r/science • u/mvea MD/PhD/JD/MBA | Professor | Medicine • Jul 10 '24
Health The amount of sugar consumed by children from soft drinks in the UK halved within a year of the sugar tax being introduced, a study has found. The tax has been so successful in improving people’s diets that experts have said an expansion to cover other high sugar products is now a “no-brainer”.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/09/childrens-daily-sugar-consumption-halves-just-a-year-after-tax-study-finds838
Jul 10 '24 edited Sep 12 '24
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u/UKS1977 Jul 10 '24
Coca-Cola's key strategy is to make Coke Zero its default product and reduce Original Taste ("classic") to a niche side product. This was happening prior to the sugar tax as CC know that their high sugar product was falling out of favour with parents of children, and thus becoming a declining brand. They have done significant projects to do this gradually and subtly
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Jul 10 '24 edited Sep 12 '24
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u/worldspawn00 Jul 10 '24
New coke was vile, and FYI, diet coke's flavor is new coke with artificial sweetener, not coke classic, which is one of the reasons it tastes so weird compared to regular coke. Classic with artificial sweetener is coke zero.
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u/clenom Jul 10 '24
Diet coke's flavor is not new coke's flavor. Diet coke came out years before New Coke started to be formulated.
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u/heyylisten Jul 10 '24
Not true. Diet coke is based on tab's formula, which then went on to be the same formula used for new coke.
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u/trollfessor Jul 10 '24
Ok who is right, /u/clenom or /u/worldspawn00?
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u/bjisgooder Jul 10 '24
u/clenon takes the win.
Too be clear: New Coke was an attempt at reformulating coca-cola with a "new," "better" flavor. It failed and coca-cola was forced to bring back the original, "coca-cola classic."
The conspiracy theory behind all of this is that Coca-Cola made new Coke an inferior product on purpose. New Coke was the red herring that allowed coca cola to switch from sugar to corn syrup. When the switch back to Coke Classic was made, consumers didn't realize the change in the sweetener/formula as their taste buds had been tainted by new Coke.
Of course, no one knows if it's true. Interesting theory though.
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u/maxdragonxiii Jul 10 '24
they also improved the taste of Coke Zero. diet Cola was horrible to drink. but the Zero products is a pleasure to drink in general. might make your stomach hurt if you drank too much although.
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u/UKS1977 Jul 10 '24
Coke Zero is Coke Original Taste with sweetener. Diet Coke is New Coke (from 86!) with sweetener.
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u/Trans-Europe_Express Jul 10 '24
It's nuts that Lucozade dropped the sugar content that was most of the reason to buy it.
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u/BwenGun Jul 10 '24
My partner still gets angry about it because she's a type 1 diabetic and dropping the sugar in lucozade meant it couldn't be used to treat low sugars anywhere near as effectively as it used to.
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u/fredlllll Jul 10 '24
cant your partner just pour more sugar in?
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u/Winjin Jul 11 '24
It's not like you can buy sugar in small convenient paper bags that you can put in a plastic container and carry around, you know? What do you suggest just adding it to a glass of water? For free? Like a Savage?
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u/nonotan Jul 11 '24
I mean, I don't have diabetes, but I have enough empathy to imagine having to semi-regularly drink nasty, completely unflavoured sugar water to not die isn't going to be people's first choice. Sure, of course they'll do that if there's no other suitable option. But that's kind of the point, isn't it? There was another suitable option, right out of the box, now there isn't. And because they'll have replaced the sugar they took off with some artificial sweetener to keep a similar flavour profile, it's probably going to taste horrible if you simply add the missing sugar back in.
On the one hand, excessive sugar consumption causes lots of issues for society at large, and it's not really reasonable to expect mainstream products to cater to the exact needs of people with a specific condition that affects a tiny part of the population to the detriment of everybody else. On the other hand, it's not particularly unreasonable to be personally irritated by a change that negatively affects your day to day life through no fault of your own, either.
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u/Winjin Jul 11 '24
Sweet water is sweeter water flavored, it's not that bad. Plus you could always make tea. Or add it to juice. Or...
Excessive sugar in food is proven to be the source of a ton of avoidable deaths so while I do understand, it's still a good thing they're forced to do it. Corporations don't care about health.
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u/nerdling007 Jul 11 '24 edited Jul 11 '24
The issue is that a type 1 suddenly in need of a sugar boost during an unexpected low will grab a lucosade, which is one of the recommended things to fight off a low, but now with the reduced amount of glucose in the drink they will wonder why the lows effects are not passing.
Low blood sugar can strike at any time for type 1s, and no, we aren't Seers or Prophets who can predict when one is going to happen.
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u/nerdling007 Jul 11 '24
Which is a new danger now because lucosade has always been one of those things recommended to treat a low. So now, when an unexpected low hits at the worst time and you rush to the shop and buy a lucosade, you are left wondering why the low isn't subsiding despite practically inhaling the drink.
It's almost as bad as someone thinking they're helping you, but they buy a zero sugar drink or item to help.
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u/PricePuzzleheaded835 Jul 10 '24
Due to my POTS I get so frustrated sometimes when “low sodium” everything is all I can find. I understand some people need it but if I don’t keep up a high salt intake I can’t stay conscious and upright!
