An article published in the January issue of Health Affairs suggests boosting the tax on sugary drinks is one way to slow down staggering obesity and diabetes rates in the United States.
In fact, increasing the tax on those drinks by just a penny per ounce could reduce the number of obese adults in this country by 1.5 percent and new cases of diabetes by 2.6 percent, according to university researchers.
And long term, the results would be much more significant. Over 10 years, they argue, the tax would prevent 2 .4 million diabetes person-years, 95,000 coronary heart events, 8,000 strokes, and 26,000 premature deaths while avoiding more than $17 billion in medical costs.
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Moreover, the tax could be expected to generate some $13 billion in revenue, and would reduce consumption of these beverages by 15 percent among adults ages 25–64.
The authors and researchers are Y. Claire Wang and Lee Goldman, professors at Columbia University; Pamela Coxson and Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, professors at the University of California, San Francisco; and Yu-Mind Shen, a doctoral student in statistics at Virginia Tech University.
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