My KQED colleague Mina Kim produced a great piece examining whether higher soda prices leads to weight loss -- and the health benefits that come with it. She profiled a 17-year-old football player from Tracy -- Jorge Cota, who at 5'11" weighed 321 pounds. He had high blood pressure and may have had heart and kidney problems. That was a year ago.
While Cota since has made many diet changes, the first thing he did was cut out his drink of choice, Dr. Pepper. He had been drinking two or three cans or bottles a day.
He's since lost 70 pounds, Kim reports.
Still, Cota told Kim that he doubts a penny-per-ounce soda tax would make a difference in soda consumption. After all, a 20-ounce soda would go up only 20 cents.
Kim turned to Kelly Brownell, head of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. As she reports:
His group has studied how pricing changes affect consumer behavior.
“The penny-per-ounce, which is the level of tax being discussed the most around the country, is enough to affect consumption, somewhere between 10 or 20 percent or so,” Brownell says. “[That] would be enough to not make it a terrible burden on consumers, but would affect consumption of the product enough to reduce health care costs.”
More importantly, Brownell says, passage of the tax would give a big boost to the national trend away from sugary drinks that’s already begun in school districts and communities where demand for fresh local food is growing.
“When the beverage industry claims that this really won’t affect consumption patterns, then why in the world are they fighting it so hard?” Brownell asks.
As State of Health reported earlier this year, not only does the reduced consumption reduce health care costs, researchers say, it can also save lives. Reduced consumption equals modest weight loss, which reduces risk of diabetes, and over 10 years researchers estimated 26,000 lives would be saved (or "premature deaths" avoided).