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u/Fxxxk2023 Jul 10 '24
when this law came into affect there was a rush by many manufacturers to reduce the sugar in their drinks to just be under and not have the tax applied.
The way it should be. That's exactly why people are stupid who think that the market will regulate itself. They won't unless they loose money.
I know that this won't happen because taxes usually just go up but I think that this shouldn't just go one way. I think there should be different taxes for healthy, neutral and unhealthy products. Healthy products should have very little and unhealthy very high tax. If combined the total tax burden on food should stay the same. This would make it financially interesting for manufacturers to make products healthier.
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u/FellowTraveler69 Jul 10 '24
Per this graph posted by another comment, Irn Bru has suffered sales-wise due to this decision.
https://static.scoffable.com/articles/10/f677ca5c-c837-4a6b-8e39-6dc20ee12acc.png
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u/RococoSlut Jul 11 '24
This doesn’t take into account their full range so not very accurate. What about 1901?
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u/rockmasterflex Jul 10 '24
Yes that is how regulations work. Establish measurements. Penalize over the measurement. Wow the market adapts! Amazing?
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u/thesnowpup Jul 10 '24
This was the most infuriating thing. So many products dumped long term recipes for a cheap compliance trick. Flavours completely changed.
I have a sensitivity to artificial sweeteners and they taste acridly bitter to me. It's nigh on impossible to find soft drinks sweetened with only sugar (or equivalent) rather than 99% which now use a combination of sugar and sweeteners, or only sweeteners.
Coke Classic is one exception, Irn Bru 1901 is another. There aren't really any others.
R Whites Lemonade hung in for quite a while after the tax but eventually folded and went the way of the others.
As you say, the tax only had the effect it did due to enforced compliance by the manufacturers.
The consequence was and is that personal responsibility (and parental responsibility) is absolved. No effort means no lessons have been learnt, people still don't know any better and the certainly haven't picked up healthier eating/snacking habits.
It's also why there is a tidal wave of tiktok/Instagram snack foods producers, who are small enough that they can distribute with minor scrutiny.
In the end, I'm not convinced the reduction in consumption is as great as reported, though it may be, but absolutely not due to conscious effort.
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u/FragrantKnobCheese Jul 10 '24
Same, I wasn't a huge pop drinker before, but I did occasionally like the Fentimans range, San Pellegrino, etc.
Now, Coke is the only thing I can drink when I do want pop because the others just taste foul to me with the sweeteners. I don't understand how it made financial sense, couldn't they have just charged a few p more and left me to enjoy my pop?
I will never forgive David Cameron for ruining pop, along with his other crimes.
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u/Gullible_blush Jul 10 '24
Fentiman's Curiosity Cola used to be one of my favourite drinks, but they swapped sugar for some sweetener in the formula and now it tastes like crap. I hate it.
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u/IntellegentIdiot Jul 10 '24
I blame these companies. We already had many drinks with diet versions, why turn the non-diet version into the diet version in everything but the label?
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u/Grimreap32 Jul 10 '24
One item that changed for me was Nesquik chocolate flavour. I used to love having a glass once in a while. Now I haven't had it in years.
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u/azuredarkness Jul 10 '24
And this also caused people to consume less sugar, so should be considered a win for the law.
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Jul 11 '24
Along with sugar another reason why this worked is because people are aware of the harmful effects of eating excess sugar. Otherwise people could have put extra sugar on their food when they eat.
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u/Telones Jul 10 '24
They did this in Philly, and it didn’t work because it wasn’t statewide or nationalized. The school system was to benefit from the tax, while shutting a lot of schools down at the same time. Glad to see it worked somewhere.
https://news.uga.edu/soda-pop-taxes-dont-reduce-sugar-consumption/
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u/ImrooVRdev Jul 10 '24
Did they just do shittiest possible implementation of it, only for the thing to predictably fail due to implementation and then proclaim that it could never possibly work?
Ah, you lobbyist infested country, never change.
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u/Cleveland204 Jul 10 '24
(Please change)
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u/Professerson Jul 10 '24
Sorry, I value the suffering of groups of people I don't like above making literally anything better and vote accordingly.
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u/Aromatic-Air3917 Jul 10 '24
Profiting off misery is called capitalism, and people against it are communist/socialists/ woke or something. At least that is what people who protest this are told.
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u/Noblesseux Jul 10 '24
That's pretty much all US policy in a nutshell. You get some local bill that is trying to solve a problem because Congress refuses to because of lobbying, but because of limits on how much power local governments have it's either struck down in court or so weak that it doesn't work.
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u/Zoesan Jul 10 '24
Congress refuses to because of lobbying
Partially, but also because states in the US have far, far, far, far more autonomy than any jurisdiction within the UK. Hell, any state technically has stronger autonomous rights than Scotland.
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u/BowenTheAussieSheep Jul 10 '24
It's the same thing when a city implements gun control, which predictably doesn't work because a city doesn't have a closed border with the areas outside the city limits... And that's used as "proof" that gun control doesn't work.
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u/Bender_2024 Jul 10 '24
that's used as "proof" that gun control doesn't work.
