5 bills target consumption of sugary drinks

SodaThe California Legislature’s determination to lessen the amount of sugary drinks consumed by state residents may never have been greater than now – at least if the metric used is the number of bills introduced. This session, five will be taken up, and more may be on the way.

For the third time, Assemblyman Richard Bloom, D-Santa Monica, has introduce a measure that would tax soda and other beverages sweetened with sugar.

The first two times, Bloom’s measure didn’t get out of committee after it faced intense, well-funded opposition from the American Beverage Association.

But Bloom told his hometown paper, the Santa Monica Daily Press, that the tax was urgently needed to nudge people to stop consuming so many unhealthy drinks.

“Everyone would acknowledge that health care costs are skyrocketing,” he said. “Diabetes and obesity are ongoing health-care crises and we need to get serious about prevention.”

Revenue from the tax – which has not been established yet but which was 2 cents per ounce in Bloom’s previous bills – would pay for programs meant to reduce diabetes and obesity. Bloom said 9 percent of state residents are diabetic and nearly half are at risk of developing diabetes.

Measure would ban Big Gulp-size sodas

Bloom’s bill will have plenty of similar company this year.

Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, proposes a ban on soda servings of larger than 16 ounces in seal-able cups sold at restaurants and grocery stores. A similar ban in New York City was thrown out by New York state courts – but not for a reason that has relevance in California. Judges repeatedly held that the New York City’s health board overstepped its powers in imposing the ban and should have deferred to the New York state Legislature.

Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, hopes to end the common practice of displaying sodas near the checkout stands of food, convenience and other retail stores.

Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, is for the fourth time proposing that sugary drinks sold in California have labels warning of their health risks. Monning said if tobacco products’ health risks are made plain with warning labels, so should the risks of soda.

Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Alameda, is touting a bill intended to prevent beverage companies from offering stores special deals with lower prices for sugary drinks.

Studies split on effect of Berkeley soda tax

Soda foes got good news on Feb. 21 when the American Journal of Public Health published a study saying that soda consumption plunged 52 percent in Berkeley in the first three years after the city adopted a soda tax.

But other research into Berkeley’s soda tax is far less encouraging, according to University of Southern California professor Michael Thom. He told the Santa Monica newspaper there was no evidence that residents reduced their caloric or sugar consumption and asserted there is little, if any, proof that soda taxes have a positive effect on human health.

A Harvard Business Review study based on an analysis of millions of transactions at California stores by Duke University professors Bryan Bollinger and Steven Sexton was also skeptical of claims of success in Berkeley. Published in January 2018, it noted that since most residents worked outside of Berkeley, they could readily buy cheaper soda elsewhere. The study also pointed to a factor not mentioned in any recent newspaper coverage of soda taxes:

“We found that much of the cost of the tax is not being passed along to consumers,” Bollinger and Sexton wrote. “Fewer than half of supermarkets changed the price of soda in response to the tax, and prices at chain drug stores did not change at all.”

This article was originally published by CalWatchdog.com

California lawmakers seek tax, other limits on sugary drinks

Soda pourSACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — State lawmakers are trying again to discourage the consumption of sugary beverages, proposing a tax, warning labels, and a ban on soda displays near checkout lines among other measures on Wednesday.

The five bills address what the Democratic lawmakers call a public health crisis leading to an increase in obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other ills.

“The soda industry is the new tobacco industry,” said Assemblyman David Chiu of San Francisco as he promoted his measure that would bar restaurants from selling soda in cups larger than 16 ounces (.5 liters). “This is an industry that has used marketing and sales tactics to victimize low income communities, communities of color throughout our country.”

One of four California adults is now obese, he said, a 40-percent increase over two decades. More than half of Californians are overweight and more than half have either diabetes or pre-diabetes. The average American drinks nearly 50 gallons (190 liters) of sugary beverages a year, he said, consuming 39 pounds (17.5 kilograms) of extra sugar. …

Click here to read the full article from the Associated Press

California bans local soda taxes until 2031

SodaA new push by the beverage industry is slowing the expansion of soda taxes in California and elsewhere.

