Paper proposes tax on foods that make us fat

Figures in real health costs

Wendy Natt, Aug 17, 09.

Pediatric cardiologist and former vice president of Texas Children’s Hospital Dr. Arthur Garson Jr. has co-authored a paper that calls for a 10 percent tax on the foods that make us fat, as well as a number of other measures that the article refers to as “aggressive public policy interventions.”

The paper, “Reducing Obesity: Policy Strategies from the Tobacco Wars,” examines the health, societal, and financial costs of obesity, a dangerous condition that has reached epidemic proportions in the US population:

The obese and overweight experience chronic illness, poor health, and more than 100,000 preventable deaths each year. For the average affected individual, obesity has a much greater impact on health status and health care costs than either smoking or heavy drinking.

If recent trends continue, 40 percent of adults will be obese in just 6 years and, for the first time in history, Americans’ average life span will shrink rather than grow.

Per capita health care costs for obese people are 34 percent higher than for non-obese individuals, according to previous research cited in the paper. Costs increase to 70 percent when a person is morbidly obese.

On a national scale, obesity-related medical costs costs are being paid by all of us - in the form of taxes and increased insurance rates - add up to approximately $133 billion per year. When people who are simply overweight are added to this figure, the cost of health problems due to excess weight goes up to $228 billion.

Most of the obesity-fighting strategies described in the paper are adaptions of measures used to discourage smoking in the US. Since these anti-smoking programs were initiated, the smoking rate among Americans has decreased from 42 percent in 1965 to the current rate of 20 percent, says the report.

Taxation on unhealthy foods has been independently tested in a number of studies and shown to be highly successful, according to the paper. The estimated billions to be gained in state and federal revenue from the fat food tax could become a major source of funding for health care reform, says the report, which adds that the cost to consumers could be offset by tax subsidies for fresh fruits and vegetables.

In addition to making fattening, less nutritious foods more expensive through taxation, the authors are calling for the implementation of a suite of anti-obesity policy measures that will work together to discourage unhealthy eating patterns, such as a ban on advertising fattening foods, especially to children, and requirements for clear, simple labeling of the health risks of fattening foods on packaged foods, in restaurants, on vending machines, etc.

The Houston Chronicle also covered this story, and its potential implications for Texas eaters.

Read the paper abstract and summary.

Dowload the full report, published by the Urban Institute.

(Photo credit: Adam Kuban)

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