Protein, fat, and sugar are all essential components of a balanced human diet but too many calories of any will cause obesity. And since more and more health care in the U.S. is subsidized by other taxpayers, it has increasingly been argued that the people paying have the right to tell you how to live.
Meanwhile, governments that want more taxes but don't want to risk a vote can simply put a tax on certain foods.
Though taxes on sugars have been a failure, in Philadelphia and Berkeley it just hurt businesses in the local area as people spent more money elsewhere, while in Mexico soda sales actually went up, more governments are likely to put them into play. And if poor people are impacted most, well, the argument goes that poor people have free or cheap health care so they don't get the same say as everyone else.
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But why stop at sugar? Meat is classed by the wacky epidemiologists who took over France's International Agency for Research on Cancer as a carcinogen - bacon is just like plutonium or World War I mustard gas if you ignore dosage and therefore risk they way they and our own National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) do. There is no reason a meat tax isn't legal if sugar is. Or fat. All three are healthy in moderation but all three can be linked to obesity and related diseases, even using the same Food Frequency Questionnaires. That should mark Harvard School of Public Health happy.
And meat is being hyped as a big cause of global warming but, like that old 'it takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef' claim, it's all made up. But government doesn't need scientific validity to pass laws or California wouldn't have 900 products on its Prop 65 list.