California cities pioneered soda taxes as a way to combat obesity, diabetes and heart disease, but the Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday bowed to pressure from beverage companies and reluctantly banned local taxes on soda for the next 12 years.

It follows similar bans recently passed in Arizona and Michigan. Voters in Oregon will decide on a statewide ban in November. The American Beverage Association, which represents Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and others, has backed the moves after several cities passed taxes on sugary drinks in recent years.

California’s ban is part of a last-minute maneuver to block a beverage industry-backed ballot measure that would make it much harder for cities and counties to raise taxes of any kind. The ABA said in a statement the legislation is about keeping groceries, including drinks, affordable.

Lawmakers approved the proposal despite deep reluctance. …

Click here to read the full article from ABC7 News

Soda Wars: Business Groups Sue San Francisco To Defend First Amendment

Soda pourA trio of business groups is suing San Francisco to protect the First Amendment rights of companies that sell and market sugary drinks.

On 24 July, the California Retailers Association, the American Beverage Association and the California State Outdoor Advertising Association filed a lawsuit to prevent mandatory warning labels on soda ads. The San Francisco ordinance, which was passed in June by nine votes to zero would cover soda ads on billboards, buses, transit shelters, posters and stadiums.

The plaintiffs argue “the city is trying to ensure that there is no free marketplace of ideas, but instead only a government-imposed, one-sided public ‘dialogue’ on the topic — in violation of the First Amendment.” They hope the District Court will overturn the city government’s decision.

The label, which must cover 20 percent of the ad, reads “WARNING: Drinking beverages with added sugar(s) contributes to obesity, diabetes and tooth decay.” The labels mimic warning signs placed on cigarette packs.

Drink manufacturers will not only have to comply with producing warning labels but will be subject to a wave of new restrictions. Baylen Linnekin, chief executive of Keep Food Legal, writes, “the law would prohibit soda makers from identifying the products they sell while protesting against the law on public space. It bars ads advertising soda, Frappuccinos, or some Jamba juices on public property.”

Linnekin identifies two violations of the First Amendment in the city ordinance. One being the government preventing speech with which it disagrees and two, compelling the speaker to switch their language to that preferred by the government.

Government efforts to label certain products with health warnings have taken a knock in recent years. The California plaintiffs may draw hope from the 2012 case where tobacco companies won a major victory after a federal appeals court struck down requirements for cigarette packs to display graphic health warnings.

Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the District of Columbia Circuit, who voted with the majority in the case, wrote ”this case raises novel questions about the scope of the government’s authority to force the manufacturer of a product to go beyond making purely factual and accurate commercial disclosures and undermine its own economic interest — in this case, by making ‘every single pack of cigarettes in the country a mini billboard’ for the government’s antismoking message.”

The Food and Drug Administration which was pursuing the policy has not attempted to reintroduce the graphic labels.

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Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation

Beverage group sues S.F. over soda warnings, advertising ban

As reported by the Associated Press:

The American Beverage Association has sued the city of San Francisco, claiming new legislation requiring health warning labels on sugary beverages and prohibiting advertisements of them on city property violates the First Amendment.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports the association filed the lawsuit on Friday.

The lawsuit says the city “is trying to ensure that there is no free marketplace of ideas, but instead only a government-imposed, one-sided public `dialogue’ on the topic – in violation of the First Amendment. …”

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California University Will Ban Soda Sales On Campus

SodaThe University of California-San Francisco is halting the sale of soda and other sugary drinks on campus due to health concerns.

Under the new policy, which was decided upon in May and will be implemented in July, campus vendors will be blocked from selling all drinks with added sugar calories to the school’s 4,600 students. That means no Coca-Cola, no Dr. Pepper, and no fruit punch. Diet sodas and 100 percent juice drinks will still be tolerated, and students will be allowed to bring sugary drinks on campus if they buy them elsewhere.

“The average American consumes nearly three times the recommended amount of added sugar every day,” UCSF professor Laura Schmidt said in the school’s initial announcement. “The most common single source is sugar-sweetened beverages.”

