Piers Akerman: ‘There’s not enough evidence to prove a sugar tax reduces obesity’
FRESH from their name-calling foot-stamping denigrate Australia tantrum the social justice warriors are weighing in for a long fight for a new tax. Yes, a tax on sugar, Piers Akerman writes.
Opinion
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FRESH from their name-calling foot-stamping denigrate Australia tantrum the social justice warriors are weighing in for a long fight for a new tax.
Yes, a tax on sugar, and, wait for it, that taxpayer-funded virtue-signalling monolithic broadcaster, their ABC, is right behind the idea even though there is a distinct lack of scientific evidence to support the idea taxing sugar in soft drinks will lower Australia’s truly horrific level of obesity.
Last week ABC Chief Economics Correspondent, the redoubtable Emma Alberici, posted a 2000-word article on its news website titled ‘Sugar tax and the power of big business: How influence trumps evidence in politics’.
Ms Alberici was subsequently interviewed by the ABC’s James Valentine on Thursday with, surprise, surprise, both agreeing violently that this country needed a sugar tax.
The ABC duo discussed at length a peer-reviewed report by eminent Sydney University nutritional researcher Jennie Brand-Miller headed The Australian Paradox.
The paper, which was republished with even more supportive data late last year, presents this paradox: the rate of obesity among Australians is increasing alarmingly but the amount of sugar they are taking in what are called SSBs (sugar sweetened beverages) has been decreasing.
Despite there being no scientific challenges to Professor Brand-Miller’s paper when it appeared in the authoritative American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Ms Alberici felt free to baldly state: “The figures don’t stack up.”
What’s worse, when the respected Menzies Research Centre, which recently commissioned independent firm Cadence Economics to conduct a review of the evidence to see if a case could be made for a sugar tax, sought a right of reply, its request was rejected out of hand.
The strong probability is ABC hierarchy knew the tough executive director of the Menzies centre, Nick Cater, would destroy the claims.
In this argument the heavy guns are with Prof Brand-Miller and her explosive research.
What’s more, Cater’s crew has Cadence’s recent research into the five most frequently cited reports by the tax-’em-till-they bleed brigade and not one withstood expert scrutiny.
Whilst the ABC’s hipster audience might sneer at those who drink SSBs and think they should be dosed with wheatgrass juice, they are on shaky ground linking SSBs to obesity.
Cater’s team concluded not one of the five studies arguing for a sugar tax including the report by the influential Left-leaning Grattan Institute in 2016, stood up to empirical cross-examination.
None had established a causal link between a tax on sugary drinks and a reduction in obesity. None had measured the cost of the inefficiency, inequity and complexity of their ‘solution’; none had questioned whether taxing the majority of SSB consumers who control their weight was justified; or correctly calculated the impact on broader society.
No evidence of market failure had been established; indeed as Prof Brand-Miller has established — along with the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN — consumption patterns show quite the opposite.
Sugar consumption is down in Australia, especially by children, and the volume of artificially sweetened beverages sold overtook sugar-sweetened drinks some years ago.
According to Prof Brand-Miller, with whom I spoke, Ms Alberici is confused. She hasn’t understood the research or has been misled.
Either way, she has mistaken the volume of soft drinks consumed with the amount of sugar consumed and hasn’t taken into account the appearance of flavoured mineral waters, which contain about half the amount of sugar as drinks — such as regular Coke — in the market about 20 years ago.
The insinuation from Ms Alberici, both in her writing and in the interview, is that Prof Brand-Miller is somehow in the pocket of sugar producers or soft drink producers.
She said “ … when you’ve got self-interest. It’s like the climate change debate right?”
“So if you’ve got the Minerals Council, you know, commissioning a report about climate change, chances are they’re not going to be very happy about a link between … mining and climate change.”
But Prof Brand-Miller, who is an unpaid director of the Glycaemic Index Foundation, which provides invaluable information for diabetics and those who simply want to make the best choices when they shop for foods, has no such conflict of interests.
Indeed, anyone who knew anything about the work of the Glycaemic Index Foundation would be aware that a number of criteria must be met, including fibre content, sodium levels and saturated fats, before a food can be given the GI Foundation’s tick (which is worth looking for when you shop).
So, yet again, the ABC is running a campaign based on cod science by virtue signallers who think they know how best your life should be run, and the solution to a non-existent problem is a new tax on those who can least afford it.
We pay more for power because we have to support inefficient solar and wind plants beloved by the ABC. Now its o staff want us to pay more for soft drinks though there is zero evidence than doing so will have any effect on obesity.
So that’s nothing new.
However, in smearing bona fide researchers and refusing a right of reply, the ABC has started 2018 at a new low.