Brian Wingfield of Forbes Magazine recently wrote the following in his article, “Fat Tax Could Be Panacea For Health Reform:”

According to a 73 page study released Monday by “experts” at the Urban Institute and the University of Virginia , aggressive public policy interventions that helped bring down tobacco use could be modified and applied to fight obesity, including

• imposing excise or sales taxes on fattening food of little nutritional value, as the tax on cigarettes has proven to be the single most effective weapon in decreasing tobacco use;

• putting graphic, simple labels on the front of packaged foods showing their nutritional value in a form that consumers can easily understand and use;

What is a fattening food that should be taxed? A Twinkie at 150 calories and 5 grams of fat per serving? Perhaps we ought to go upscale and consider a serving of high end chocolate mousse pie at 247 calories and 15 grams of fat per serving - obviously deserving of a higher tax. If you're not interested in dessert, then how about a serving of fruit or vegetables. A convenient compromise would be a serving of avocado, which is botanically a fruit, but usually served as a vegetable. A serving of avocado is 240 calories with 22 grams of fat! Clearly anything with more than 20 grams of fat per serving should be dinged with a surtax above and beyond the normal fat tax.

It goes without saying that green foods (fruits and vegetable) contain the lowest levels of fat and should be exempt from tax.

Obesity is the result of consumption of calories in excess of calories expended. It is not the result of the types of foods consumed. Vegetarians and vegans are known to be very concerned about their health and are defined by the green foods they eat. Yet, obesity is a problem among this category of green food consumers as well. The June 2005 issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition describes this in the article. “Risk of overweight and obesity among semivegetarian, lactovegetarian, and vegan women .” Overweight or obesity (BMI 25) was 29% among both semivegetarians and vegans, and 25% among lactovegetarians. For them, vegetarian and vegan foods are fattening. Should they be taxed?

Using the reduction in tobacco use as a model to influence food choices is an absurd notion. Tobacco use causes cancer. There is no strategy that tobacco consumers can employ to mitigate its negative health impact, other than complete cessation of use. Eating food does not cause cancer nor does it result in obesity. Eating an excess of calories over what is expended does result in obesity. It’s not the type of food that is the problem, it’s the amount that’s consumed, as demonstrated by the vegetarian/vegan example above.

Consumers have to be informed on all aspects of obesity and then be left to their own personal choices. If eating a twinkie makes me happy and I burn off any extra calories by cycling around the block a couple of extra times, then that is my priviledge. I prefer that to not eating the foods I enjoy, then getting into a dour mood and kicking the first squirrel that comes into reach. A tax on any class of food or beverage is nothing more than a sumptuary law, no different than all the other sumptuary laws enacted throughout history that have failed. Social authoritarianism does not work and can lead to dangerous unintended consequences. Taxing sugar-sweetened beverages will drive children to drink cheap concoctions laced with artificial sweeteners. Do we know the long tem consequences of a lifetime of artificial sweetener consumption or is it simply enough to put a warning label on the product (as in the case of saccharin)? Will taxing of higher fat foods drive consumers to overeat more fruits and vegetables? Fruits and vegetables have high fiber and phytic acid levels, which means that other nutrients in the diet may not be digested properly.

The fat or beverage tax is another simplistic attempt to arrive at a superficial solution to a lack of a rational food culture. It is the abandonment of confidence in the average consumer’s ability to think and make free and informed choices once they are educated.

It is far better to follow the old proverb; Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.