Common ingredients in fast food, ready meals and drinks should be taxed as a public health measure to curb soaring rates of obesity and diabetes, according to a leading epidemiologist.
The scheme, proposed by Sir Nicholas Wald, director of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine in London, would raise the cost of less healthy products to discourage shoppers and put pressure on manufacturers and retailers to embrace healthier options.
Rather than targeting junk food in general, the tax would be applied to salt, alcohol, sugar and saturated fats, the four major ingredients that contribute most to public health problems. The tax would not apply to the ingredients sold separately.
Most affected by the scheme would be fast food, ready meals, soft drinks and alcoholic beverages, but also less obvious products. The salt in bread, for example, contributes a significant amount of salt to the diet.
Levying the tax at a penny a gram for sugar, saturated fats and alcohol, and a penny a tenth of a gram for salt, would see the cost of a Big Mac rise from £2.49 to £2.88, while the cost of a healthier portion of Chicken McNuggets would rise from the same amount to £2.58.
Details of the proposed tax are to be outlined by Wald in the annual Jephcott Lecture at the Royal Society of Medicine. "There is now a substantial global epidemic of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease. There is no single way to tackle it, but one way is to engineer society to make the healthy foods cheaper relative to the unhealthy foods," he said.
Adopting the tax would earn the Treasury £38bn a year, enough to cover much of the interest on the national debt or pay for one-third of the NHS.
In the UK, the average intake of salt is around 9g per day. Were that to fall to 6g, it would reduce the number of heart attacks and strokes in the country by tens of thousands, Wald said.
Other countries and US states have introduced similar taxes with mixed results. In 1991, California brought in a snack food tax that led to a 10% drop in sales, but scrapped the scheme the following year. Since 1992, Arkansas has raised $40m (£25m) a year from a tax that adds roughly two cents to 360ml cans of soft drinks. Last year, Denmark brought in taxes on chocolate, ice-cream and sugary soft drinks, and plans to introduce a further tax on saturated fat.
