A research study has a plan to deal with the obesity of a population like Australia: tax them for junk food and reduce the cost for healthy food.
Tax people to change, because that has worked out so well for humanity! Just coerce people with punitive measures to get them to change their individual behavior, right?
Don't truly educate people to learn how to think and understand right from wrong, both in a moral understanding and in terms of what is right and wrong for optimal health. Instead, just coerce them into changing through extrinsic punishment, which they will maybe do if they want to not pay extra for things through taxes. *Bonus, make other things cheaper, and that will get them to think with their money rather than their health.
People still smoke cigarettes despite the cost of cigarettes going up. Some might be incentivized to stop, but most stop because they know it's bad for them, not because it costs more to still do it. The extra cost is an additional factor that weighs in on the overall balance sheet, but not what intrinsically determines the change.
Other countries are implementing taxes on unhealthy foods and drinks. They are all taxing people in an attempt to deal with the burden of dietary related diseases. Current countries like France, Mexico, Norway and some cities in the United States are already taxing sugary drinks, and Hungary as a "chips tax". But these single measures only have modest effects. In Mexico, soft drink consumption only fell by 12 mL per person which is almost nothing.
A new study funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council Fellowship (Grant number 1036771), was published on Feb. 14th to simulate the effect of taxes on saturated fat, salt and sugar sweetened foods, while at the same time employing a subsidy on fruits and vegetables, to determine how this affected dietary-related diseases and health care costs. This two-pronged approach to getting people healthier works in the simulated model.
This study wants to target more unhealthy foods and introduce a carrot-and-stick approach. Taxing foods high in sugar, salt or saturated fat, while providing subsidies to buy fruits and vegetables cheaper, will prevent overall household food bills from increasing which promotes a greater chance that people will be able to afford eating better while having the bad foods cost more. If they only increase the cost of bad foods which are cheaper, it still leaves the good food at the price it always was which is a problem in terms of the budget a family may have.
The study concludes that almost 500,000 extra years of healthy life would be added to the population of 23 million Australians, with a saving of $3 billion in health care costs over the current lifetimes of existing Australians. 500,000 extra years for 23 million people only comes down to 0.02 extra years per person, which only equates to one week. Given that most people are driven by their lower consciousness desire to ingratiate their senses, such as their taste buds, having one extra week to live isn't much of a motivator.
Taxes do change people's behavior. Carrots to reward, and stick to punish, have "worked" for a long time. But where does it get us? To real lasting change from within? No.
As I have mentioned in my article Shooting Ourselves in the Foot by Leading with a Carrot, trying to get people to do things by manipulating them with extrinsic incentives (such as rewards or punishment), doesn't actually deal with the underlying intrinsic motivation that has people do or not do something in the first place. The inner motivation needs to be changed for people to want to do something differently. The alternative of extrinsic manipulation doesn't deal with the underlying inner psychological reasons for not changing themselves.
A survey of Australians indicated that the majority are in favor of taxing junk food as long as the tax money is spent dealing with childhood obesity, as 1/4 of Australian children are now overweight or obese. Other methods include restricted marketing that targets children, better labeling for unhealthy foods, or getting food manufacturers to use less of the bad ingredients.
The Australian government doesn't have plans to tax or subsidize certain foods. Instead they are going to encourage the food industry to have less sugar, salt and saturated fat, while having more whole grains and vegetables.
I changed my eating and other habits through knowledge and willpower of recognizing the need to change for the better. I would not have been able to change if I lacked the knowledge of the underlying root causal factor for WHY I needed to change.
How are people really going to change themselves, when they lack the knowledge to empower and motivate them to change? We keep being ignorant of self-knowledge, we don't know who we really are as a psyche, and how to overcome our limitations. Yet, magically, the same old routine of external control is going to change us?
People were forced to abandon slavery or face severe consequences, but they didn't want to do it because it was right. This resulted in the master-slave mindset continuing, even to this day, because we have never been truly educating people on psychology, philosophy and morality in order to empower people into doing what is right for themselves, or others. So the same false ideas and beliefs get perpetuated from generation to generation, taking a long time to root out.
Things don't really change when we don't really change. Change starts from the inside.
References:
- Junk food tax and veg subsidies could add 500,000 years of life
- Taxes and Subsidies for Improving Diet and Population Health in Australia: A Cost-Effectiveness Modelling Study, Linda J. Cobiac, King Tam, Lennert Veerman, Tony Blakely, PLOS, February 14, 2017, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1002232
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2017-02-17, 7:25pm