Exeter Food 2021-2022 Seminar Series

The popularity of ‘soda taxes’ as a public health policy has grown rapidly in the last few years, offering what appears to be a ‘simple’ solution to a ‘complex’ problem. While the evidence suggests that a tax is associated with reducing the purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages, there are a number of questions that remain, including: understanding possible spill-over effects across the food system, the mechanisms for behaviour change (how much of the effect is actually price versus other effects), extensions to tax policies beyond ‘soda’, importance of changed product composition versus overall consumption. In this presentation, I will outline research we have conducted in the UK over the last few years that cover these (and other) areas, including our current evaluation of the UK’s ‘soda tax’, the ‘sugar drinks industry levy’.