Taxes on Sugar-Sweetened Beverages to Curb Future Obesity and Diabetes Epidemics

Diet is the leading cause of health loss globally according to the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2010, contributing 10% of all health loss [1]. Requiring many assumptions, the GBD team also estimated that 300,000 (95% uncertainty interval: 212,000 to 404,000) deaths per year were attributable to diets high in sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) [1], or about 0.6% of all deaths globally per year. Thus the impact of SSBs on global health is not as big as tobacco, alcohol, or salt, but it is still important. A feature of SSBs is how much they ‘‘stand out’’ as an unnecessary health risk— they tend to have little or no nutritional value, leading to labels such as ‘‘empty calories.’’ Moreover, there are readily available healthy drinks that can be substitutes, such as water, milk, and tea. Lowcalorie and diet soda drinks can hardly be considered ‘‘healthy’’ but are also a less hazardous substitute. SSBs are therefore a common target for public health action, from health education to regulation (e.g., bans in schools [2]) to taxes [3].