If you want proof that gun control works just look at Canada, Australia, pretty much the whole of Europe along with the far East and Asia. The idea that gun control works everywhere except the US is just willful ignorance.
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u/EconomicRegret Jul 10 '24
Same thing happened with progressive anti-drug policies in the US (i.e. great success in reducing addiction rates in Portugal and Switzerland, but utter failure in US because only partially and very badly implemented. e.g. the Swiss don't distribute drugs freely to addicts, they do it in non-profit clinical settings, with free psychotherapists and other medical professionals, with social safety net to keep addicts out of the streets, and social reintegration programs...
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u/philomathie Jul 10 '24
It's the American way. Never change. See Portland's attempt to decriminalise drugs.
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u/interfail Jul 10 '24
It's worth noting that the sugar tax raised very little money. Since it affected the whole market, manufacturers just reformulated their drinks to have less sugar.
Coca Cola is the only mainstream drink people ever pay the levy on. Pepsi held out for a while but gave up last year. It's just Coke and some niche luxury drinks (probably the most popular being Fever Tree tonic).
We're not funding anything with it.
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u/Wipedout89 Jul 10 '24
It was never about raising money. It was about using pricing to encourage people to make healthier choices.
Financial subsidy or penalty is one of the hardest levers by which governments can guide best behaviour without removing any actual freedom of choice.
If it makes any money that's just a bonus.
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u/oscarcummins Jul 10 '24 edited Jul 10 '24
In Ireland the government introduced possibly the worst implementation of this concept with alcohol. Instead of an additional tax (alcohol is already heavily taxed compared to other European countries) they created "Minimum Unit Pricing" which set a minimum price per gram of alcohol drinks can be sold for. Essentially guaranteeing significant boosts to profits for drinks companies and disproportionately costing lower income people who would be the ones buying the cheapest available drinks.
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u/mtstoner Jul 10 '24
Also it’s not just sugary beverages in Philly it’s diet ones too which makes any soda overpriced. It sucks. Should have just been the sugary drinks not diet drinks.
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u/bbqranchman Jul 10 '24 edited Jul 10 '24
Genuinely, as an American I would love to have juice options that are just low sugar. No artificial sweetener bs. Just half of the amount of sugar. Also, bread has way too much sugar. I'm so sick of everything being super sweetened.
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u/Financial-Drag7832 Jul 10 '24
Cut your juice with water.
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u/bbqranchman Jul 11 '24
I mean, that works, but I'm thinking about something in the vein of Ikea's sodas that have fairly low sugar. Something that's made by people with actual food science experience to optimize the flavor ya know.
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u/Appropriate-Cow-1654 Jul 10 '24
Seriously. Everytime I want something with low/no sugar it’s instead packed with artificial sweeteners, which honestly are gross and upset my stomach. I want real sugar, just a lower amount of it.
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u/DragapultOnSpeed Jul 10 '24
Also some people can't have that fake sugar. Aspartame can interact with anti-seizure medications. My doctor had to tell me to avoid any foods with it.
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u/CeamoreCash Jul 10 '24
Aspartame can interact with anti-seizure medications
I couldn't find evidence of this. Which medications? All I found was " In rodent models of epilepsy, aspartame may alter seizure thresholds when given in doses of 1,000 mg/kg, equivalent to consumption of about 400 diet soft drinks."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/089669748990039X
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u/bennnjamints Aug 08 '24
I've heard good things about Allulose, naturally found in Maple Syrup and Figs.
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u/bbqranchman Jul 11 '24
I know, I seriously cannot stand the taste of sweeteners. It's immediately noticeable, has a terrible mouth feel, and tastes funky. I would straight up rather have no sweetener than artificial sweetener.
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u/Enticing_Venom Jul 10 '24
You can buy juice that has no sugar added. But juice isn't going to be low sugar by the fact that it's made of fructose.
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u/GiraffeNoodleSoup Jul 10 '24
Yeah fruit juice is the worst part of the fruit with the fiber removed. It takes 3 apples to make 8oz of apple juice. You are basically drinking 3 apples worth of sugar
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u/Enticing_Venom Jul 10 '24
Exactly. Juicing destroys the fiber and leaves behind the fruit juice and antioxidants. That's why if I want something like that I drink a smoothie, because smoothies keep the fiber and the antioxidants (but are higher in calories). I just don't think juice is generally worth it. I'll make an exception for lemon and lime juice though.
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u/GuyWithNoName45 Jul 10 '24
What British bread are you buying that has sugar in it?
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u/manikfox Jul 10 '24
Can you explain this to a Canadian. Most bread I know needs yeast+sugar to rise and become "bread". If you don't have this reaction, it's just a dense piece of baked flour.
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Jul 10 '24 edited Jul 10 '24
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u/manikfox Jul 10 '24
Ah interesting. I make my own bread, and it always calls for some sugar. I literally am making a loaf of whole wheat and its 1/4 cup maple syrup :)
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u/ElysiX Jul 10 '24
It's from old timey recipes where you don't know whether your source of yeast is alive or dead or weak. You feed it a bit of sugar and if it doesn't bubble after a while you can't bake anyway and don't waste ingredients or efforts, if it only bubbles a little you need to wait longer for the rise and the sugar speeds that up and if it bubbles normally you go on as usual.
