With obesity among residents of all ages continuing to be a health concern in Alberta and across Canada, the Canadian Medical Association has put out a call for government action.
In its latest editorial in the CMA Journal, the association said stemming the increase in obesity levels should involve not only more education and public awareness, but also government intervention in the form of higher taxes on so-called junk foods and drinks.
“Our government needs to consider taxation as a tool to combat the consumption of these addictive food and beverages, just as it regulates the sale of alcohol and tobacco products for the purposes of population health,” write Dr. John Fletcher and Dr. Kirsten Patrick, the editorial's authors.
“We need incentive beyond educational messages. Strategies that include individual interventions, school-based nutrition and activity interventions should continue.
“However we also need robust ways to restrict portion sizes and reduce the sale of sugar-sweetened beverages and other high-calorie, nutritionally poor food products.”
With health-care costs continuing to climb, including in West Central Alberta, trying to ensure residents live healthy lives only makes sense, both financially and for society in general.
Yet whether that worthwhile goal can be achieved by making junk food and junk drinks more expensive, and therefore presumably less attractive to people, remains an open question.
The case of tobacco taxation may be a good example of what can sometimes happen when governments try to reduce bad behaviour by making people pay for their sins.
While heavy taxation of cigarettes has probably led to fewer young people taking up the habit in recent years, it has also had the unfortunate side effect of leading to the governments themselves becoming “addicted” to tobacco revenue.
Instead of putting the tobacco tax revenue directly into health care, governments today put the money into general coffers, considering it to be part of the overall revenue stream.
That, in turn, has arguably led to a marked reluctance on the part of some governments to take much stronger action against tobacco, such as outright prohibitions.
No one can doubt that Canada's doctors have the health and welfare of citizens at heart when they make this call for the extraordinary taxation of junk food and junk beverages.
Unfortunately increasing taxation by itself is probably no guarantee that people will gobble down less of the junk foods they love.
What it would almost certainly guarantee would be a new government addiction to yet another sin-tax revenue stream, with all its future consequences.
