Forget Taxes—Warning Labels Are the Next Front in the Soda Wars

Standing in line at a fast food restaurant, you skip the cheese and go with grilled instead of deep fried—gotta keep it healthy. But as you get ready to pay, you don’t think twice about adding a soda to your order. That indulgence is an ingrained habit for many Americans—and this addiction to sugary drinks has a deadly cost.

Drinking one soda a day increases your chances of becoming obese by 25 percent,  according to the California Center for Public Health Advocacy—and in children, that number jumps to 55 percent. Doubling that intake for 6 months can increase the amount of fat in the liver by 150 percent, which can lead to type 2 diabetes.

The group is sponsoring a new bill introduced in the California legislature Wednesday that would require safety warning labels on sugary drinks that have 75 calories or more per 12 ounces. The warning will simply state: Drinking beverages with added sugar(s) contributes to obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay.

The effort is driven by an alarming increase in obesity and diabetes. In supposedly health-conscious California, more than 60 percent of adults and 40 percent of children are overweight, making them more vulnerable to heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure and asthma; and 14 percent have diabetes, which can affect the kidneys, nerves and eyesight.

It’s not just the Golden State that’s suffering this epidemic. Across the U.S, nearly a quarter of all teenagers are pre-diabetic, nearly ten percent of adults are diabetic and one-third of adults and children are obese. This has led to a host of initiatives to reduce soda consumption across the country—with varying degrees of success.

“It’s part of a national movement,” Harold Goldstein, CCPHA’s executive director, said of the bill. “There are 16 teaspoons of sugar in a 20 ounce cup of soda, and because it’s absorbed so quickly, it overwhelms the pancreas which work to reduce our blood sugar level and at the same time, (excess sugar) leads to accumulation of fat in the liver—and this combination is what leads to diabetes."

In 2012, New York City's then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg famously tried to ban so called “big gulp” drinks—sodas and other sugary beverages of more than 16 ounces—which ultimately got shot down after a series of court cases. In Berkeley, Calif., voters passed the nation’s first ever soda tax in 2014, with supporters receiving advertising and financial help from Bloomberg. Revenue from the one cent per ounce tax is supposed to fund efforts to curb sodas and energy drinks consumption. In nearby San Francisco, similar efforts failed to garner the needed majority of votes. Illinois and Maryland have looked into soda taxes too.

When compared to Bloomberg’s portion size restriction—or a tax—Goldstein said the warning label is more of a libertarian strategy.

“It’s an ethical obligation of the state to educate customers about a product that is so harmful,” he said. “Just tell the facts and let consumers decide if they want to buy it or not.”

Despite the spotty track record of similar public health initiatives, Goldstein is not worried by other efforts that been stymied by successful lobbying by beverage manufacturers. The Surgeon General’s warning that is on tobacco products was initiated in 1965 and it took a while for habits to change, he pointed out—but 50 years later, it has proved to be effective in reducing smoking.

Efforts to warn consumers about the health risks in consuming sugary drinks are still in the early stages, but he is confident it will be status quo in every state in the next 10 years.

“When California public schools (eliminated) sodas and junk food in 2005, that was the year when childhood obesity rates slowed down, after going up for 20 years,” Goldstein said. 

Mexico, which is also fighting alarming rates of obesity, is seeing early successes too. After it passed one of the first countrywide soda taxes last year, there has been a 6 to 7 percent drop in soda consumption in just 6 months.

Original article from TakePart