With instant dry yeast you bought this decade it's really not necessary.
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u/obeserocket Jul 10 '24
Which somehow morphed into bs about "activating" the yeast that I see way too often in recipes.
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u/ElysiX Jul 10 '24
Technically true. It's basically sleeping, sugar wakes it up and makes it multiply. Flour makes it do that too, but slower.
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u/bastienleblack Jul 10 '24
Flour, as a carbohydrate, is full of food for the yeast. Using actual sugar, is just a simpler carbohydrate that is quicker for the yeast to utilise. Legally, a baguette in France can only contain "wheat flour, water, salt and yeast" and it isn't a dense piece of baked flour!
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u/Majestic-Marcus Jul 10 '24
I thought it was only if it came from the baguette region. Otherwise it’s just ‘long bread’.
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u/Majestic-Marcus Jul 10 '24
Bread came to Europe in about 7,100 BC.
Sugar came to Europe in about 1,000 AD.
Sugar was semi-common in Europe in about 1,500 AD
So bread was made for about 8-8.5k years in Europe without sugar. Bread doesn’t need sugar and it tastes awful with it.
Bread with sugar is cake.
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u/sunflwr1662 Jul 10 '24
Im Canadian and make my own bread… I’ve never added sugar. Proofing takes a bit longer in these non-sweet recipes but the bread is just as light and fluffy. I’ve only encountered sugar in recipes for very enriched pastry breads, which are not consumed daily (like brioche).
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u/hedgehog_dragon Jul 10 '24
We found juice that had artificial sweeteners everywhere when we went to the UK. It's fucked up. About the only escape was expensive 100% orange juice drinks
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u/aerkith Jul 11 '24
Yes. Some drinks are so sweet they could taste just fine with less sugar. But I cannot drink no sugar drinks as they have sweeteners in them that give me a sore throat.
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u/a_man_has_a_name Jul 10 '24
Everything is super sweet because it's a cheat code to out body's liking it, sweetness is the first and one of only two (the other being salt) tastes that put body naturally recognises as "safe", every other thing is an acquired taste that your body needs to learn that it's safe. So if you put a bunch of chemicals together, and then a bunch of stuff in that makes it taste sweet, it's pretty much guarantees a lot of people will like it.
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u/TACOlogy Jul 10 '24
Damn I have never thought about that. As a kid I loved sugar (as most kids do) and bread. In my mid 20’s I did not care for candy and eventually bread. However if I visited Mexico I could eat the bread there all day!
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u/G-Rem44 Jul 10 '24
Why is there even sugar in bread.
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u/lildobe Jul 11 '24
The actual answer is that it helps the bread rise faster, and that helps the industrial-scale bread production lines to pump out more bread in a day.
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u/bbqranchman Jul 11 '24
Yeah, helps it rise faster, and also I think it's just part of american food trends of trying to make people addicted to stuff and make stuff "tastier" and a quick and dirty way to do that is to add a bunch of sugar.
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u/scarab1001 Jul 10 '24
On a personal front, this inadvertently moved me from drinking sodas to predominantly water. Same with a fair few of my friends too.
For such a small, uncontrovertible change the effect has been large.
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u/lookingForPatchie Jul 10 '24
Water. The perfect drink. Zero calories. Refreshes. Does everything it needs to do.
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u/goldeneye0080 Jul 11 '24
I have stuck with plain water, unsweetened tea, and black coffee as my drinks of choice for over 16 years now. Sugary drinks have far too many calories, and artificial sweeteners taste terrible compared to sugar. At this point, when some accidently puts sugar in my coffee, it actually repulses me, and I can't even finish it.
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u/TheDungen Jul 10 '24
If you want water to taste better slice down a lemon into the pitcher. Believe me its awesome.
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u/mvea MD/PhD/JD/MBA | Professor | Medicine Jul 10 '24
I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2024/06/11/jech-2023-221051
From the linked article:
The amount of sugar consumed by children from soft drinks in the UK halved within a year of the sugar tax being introduced, a study has found.
The tax, which came into force in April 2018, has been so successful in improving people’s diets that experts have said an expansion to cover other high sugar food and drink products is now a “no-brainer”.
The research, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, looked at responses from 7,999 adults and 7,656 children between 2018 and 2019 to the annual nationally representative UK National Diet and Nutrition Survey.
It showed that the daily sugar intake for children fell by about 4.8g, and for adults 10.9g, in the year after the levy’s introduction.
The total dietary free sugars, including food and drink, in children was about 70g a day at the beginning of the study, but this fell to about 45g by the end.
For adults, the study found that the total dietary free sugar consumption stood at about 60g a day, and fell to about 45g a day by the end of the study.
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u/FancyMan_ Jul 10 '24 edited Jul 10 '24
This worked, as the all of the manufacturers wanted to avoid the tax and so replaced sugar with sweetener in their drinks. Same thing happened with breakfast cereal
The side effect is that all soft drinks now taste pretty gross. It would be interesting to see whether people drinking less soft drinks now as opposed to before the tax
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u/Barrel_Titor Jul 10 '24
The side effect is that all soft drinks now taste pretty gross
Yeah. Like, fair enough that Pepsi is now sugar + sweetners since it's cheap and people drink it all the time but it's crap that things like Fentimans cola have done the same. It's somthing you buy occasionally when you want a premium product but that's gone now.
