The Fat Tax

One out of three Americans is obese, and about 300,000 people a year die of obesity-related health conditions. This is not just a problem of too many weak-willed or genetically driven people; our society fosters fat in a big way. Fatty foods are inexpensive, tasty and readily available, and television constantly bombards us with seductive junk food advertisements. Some believe that our fat-promoting environment makes overeating just too difficult to resist.

To cut down on fat consumption, Yale Professor Kelly Brownell has proposed a sin tax on fatty foods. He suggests that revenues from this fat tax be used to subsidize exercise facilities and promote healthy foods. Brownell points out that two other unhealthy consumer products, alcohol and tobacco, are taxed and regulated by local and federal governments¾ why not disease-causing food.

According to Brownell's proposal, fatty foods should be evaluated on the nutritive value per calorie or gram of fat, and the less healthy they are, the higher the tax. In addition, ads hawking unhealthy foods to children should be either limited or outlawed. Non-food advertisements that might lead to eating disorders, such as those glamorizing thinness, should be banned, or altered to remove their "toxic" content.

Those who oppose a fat tax charge that a law of this type would impose the values of the nutritional experts on consumers. What a person eats, they feel, should be left to the individual to decide.

[Editor: Instead of taxing fat, which is a natural and necessary food substance, it might be wiser to tax refined foods (e.g., sugar, white bread), altered foods (e.g., trans fatty acids) and unnatural foods (e.g., feedlot beef, which contains far more saturated fat because of unnatural, drug-assisted livestock practices.]  Based on information in: Consumers' Research Oct 1997