Extending the UK’s sugar tax to snacks

In the UK, for just over a year, we've been paying the "Soft Drinks Industry Levy" - a tax on sugary beverages intended to reduce our consumption of free sugars. That was based on taxes that had happened in other countries, however, in the UK high sugar snacks, such as confectionery, cakes, and biscuits make a greater contribution to intakes of free sugars as well as energy than sugar sweetened beverages. Now new research models what extending the sugar tax to those snacks would do to our energy intake, and then onto the BMI of the nation. Pauline Scheelbeek, assistant professor in nutritional and environmental epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine joins us to explain how they modelled that, and what the outcome might be Read the full open access research:

https://www.bmj.com/content/366/bmj.l4786