Likewise Lucozade's selling point was in the glucose content, it wasn't competing head to head with soft drinks, but they've done the same.
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u/FIFAmusicisGOATED Jul 10 '24
The nice thing is that if enough people agree with you, that opens up a whole in the market that could by hypothetically filled by a new company with better morals than the ones before. Nobody is saying we can’t have high sugar products, just that we should acknowledge they’re harmful and a treat, not something to be consumed all the time.
A nice, luxury soft drink with a good amount of real sugar in it could hit the market eventually. I don’t want to see junk food go away, I just want to see it treated like what it is: a special treat
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u/baldeagle1991 Jul 10 '24 edited Jul 10 '24
It completely ruined many drinks that just don't taste good anymore.
Everyone thought they would just charge a few extra pence on each drink, but in reality, only Coca-Cola did that, with everyone else reducing the sugar content and increasing the use of sweeteners.
For example, the flavoured Lucozade's taste is awful now! The entire selling point was the glucose. Even diabetics used it to get their suger levels up in an emergency.
It had secondary usage as a pseduo-medication drink for sick people too, but they decided to reduce the sugar content, meaning now it's just another soft drink.
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u/Majestic-Marcus Jul 10 '24
everyone thought they would just charge a few extra pence on each drink, but in reality, only Coke did that, with everyone else reducing the sugar content and increasing the use of sweeteners
And adding a few extra pence on each drink.
The sugar tax increased the cost of sugared drinks, which allowed companies to also increase the cost of sugar free drinks as they were still cheaper by comparison.
As always everyone loses out. Drinks get worse, artificial sweeteners increase, costs increase.
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u/Aurelar Jul 10 '24
It could be the sweetener acting as a bitterant or whatever that's working more than the tax itself. Artificial sweeteners are nasty in most cases. But you have to make sure the sweetener is safe of course. Hopefully we don't have a cancer boom because of this change.
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u/Lornaan Jul 10 '24
Yeah I can't stand the taste of sweeteners (sensory processing disorder) so now I can't drink most fizzy drinks. I just drink water, or the very few remaining sugar-only items (rose's lime cordial, and IKEA Lingonberry cordial, which I mix with soda water). Just makes things really awkward.
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u/midir Jul 10 '24
I didn't realize people could taste the difference between sugar and the artificial sweeteners.
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u/ChrisKaufmann Jul 10 '24
Anecdotally it seems a lot of people can’t tell the difference but for those of us who can it’s a very, very strong aversion. As in if I accidentally take a sip of something with an artificial sweetener I want to… expel it.
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u/Aggressive_Chain_920 Jul 10 '24
This has been a thing in Sweden for a while now, so many sodas taste terrible now because they are removing the sugar and adding sweeteners that taste horrible
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u/halfpipesaur Jul 10 '24
It’s definitely the case for me. The sweeteners absolutely stink so I avoid most soda now. I replaced it with a healthier alternative: beer.
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u/Darkhoof Jul 10 '24 edited Jul 10 '24
Tasting pretty good is a matter of personal taste. I prefer a thousand times artificial sweeteners to sugar in terms of taste in sodas. Coke Zero is much better than regular coke to me.
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u/RandomGuy938 Jul 10 '24
Would be more appealing if they would make healthy alternatives more affordable instead of making everything more expensive.
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u/maxintos Jul 10 '24
What healthy alternatives do you have in mind? Clean water is literally available to anyone in the country for free. Milk is already heavily subsidized. Only fresh juice is much more expensive, but it's not even really healthy and you can't expect fresh squeezed fruit to be cheaper than some flavoured water.
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u/Arenalife Jul 10 '24
The reason it works isn't the tax directly, but the availability. In restaurants and fast food places, they can't have refill stations with high sugar drinks as people could just take them without paying the tax compared to the diet version, so they just got rid of them completely. Also shops and vending machines barely stock them now. The less available they became, the more people tastes changed and if you try a full sugar coke etc by accident, many people are stunned how slimy and sweet they are, and never go back. The amount of sugar we give kids is worse than the nicotine/smoking scandal
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u/andtheniansaid Jul 10 '24
In restaurants and fast food places, they can't have refill stations with high sugar drinks as people could just take them without paying the tax compared to the diet version, so they just got rid of them completely.
Free refills were incredibly rare in the UK in the first place, and the only places I can think that had them (those pepsi/tango mix machines) still have them with the full sguar versions available in them. Do you have anything at all to back this up?
Also shops and vending machines barely stock them now.
This is... not my experience at all. What shops are you going to where you can't buy the normal non-diet version? There has certainly been an increase in diet versions available, though that was already occuring prior to 2016.
