We Don’t Know Yet If Soda Taxes Will Make Us Healthier

With the election less than two weeks away, Big Soda is preparing for battle.

The soda industry, led by the American Beverage Association trade group, is spending many millions of dollars in a carefully coordinated effort to defeat proposals in four U.S. cities to tax local sales of sugar-sweetened beverages.

Three of the cities where voters will consider the proposals on Nov. 8 — San Francisco, Oakland and Albany — are in California, while the fourth, Boulder, is in Colorado. The industry is spending about $19.3 million to fight the Bay Area proposals alone.

They may follow in the footsteps of cities like Berkeley, California, which passed its tax in 2014, and Philadelphia, which earlier this year introduced a tax that’s currently the subject of a lawsuit brought by the ABA.

As supporters of the soda taxes tell it, the beverage industry is fighting the new soda tax proposals so aggressively because it can sense proponents of such legislation gaining momentum.

Marion Nestle, a pro-soda-tax New York University nutrition professor and author of the book Soda Politics: Taking On Big Soda (And Winning) told The Huffington Post she believes the tipping point on the taxes has already been reached.

“This fight is a last act of desperation,” Nestle said by email. “The more they fight the taxes, the more people learn that sodas are best consumed in small amounts.”

If soda tax proponents succeed at the ballot box in all or most of the Nov. 8 votes, Barry Popkin, a nutrition professor at the University of North Carolina, believes more municipalities will soon follow. Cook County, Illinois, the nation’s second most populated county, already appears to be on the verge of proposing its own 1-cent-per-ounce soda tax.

“I think this is going to empower enormously the advocates,” said Popkin, who has researched the impact of soda taxes extensively. “I see a series of counties and maybe one state that will be the next generation.”