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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

Except in the United States that will never be done voluntarily by the manufacturers or most consumers, we just had two years now proving "freedumbs".

The only "solution" is the cigarette model, all food now has an "added sugar" nutrition label, add a dollar to price for every added gram.

Those dollars go towards health care fund for sugar based diseases.

If you don't eat sugar-added foods, great for you and you don't pay for it. Just like the cigarette model (except goverments siphon cigarette taxes for everything except cancer/copd treatments).

Manufacturers will then also make low or no sugar foods that cost way less because they don't have any taxes.

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I like the corporate responsibility aspect here. However, this always gets labeled as a sugar tax and the food industry lobbies to stop any bill like this from passing.

I would offer a cap n trade alternative. Each business gets a fixed amount of sugar they can put in their food based products. They can buy credits from businesses who are sugar free. This shifts the messaging that this isn’t a sugar tax. Businesses can sell sugar. Just dial it down, buy credits, or find a way to spread the sugar across all your products.

Would it work? I honestly have no clue since I don’t know if that incentivizes the right behavior.

IMO this is attacking it from the wrong angle.

What I want is a change to insurance industry regulations to make it so fat people and sedentary people can start paying their fair way and not be subsidized by those of us who maintain their health.

Could be done a number of ways. Life insurance already sometimes requires a physical at signup. Why not for health insurance too? Could also just be a discount. Could even, e.g., partner with Peloton--you work out 5 days a week? Actuarial table shows you're XX% cheaper to insure.

If it's opt-in like that, all the healthy people will opt-in, and all the unhealthy people (NOT pre-existing conditions, just things within people's own power to control that some do well and others ignore--exercise and diet, primarily) will pay more.

No need to tax the sugar, tax the actual impact, healthcare.

"to make it so fat people and sedentary people can start paying their fair way" You can make people pay for added sugar in the food but not for them being fat. That is discriminating. BTW you don't know if a fat person is in bad or good health based on her/his overall shape.

> BTW you don't know if a fat person is in bad or good health based on her/his overall shape

If you are obese or overweight you are, by definition, not healthy.

No, only "morbid obesity" includes a morbidity in the definition.

Other than that, body fat is an indicator not of personal health, but of personal risk.

You're pulling a sleight of hand here with your definitions.

To rephrase the sibling: if you are obese or overweight, you have, by definition, a certain BMI. (According to the WHO and many national entities, anyway.) The intended common-sense definition of obesity is "accumulation of fat to an unhealthy level", but the diagnosis of obesity is usually based on a statistic which merely correlates with that.

Similarly, to declare that someone is in bad or good health based on their overall shape is to do the same thing: to diagnose someone as having medical problems by observing that they demonstrate a property which often correlates with medical problems.

The sleight of hand is that you're defending a position based on a "diagnosis by correlating statistic" definition of obesity, but you're using the intended definition of obesity ("enough fat that you're unhealthy") to do the actual argument, and relying on the fact that both are referred to by the same name ("obesity") to hide the gap.

Harvard Medical School:

https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/can-you-be-ov...

UCSF:

https://generalsurgery.ucsf.edu/conditions--procedures/healt...

Naturally, this is all phrased in general terms, and all hedged with e.g. the direct quote "While there is no one-size-fits-all number when it comes to a person's ideal weight, men should not ignore significant weight gain and the implications it has for their future health." Again, of course, you're pulling exactly the same sleight of hand: confusing a risk factor with an actual health problem. It's certainly not "true by definition" that being overweight means you are unhealthy, as you claimed.

Why would you tax the symptoms? It's like taxing oil companies for melting glaciers.

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