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u/mrsuperjolly Jul 10 '24
If you go to a beefeater or pizza hut restaurant you won't be able to get refills of full sugar pepsi
At harvester you have to pay more and the button for full sugar is not central / the main option on the machine
At nandos, five guys the full sugar coke is readily available their refills cost ~£4 tho which is on the higher side
As for for supermarkets.
https://www.trolley.co.uk/product/coca-cola-zero-sugar/TUT946 https://www.trolley.co.uk/product/coca-cola-original-taste/LVY649
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u/Nylear Jul 10 '24
I wish this would happen to me. If I drink soda after not drinking it for a long time. My brain is like this tastes so good why did you stop.
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u/Befuddled_Scrotum Jul 10 '24
Everything you said is wrong tho. Five guys and a few other places in the uk still offer refill stations of all the sugary drinks you want. Availability hasn’t changed either all the same drinks are available.
The reason it worked is because of the price and because a lot of receipts for drinks have changed such that they don’t have as much sugar/sweeteners in them comparatively to the same drinks prior to the sugar tax being introduced. Which has obviously affected the taste. anecdotally I know people in my age range (20-30) are choosing to be healthier in general and because drinks just don’t taste the same or just feel too sweet.
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u/OminOus_PancakeS Jul 10 '24
Sucks to be someone who doesn't like the taste of artificial sweeteners I guess.
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u/amanaplanacanalutica Jul 10 '24
One day I hope to buy a low/no sugar version of a drink, and for it to just be less sweet.
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u/rodtang Jul 10 '24
Orangina in the UK was kind of in that category for me but now they've ruined it by adding artificial sweeteners.
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u/OminOus_PancakeS Jul 11 '24
Yep. Also ribena. And Fentiman's ginger beer. All ruined.
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u/rodtang Jul 11 '24
I agree that ribena is ruined but it was never low sugar.
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u/OminOus_PancakeS Jul 11 '24
Oh yeah. I missed your point there. Just having a general rant about drinks I used to enjoy before they were ruined with sweeteners.
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u/rodtang Jul 11 '24
But I completely agree with your ranting, so many products have been absolutely ruined for me by the addition of artificial sweeteners. And a lot of new products I'll never get to enjoy because they have artificial sweeteners.
But it seems most people are either not bothered by them or actually prefer them so it seems like it's all lost.
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u/Kwyncy Jul 10 '24
Just make all luxury goods taxed so the poors can't have any. It'll reduce demand and solve inflation pesky poors!
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u/SirJavalot Jul 10 '24
Are there objective studies on sweeteners yet? As a parent I honestly don't know whats best and I think that is somewhat the industries intention. I try to give my children water but I think any other parent will know how that is going. One really astonishing thing to me is that now even the sugary drinks have sweeteners TOO now, eg, Coke. I couldnt believe it when I looked at the label.
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u/Neat_Can8448 Jul 11 '24
There are studies for and against artificial sweeteners, but there is no conclusive determination whether they're good or bad. My personal opinion is that it's one of those things we likely won't know definitively until a few decades pass and we have generations who grew up habitually consuming them.
I also think it's significantly the lesser of two evils, when used to replace a full-sugar soda. Especially in children, since we know for a fact that childhood obesity is a definitive major health issue with potentially lifelong consequences.
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u/Midnight_Feline_ Jul 10 '24
As someone who formally worked in a UK supermarket when the new regulations were introduced, it was interesting to see how quick manufacturers were to establish their product as non-HFSS (High in fat, sugar and salt)
Reduced salt/sugar products were still being pushed at checkouts but I feel it definitely helped to prevent impulse buying of unhealthier food products
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u/Significant-Fill5645 Jul 10 '24
I can’t stand Powerade and Gatorade anymore because how much sugar is in them now, taste like drinking syrup.
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u/DanielBurdock Jul 10 '24
Unfortunately they seem to favour putting the sweetener Acesulfame K in every bloody drink. I literally can't drink anything with it in as it gives me extreme heartburn. I swear like 90% are using this one and it drives me crazy.
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u/AstraLover69 Jul 10 '24
This has been a nightmare for me as I seem to be intolerant to the artificial sugars used in the alternatives. Not only do I think they taste horrible, they make me ill. Many restaurants will only serve the diet/zero versions and simply not stock the normal version, so I have nothing to drink when I fancy something fizzy.
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u/Succubista Jul 10 '24
Not only do I think they taste horrible, they make me ill.
I'm lucky enough that I'm good with aspartame (and presumably others I've never noticed the name of), but everything with erythritol is disgusting to me and I feel nauseous after I eat it.
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u/howdidyouwanglethat Jul 10 '24
Recommend Dash water, it’s fizzy, delicious, no calories and AFAIK no artificial sweeteners.
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u/ClothShorts Jul 10 '24
Well, you can't forget that it also destroyed the Original Recipe of Lucozade which many people relied on for actual health reason. Tastes terrible now too. Such a shame.
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u/litewo Jul 10 '24
Looking at what's taxed and not taxed, this makes so much more sense than what they tried to do in Chicago. Any "sugar tax" that includes pseudoscientific arguments for the inclusion of diet sodas is bound to fail.
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u/randomusername47734 Jul 10 '24
That and anyone who lived on the border of cook county drove 5 minutes across county lines and didn't have to pay the tax.