While UCSF characterizes the policy as a voluntary “strategy” for its vendors, the vendors themselves don’t agree. Kenneth Guzman, who operates an on-campus restaurant, told Inside Higher Ed that he “didn’t really have a choice” about dumping soda.

“I felt like it was a little too rash, they are too harsh,” Guzman said. “We could’ve just educated our customers on how to choose healthier alternatives and not punish them, taking away what they love.”

Another food vendor on campus said he thought it was silly for the school to ban sugared drinks but not diet sodas.

“Artificial sugars are worse than sugar itself,” said Peasant Pie operator Ali Keshavarz. “If my kid had a choice between a sugar soda and a diet soda, I’d want them to have the sugar soda, I know that for a fact.”

The new policy makes UCSF the first university in the country to put such a broad limit on sugar sales, and comes just two years after the campus banned all tobacco products.

The decision may be slightly more justified at UCSF than at other colleges, as the school is focused solely on graduate education in health sciences.

The move is also premised on research the school itself has conducted. A 2012 article in Nature by three UCSF researchers argued the health consequences of added sugars were so severe they deserved to be regulated in a manner similar to alcohol.

“Passive smoking and drink-driving fatalities provided strong arguments for tobacco and alcohol control,” the authors say in the article. “The long-term economic, health-care and human costs of metabolic syndrome place sugar overconsumption in the same category. The United States spends $65 billion in lost productivity and $150 billion on health-care resources annually for morbidities associated with metabolic syndrome.” Metabolic disorders related to sugar, the authors say, consume 75 percent of U.S. health spending.

Since “individually focused approaches” such as education aren’t working, the authors say, what is needed are “supply-side” restrictions such as higher taxes, age restrictions, and banning sales at schools.

Leeanne Jensen, the school’s wellness coordinator, told Inside Higher Ed the ban meant UCSF was “living our mission” by adopting its own advice on health. She also said the ban was focused on sugary drinks because their effect on health was particularly bad. High-sugar foods like cookies are more satiating than soda, she said, while the research on diet sodas is not as clear regarding whether they are unhealthy or not.

Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation

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Berkeley Soda Tax: First Month’s Take, $116,000

As reported by the Contra Costa Times:

BERKELEY — Several City Council members and other boosters of Berkeley’s first-in-the-nation soda tax giddily reported the first month’s haul — $116,000 — on the steps of the municipal office building on Milvia Street on Monday.

Councilman Laurie Capitelli, a prominent booster of the freshly enacted tax, projected the first year’s proceeds at about $1.2 million.

On Nov. 4, voters approved Measure D, a 1-cent-per-ounce tax on the distribution of most sugar-sweetened beverages, by a better than 3-1 margin, even though, as a general tax with proceeds to go into the general fund, it needed only a simple majority.

The city did not estimate what the tax might bring in, but …

Click here to read the full article

Soda Tax Difficult to Swallow in Berkeley

The city of Berkeley, Calif., is finding it’s not so easy imposing a soda tax. Since the tax’s Jan. 1 imposition, retailers find it’s a burden changing prices for just one type of item in one city.

Measure D, officially the City of Berkeley Sugary Beverages and Soda Tax, last November overwhelmingly was passed by 76 percent of city voters. The tax is a penny per ounce. So a 16-ounce Coke would be hit with 16 cents. There are exceptions for small businesses.

The measure passed even though the soda industry spent $2.4 million against it, an estimated $30 per registered voter. Opponents warned of increased costs to consumers.

The pro-Measure D coalition called itself Berkeley vs. Big Soda. It maintained on its website, “We face a serious health crisis:40% of kids will get diabetes in their lifetimes unless we do something about it. The link between sugary drinks and diseases like diabetes is undeniable.”

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, a Berkeley resident, wrote in the Huffington Post in favor of the tax, “Berkeley’s Soda War pits a group of community organizations, city and school district officials, and other individuals (full disclosure: I’m one of them) against Big Soda’s own ‘grassroots’ group, describing itself as ‘a coalition of citizens, local businesses, and community organizations’ without identifying its members.”

