://www.sbspod.com/episodes/reverse-dieting-bodybuilding... (starts around 1:49:39, it's the second last topic)
[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
Re: New evidence suggests that Seattle’s soda tax is working well
#35Did they also study whether total sugar sales rose in the cities next to Seattle? I can imagine that some price sensitive soda drinkers just drove to the nearest store outside of Seattle to buy their sodas.
This makes zero sense. A gallon of gas is about $4.00, the idea that someone would spend all that gas money to avoid a tax of 1.75 cents/oz just doesn't pass the sniff test.
Re: New evidence suggests that Seattle’s soda tax is working well
#36I'm...skeptical. Mostly that in a city where houses stretch into the millions now, people forego a can of Coke over a 20 cent price increase. Soda consumption has been on a long decline since the late aughts. I even noticed as much anecdotally - often when dining out I would be the only one or maybe one of two to order a soda at all. I'm completely willing to be proven wrong, but the data set is much too small to con…
> Why not include the top x cities, instead of just one 200 miles away? Because it rains a lot in both?
You can find the source here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2020.100856
To quote from it:
> Portland, OR, was selected as the comparison site for Seattle, WA, based on Mahalanobis distance matching to evaluate the four largest municipalities in each of Washington and Oregon as potential comparison sites [etc]
They had more of a reason and included the model they used to pick the city.
It's also quite beneficial to keep the areas somewhat near in that there will be less variance in the number of item codes between close locations (i.e. different drinks are sold on the east coast vs west coast since some brands are local)
From a different section:
> Custom-ordered data were provided from store outlets geocoded within the boundaries of the taxing jurisdiction of Seattle, WA, the comparison site, Portland, OR
I suspect they didn't have enough funding to afford more geocoded scanner data given that it sounds like they had to pay for custom data at a rate per-geocoded location... or didn't have the funding to process that much more data.
It wasn't clear how much of the dataset labeling was manual, but it sounded like the study's authors may have had to sift through several thousand barcodes by hand.
Re: New evidence suggests that Seattle’s soda tax is working well
#37Armed with three years of grocery shopping data, researchers found that total sugar sales are down by almost 20 percent, driven largely by falling soda purchases. This isn't the right definition of success. The first minimal requirement for this to be a successful initiative is that the community lost weight overall. Or even gained weight, but more slowly than other communities. If they could prove that it would be a…
Lol, that might be tough as Seattle is already ranked as one of the countries healthiest cities.
Re: New evidence suggests that Seattle’s soda tax is working well
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eating sugar makes your body/mind crave more sugar though… regardless of consumed calories.
You don't even know that the replacement thing isn't still sugar. People can't spend their soda money on candy? What if they spend it on cigarettes?
Quote from start if thread said "total sugar sales are down by almost 20 percent, driven largely by falling soda purchases", so at least we know they didn't buy candy with the money.
Re: New evidence suggests that Seattle’s soda tax is working well
#39How much are sodas taxed in Seattle? Maybe I missed something but I couldn't find it in the article.
Does the soda tax go towards increasing public health services in the region?
Re: New evidence suggests that Seattle’s soda tax is working well
#40I'm...skeptical. Mostly that in a city where houses stretch into the millions now, people forego a can of Coke over a 20 cent price increase. Soda consumption has been on a long decline since the late aughts. I even noticed as much anecdotally - often when dining out I would be the only one or maybe one of two to order a soda at all. I'm completely willing to be proven wrong, but the data set is much too small to con…
It's possible the decrease is driven largely by spending habits of low-income families: > Last year, researchers at the University of Washington found that low-income families in particular saw a significant decrease in soda consumption following the implementation of the tax. The findings were based on a survey of residents, meaning that it relied on self-reporting, which is less accurate than sales data. This leads…
> One way around this knotty issue is to take the money from this tax and use it for public services that disproportionally benefit the populations from whom it is generated. (I have no idea what the tax revenues in Seattle are used for.)
And now you've created a bureaucracy that can only maintain its existence if sugary drinks continue to sell well.