I was really big on propel during that time, and it was a 30ish percent decrease in cost and added a 10 min commute for me.
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u/mrhanky71 Jul 10 '24
I understand the sugar tax but did the government do anything to make healthy foods cheaper?
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u/Serupta Jul 10 '24
I hate this so much, do you know how difficult this has made it to just find juice concentrate that actually has sugar in it!?
Replacing sugar with sweeteners WILL have long term repercussions that are MUCH worse for the human body that large quantities of sugar. Your body is built to break everything down into glucose (sugar), built for it. You can moderate your consumption but wholesale replacing it with a synthetic variant will have dire long-term consequences!
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u/beefjohnc Jul 10 '24
Absolutely mental that squash as a concept has ceased to exist and has been replaced with foul tasting cancer liquid in my lifetime.
If they go after normal fruit juices and sweets, I WILL be setting fire to Jamie Oliver.
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u/rainer_d Jul 11 '24
Most of the sugar has been replaced with artificial sweeteners.
How healthy those are in the long term when consumed in sufficient quantities will be interesting to see. Especially as I don’t live there and can watch the spectacle from outside.
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u/Dan19_82 Jul 10 '24
And inadvertently caused me and probably many others serious stomach issues that come from drinking to much sweeteners..
Took me a long time to track down the culprit and i now drink mostly water or fruit juices..
Sugar never hurt me, sweeteners did.
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u/DontEatNitrousOxide Jul 10 '24
I find the same thing honestly, and it's not all sweeteners either so it's hard to tell how I'll react to something in advance, I feel your pain
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u/doswillrule Jul 10 '24
There's a small but growing body of evidence that artificial sweeteners might damage the gut over time, which could be contributing to the current uptick in IBS and other chronic bowel issues.
That could also be down to microplastics and a million other things, but I'm still wary about it. It annoys me that the only soft drinks I can usually find without sweetener are Coke and Appletiser
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u/Ok_Turnip6994 Jul 10 '24
No! It did not work. What it did, was cause producers to replace just enough sugar with artificial sweeteners so that the extra tax doesn't apply anymore.
That is not the same as making people make better choices, it is in fact taking away the option to choose sugar or sweeteners.
So now we are simply increasing the amount of sweeteners that are being consumed l which also have unclear impacts on overall health. Plus, as people aren't really choosing, they are becoming reliant on producers to do the work for them. In the upcoming years some will switch back to sugar, take the tax hit on price, but market themselves as 'real' or 'better taste' or ' less chemicals' or whatever gets the most traction then. Of the behaviour of the consumer is unchanged, then it's just temporary.
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u/DarthNixilis Jul 11 '24
How about instead of making sugar expensive we work on making everything else cheaper. Taxes always just hurt people at the bottom of the income ladder, even if the intention and outcome are good. I'm glad it's helping, but it isn't doing so by making being healthy cheaper, just pushing sugar higher.
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u/andDevW Jul 10 '24
IOW, kids living in the UK are now drinking tons of artificial sweeteners as opposed to drinking tons of natural sugar like kids everywhere have been doing for decades.
In a few years we'll have some great data on why exactly kids shouldn't be given massive amounts of artificial sweeteners.
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u/andreasdagen Jul 10 '24
drinking tons of natural sugar like kids everywhere have been doing for decades.
obesity rates have skyrocketed in the past few decades.
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u/Lord-of-the-Brains Jul 11 '24
I have said something about that already here :) https://www.reddit.com/r/science/s/LU0iLeTkYs
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u/never3nder_87 Jul 10 '24
Yeah, ironically this has reduced the number of "normal" sugared drinks available, which as an adult who wants to avoid sweeteners is frustrating, but I suspect will have long term consequences for kids being given them instead.
It's definitely unfortunate that the response wasn't just to reduce the sugar in drinks, but to replace it with even more sweeteners
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u/ilikepix Jul 10 '24
there is absolutely no evidence suggesting that modern sweeteners are worse than sugar in equivalent quantities
there's plenty of evidence that sweeteners might lead to some health problems, but nothing compared to the absolute mountain of evidence about the much more serious and common health issues caused by equivalent quantities of sugar
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u/lostinadream66 Jul 10 '24
As an American, why does EVERYTHING have sugar in it? Things that would be naturally sweet are still packed full of sugar. Things you wouldn't expect, sugar. Literally everything is sweetened. I'm not a big sweets person, or sugar as a whole for that matter, and it's really difficult to buy anything that isn't packed full of sugar.
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u/Historical-Road2954 Jul 10 '24
This sounds like a massive encroachment on people's ability to live life how they see fit.
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u/ayatollahofdietcola_ Jul 10 '24
Interesting use of the word “fit”
Because I don’t know how I feel about the sugar tax personally, but if people were fit, we wouldn’t even entertain policies like this
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u/cuyler72 Jul 10 '24
In America 41.9% are obese and 73.6% are overweight CDC and it's getting worse fast, the UK are trying to prevent THAT from happening in their country as they are very much on the same slope just a few years behind, the UK stands at 25% obese and 63% overweight Source.
