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Let Them Drink Water!What a fat tax really means for America.

By Daniel EngberPosted Monday, Sept. 21, 2009, at 5:29 PM ET

Read more of Daniel Engber's columns on obesity and health care reform.

Not long after the attack on Pearl Harbor, in the winter of 1942, physiologist A.J. Carlson made a radical suggestion: If the nation's largest citizens were charged a fee—say, $20 for each pound of overweight—we might feed the war effort overseas while working to subdue an "injurious luxury" at home.

Sixty-seven years later, the "fat tax" is back on the table. We're fighting another war—our second-most-expensive ever—and Congress seems on the verge of spending $1 trillion on health care. Once again, a bloated budget may fall on the backs of the bloated public. Some commentators, following Carlson, have lately called for a tax on fat people themselves (cf. the Huffington Post and the New York Times); others, like a team of academics writing in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, propose a hefty surcharge on soft drinks instead.

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The notion hasn't generated much enthusiasm in Congress, but fat taxes are spreading through state legislatures: Four-fifths of the union now takes a cut on the sales of junk food or soda. Pleas for a federal fat tax are getting louder, too. The New York Times recently endorsed a penny-per-ounce soda tax, and Michael Pollan has made a convincing argument for why the insurance industry may soon throw its weight behind the proposal. Even President Obama said he likes the idea in a recent interview with Men's Health. (For the record, Stephen Colbert is against the measure: "I do not obey big government; I obey my thirst.")

For all this, the public still has strong reservations about the fat tax. The state-level penalties now in place have turned out to be way too small to make anyone lose weight, and efforts to pass more heavy-handed laws have so far fallen short. But proponents say it's only a matter of time before taxing junk food feels as natural as taxing cigarettes. The latter has been a tremendous success, they argue, in bringing down rates of smoking and death from lung cancer. In theory, a steep tax on sweetened beverages could do the same for overeating and diabetes.

It may take more than an analogy with tobacco to convince voters. As my colleague William Saletan points out, the first step in policing eating habits is to redefine food as something else. If you want to tax the hell out of soda, you need to make people think that it's a drug, not a beverage—that downing a Coke is just like puffing on a cigarette. But is soda as bad as tobacco? Let's ask the neuropundits.

Junk food literally "alters the biological circuitry of our brains," writes David Kessler in this summer's best-seller, The End of Overeating. In a previous book, Kessler detailed his role in prosecuting the war on smoking as the head of the FDA; now he's explaining what makes us fat with all the magisterial jargon of cognitive neuroscience. Eating a chocolate-covered pretzel, he says, activates the brain's pleasure system—the dopamine reward circuit, to be exact—and changes the "functional connectivity among important brain regions." Thus, certain foods—the ones concocted by industrial scientists and laden with salt, sugar, and fat—can circumvent our natural inclinations and trigger "action schemata" for mindless eating. Got that? Junk food is engineered to enslave us. Kessler even has a catchphrase to describe these nefarious snacks: They're hyperpalatable.

Try as we might, we're nearly powerless to resist these treats. That's because evolution has us programmed to experience two forms of hunger. The first kicks in when we're low on energy. As an adaptation, its purpose is simple enough—we eat to stay alive. The second, called hedonic hunger, applies even when we're full—it's the urge to eat for pleasure. When food is scarce, hedonic hunger comes in handy, so we can stock up on calories for the hard times ahead. But in a world of cheap food, the same impulse makes us fat.

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Daniel Engber is a senior editor at Slate. He can be reached at .

Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty.

COMMENTS

Before we go off and tax junk food and soda -- most of which contain high-fructose corn syrup and/or other corn derivatives -- wouldn't it make sense to end corn subsidies? These subsidies make junk food/soda prices artificially low; ending them would raise the prices to what they should have been in the first place. Maybe then there will be more of an even playing field for healthier (unsubsidized) foods.

-- pb53
(To reply, click here)

That's an excellent point: Right now, the government effectively lowers the price of soda by subsidizing the production of high-fructose corn syrup. To impose a tax on top of subsidy does seem kind of ridiculous.

On the other hand, corn subsidies turn out to have a minimal impact on the price of soda. The corn content of HFCS contributes less than 2 percent (PDF) to the cost of producing a can of Coke, and the subsidies amount to just a few pennies in the retail price. Is that enough to make people fat? No. We already know (from state-level soda taxes) that price shifts that small don't have a significant effect on consumption patterns or obesity rates.

-- Dan Engber
(To reply, click here)

Not everybody can drink their tap water. I live in a rural area of West Virginia and we don't get city water, our water comes from a well. We have hard water and although we have a water softener the water is still pretty undrinkable. It has an incredibly nasty taste to it with an even worse aftertaste. Many people around where I live have this problem. At my household we buy bottled water to drink, which is pretty expensive. I know the tax is just on pop but I honestly would not be surprised if they decided to tax bottled water too. I have to wonder what most of the people around where I live (who are desperately poor) are going to do when they start taxing soda.

-- Cady
(To reply, click here)

Since consumers wouldn't really care that much and it's hard to feel the corn syrup grower's pain, a solution would be to tax calorie-sweetened soda, and leave stevia-sweetened soda untaxed. This would be better than taxing all soda, because consumers would likely just reduce slightly-- maybe even somewhat-- their soda consumption. But faced with a choice between sugar and corn syrup sweetened Dr. Pepper at 150 calories a can and a higher price, and Diet Dr Pepper sweetened with stevia at 0 calories and no extra tax, I would expect the "regular" Dr Pepper to grow dusty on the shelves. One of the chief reasons for avoiding "diet" soda heretofore has been the stuff used to make it sweet, all chemicals of dubious value and safety. stevia is safe, natural, and very sweet. Does it taste exactly like sugar? No. So what? People can adapt. But stevia should be the default sweetener in things like soda and ice cream, not sugar.

-- DuckworkerMike
(To reply, click here)

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