The text of Measure D claimed “this Ordinance is to diminish the human and economic costs of diseases associated with the consumption of sugary drinks by discouraging their distribution and consumption in Berkeley through a tax.”

Measure D set up a new bureaucracy, the Sugar Sweetened Beverage Product Panel of Experts, to recommend to the City Council how to spend the taxes collected.

Compliance

But things are turning out more complicated than expected. Camilo Malaver co-owns the San Francisco-based Waterloo Beverages company, reported Berkeleyside. “In January, when the tax was implemented, Malaver decided to stop restocking his supply of craft sodas and naturally sweetened beverages in Berkeley to avoid further confusion. … His frustration was aimed primarily at the city for what he saw as a poor job relaying information on how to comply with the tax.”

Malaver said, “Berkeley is a good city to do business with the university, but now, it’s tough. We’re in limbo. Everybody’s lost and [we] don’t know what to do.” The university itself, as a state entity, is exempt from Measure D.

A problem is that the soda market has changed from the days when the market mainly was such Big Soda suppliers as Coca-Cola and Pepsi. As with the craft brew markets for beer, “craft sodas” have popped up like those sold by Malaver.

When potentially hundreds of different items are involved, that complicates trying to figure out if a beverage is taxed, or is exempt. For example, the ordinance taxes “heavily presweetened tea,” but not regular tea, or slightly sweetened tea.

The big distributors offering a limited number of different drinks more easily can comply than can the small or medium outfits. As Berkeleyside notes, “All but one of the distributors who spoke to Berkeleyside were small- to medium-sized local distributors that sell craft sodas, sweetened teas and energy drinks.”

The confusion over what to tax also is reminiscent of the controversy over the statewide 1991 Snack Tax. As part of a $7 billion tax increase to close the budget deficit of that year, the tax was imposed on formerly exempt snacks. Except that some snacks, such as nuts, remained exempt. But it wasn’t clear whether candy with nuts was taxed, or exempted.

The Los Angeles Times reported in October 1992, “SACRAMENTO — A year and a half ago, part of the answer to the state’s dire need for higher revenue was extending the sales tax to snack foods, candy and bottled water, passed by the Legislature and signed by Gov. Pete Wilson.

“Today, with the signatures of nearly a million Californians standing behind Tuesday’s ballot measure to repeal the tax, no one — not the governor nor a single lawmaker who voted for it — has stepped forward to support keeping the tax.”

On Nov. 3 that year, two-thirds of voters backed Proposition 63, which repealed the tax.

Dollar Tree

Meanwhile, one large outfit affected by the Berkeley soda tax is discount chain Dollar Tree. A 16-ounce soda formerly cost $1, plus Berkeley’s 9-cent sales tax. (In California, sodas are taxed, unlike most other food). Now on top of that is placed the new soda tax of 16 cents (1 cent per ounce). Total: $1.25.

Berkeleyside reported in January, “Dollar Tree — which sells a variety of products for $1 or less and has more than 5,200 stores in North America — decided to pull out sodas in its Berkeley stores when the soda tax went into effect on Jan. 1, according to Randy Guiler, vice president of investor relations.”

Guiler said, “Due to the increased cost from the Berkeley sugary drinks and soda tax, we are no longer able to carry sugary drinks and soda at the one-dollar price point.”

Ironically, Dollar Tree still sells fruit juice, even when it is saturated with sugar, because the beverage is not subject to the new tax.

Future taxes

A 2013 bill for a statewide soda tax, SB622, died in committee. It was by state Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel. According to the March 2 Sacramento Bee, it’s unlikely to come back in the Legislature any time soon.

A tax increase still requires a two-thirds vote in both houses of the Legislature. With Republican gains last year in the Legislature, Democrats’ two-thirds supermajority is long gone. And if there’s one thing Republicans can agree on, it’s opposing higher taxes.

That leaves anti-soda forces hopeful that Berkeley’s example can be poured out into other cities, even though 30 previous tries have failed.

Originally published by CalWatchdog.com