By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times/For the Booster Shots blog
 
The soda tax is back on the table, and this time proponents say that a tax of a penny per ounce of sugar-sweetened beverage would not only raise $13 billion a year but also save $17 billion in medical costs by reducing the incidence of heart disease and diabetes.

These figures, published Monday in the journal Health Affairs, are based on some facts and several assumptions.

First, the facts: Americans drank 13.8 billion gallons of soda, punch, sports drinks, sweet tea and other high-calorie, nutrient-free beverages in 2009, according to industry data. That works out to about 70,000 calories per person. The sugar in all this “liquid candy,” as it is often called, is considered to be a major contributing factor to the obesity crisis, which in turn has fueled the rise of Type 2 diabetes and other diseases.

Now for the assumptions: Based on previous studies by economists, the authors of the Health Affairs study assumed that a penny-per-ounce tax would reduce soda consumption by 15%. They also assumed that 40% of the calories saved by drinking less soda would be replaced by drinking more milk and juice.

Putting it all together, the study authors from Columbia University, UC San Francisco and Virginia Tech calculated that their hypothetical tax would result in the average U.S. adult, age 25 to 64, consuming 9 fewer calories per day. Over time, that would result in enough weight loss to reduce the number of obese adults by 867,000 in 10 years.

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