Taxes Trimmed Mexican Soda Consumption For Two Years

(Reuters Health) - A soda tax has continued to help reduce Mexico’s consumption of unhealthy beverages, researchers say. Purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages were down nearly 10 percent in the second year of the tax, a new study shows. “The tax is working” toward its objective, senior author Shu Wen Ng said in a phone interview. Ng, a health economist and a professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and her team estimated that Mexicans bought 9.7 percent less sugary drinks in 2015 than they would have before the tax took effect. In an effort to wean consumers off sugary drinks and reduce the epidemics of obesity and diabetes, Mexico imposed a peso-per-liter excise tax at the beginning of 2014. Mexicans cut their purchases of soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages by 5.5 percent the first year that the tax was imposed, the study calculated. Researchers used Nielsen survey data on store purchases for nearly 6,650 urban Mexican households and estimated beverage purchases after adjusting for inflation, population growth and seasonal differences. The poorest households showed the biggest drops in purchases of taxed sugary beverages, an average decrease of nearly 12 percent over two years. Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, chair of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, has also been studying the public health effects of Mexico’s soda tax. She described the new study as &ldquo...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news