Things are not so sweet in the sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) industry after a study found consumption dwindled after the implementation, in 2018, of SA’s “sugar tax”.
The study was published last week in Lancet Planetary Health. It was compiled by the South African Medical Research Council’s Centre for Health Economics and Decision Science (Priceless-SA) in the School of Public Health at Johannesburg’s Wits University and the University of the Western Cape (UWC), in partnership with the University of North Carolina in the US.
Titled Changes in beverage purchases following the announcement and implementation of South Africa’s Health Promotion Levy: an observational study, researchers examined the nutritional data of more than 3,000 households’ purchases before and after the tax to assess any changes in daily sugar, calories and volume of taxed and non-taxed beverages.
Senior researcher at Priceless-SA Nicholas Stacey said the team found a 51% reduction in sugar, a 52% decrease in calories and a 29% reduction in the volume of beverages purchased per person per day after implementation of the tax.
“We also found that the relative reduction in the sugar content of taxable beverages was larger than that for volume, showing that industry reformulated products.”
The study, the first of its type to evaluate the impact of SA’s tax on sugar and caloric intake, found the decline in intake of sweetened beverages in the country after the tax was consistent with evaluations in other countries, where taxing sugary drinks was an effective public health strategy to reduce the burden of health conditions linked to over-consumption of sugar.
SA’s 2018 Health Promotion Levy (HPL) placed a tax on sugary beverages, with the figure related to the amount of sugar in the drink and the first teaspoon untaxed.
SA was the first African nation to implement a sugar content-based tax, after an announcement in 2016 of an intention to levy a tax on SSBs.
In 2018, the country implemented the approximately 10% SSB tax, known as the HPL.
The study highlighted that the announcement and implementation of the tax coincided with large reductions in purchases in terms of volumes and sugar quantities from taxable beverages, with non-significant changes for non-taxable beverages.
“While other countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have levied SSB taxes, this is the first country in the region to evaluate such a policy and our results clearly show positive changes that could offer useful public health gains across the region.”
With SA facing an increasing burden of non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease and cancers, diseases linked to increased consumption of sugar, particularly from beverages, the study aims to pave the way for a healthier populace.
The findings coincided with research in Mexico, which has used policies such as taxation to successfully curb consumption of sugary beverages.
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