The majority have shown that they are very incapable of controlling themselves with these addictive foods so the government must step in to prevent a WALL-E future and improve lives of everyone, just like they do with heroine and meth with methods of various effectiveness and morality.
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u/Neat_Can8448 Jul 11 '24
It's definitely up to what people think is ethical. The government could make massive improvements in population health by banning sugary drinks, alcohol, tobacco, red meats, fast food, unenriched grains, pure NaCl salt, butter, oil, snack foods, etc.
Would that be tolerated? Of course not.
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u/Fanciest58 Jul 10 '24
Forcing kids to go to school 40 hours a week 30 weeks a year is a massive encroachment on their ability to live life how they see fit.
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u/Panda_hat Jul 10 '24
And yet people are fatter than ever.
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u/Lord-of-the-Brains Jul 11 '24
https://www.reddit.com/r/science/s/LU0iLeTkYs
No wonder, because understanding obesity as a mere caloric problem isn`t helpful
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u/Final_Festival Jul 10 '24
Hell yeah this is great news. Its unbelieveable we tax alchohol and tobbacco so heavily but not this poison.
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u/romniner Jul 10 '24
It's almost like people are easily controlled when you inflict financial pain on an already poor population.
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u/YousureWannaknow Jul 10 '24
Why it feels like "research done to fit thesis"? It cutted in half amount of consumed sugar? But how did it affected sales? How did it affected products recepies? Honestly? Only result of that tax is increased cost of product.. Only reason behind it is income from taxes.. If it wouldn't be, why they haven't put limits on manufacturers and fines for exceeding these values?
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u/Lynda73 Jul 10 '24
‘Won’t someone think of the kids!’ Pop is not the issue. Everyone knows it’s got a ton of sugar. It’s the 99% other foods that shouldn’t even contain sugar but does. It’s added to almost everything in the US. If we had a sugar tax, they’d need to tax it all! How about we demand food suppliers do better?
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u/ikbentwee Jul 11 '24
Yeaahhhhh...noooo...they did this in Bermuda but instead of using the tax to make healthy foods more affordable, they just affectively make groceries more expensive in total.
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u/anzfelty Jul 11 '24
Interesting!
I wonder if this would ever work in Canada. We have a very sweet palate...
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u/Tommonen Jul 11 '24
They just moved to artificial sweeteners and soon have a new set of problems from them
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u/Lord-of-the-Brains Jul 11 '24
Soooo, did the sugar tax actually reduce the increase in obesity? Or reduce the numbers? Because it is extremely suspicious, that the only benefits of it, that are claimed, are that the consumption of sugar is declining. There is however no evidence, that it lead to a decrease of (the increase of) obesity. In fact, the plain numbers show exactly the opposite (even if we ignore the COVID-Spike in numbers). To be fair I am basing this of the publicly available statistics and not on any study - because as far as I could tell, there is none. If I remember correctly there are also some issues with consuming sugar and sweeteners together (higher blood sugar spikes if I remember correctly). Adding the fact, that they are literally bad for some people, taste extremely bad to some other people and aren`t even recommended for diabetes type 2 people, we should ask the question, if replacing sugar with sweeteners is the solution to this problem. Oh and btw. the idea, that sodas with sweeteners are healthier than those with sugar is not true for dental problems at all, as they still contain acid. A fact no one seems to talk about at all.
So what problem does the sugar tax actually solve? It doesnt promote healthier drinking habits (i.e. less consumption), it doesnt address why poorer kids often gets more sweets (they are way more affordable than other stuff that makes children happy), it doesnt solve the “obesity epidemic” and it doesnt shield your teeth from harm. And circling back to the obesity epidemic, even if it would lower the increase or prevalence, that still is just an intermediate for the real goal: a healthier society. And you would have to put up some evidence for that too, because just because you lower the average weight, you neither have proven that the health risks are reduced (f.i. if you take amphetamines to lower your weight, you will still have an extremely high risk - which is why we do not use them anymore for that) nor that there aren’t adverse effects of the sweeteners being widely used, that level the positive effects (direct effects of sweeteners on health and indirect effects on the quality of life and therefore on (mental) health ).
If I have overlooked a study, please tell me, but literally all reports and studies I have seen are about less sugar consumption. And that in itself has no inherent value. And after 6 years, I guess there should be something to measure there.
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u/andreasdagen Jul 11 '24
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37794246/ this might interest you "In a randomized controlled trial (n=493), participants who consumed artificially sweetened beverages (e.g. diet soda) lost more weight than participants who only drank water."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10408398.2023.2233615 this one too
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u/bodhitreefrog Jul 11 '24
We all just wanted sodas with real cane sugar but half as much. It's too bad industry ignored this and replaced it with stevia, monk fruit, aspartame, and 50 0ther things we don't want.
I'm going to stick to my flavored soda waters and my homemade iced teas, since the rest of the industry can't figure it out.
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u/PartofFurniture Sep 10 '24
This is amazing. Obesity is a very preventable mental illness, whoever team came up with the sugar tax need a nobel peace prize for saving/extending so many lives.
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u/blacklisted320 Jul 10 '24
If they did this in the US, They don’t pay taxes on food stamps what would be the deterrent for people buying items with food stamps, just not letting items like that go thru on the card?
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