BREAKTHROUGH Method Defeats Diabetes?!

I don’t need to tell you how bad sugar is for you—especially when it’s in the form of a drink like juice or soda that people guzzle by the gallon.

Yes, by the GALLON.

You see, despite warnings about their dangers, the average American drinks 45 GALLONS per year.

They call them “empty calories,” but there’s nothing empty about their impact on your waistline, your heart, your diabetes risk, and your increased risk of death.

But researchers think they’ve found a way to help prevent sugar’s negative impact on your health—and it’s in a VERY unconventional way.

Telling people to stop eating (and drinking) sugar obviously isn’t working.

Sugar is too addicting, too pervasive, and too cheap for that to happen anytime soon.

But researchers have another idea.

If people won’t stop eating sugar for their health, maybe they will for their wallets.

A study published in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, has found that taxing sugary drinks could LOWER the rates of heart disease and diabetes.

This would include soda, juice drinks, sports drinks, pre-sweetened ice tea or coffee, and electrolyte replacement drinks with 5 or more grams of added sugar per 12 ounces.

For the study, researchers tested three different types of taxes on sugary drinks—and all had big benefits.

• A flat “volume tax” ($.01 per ounce) helped prevent 850,000 cardiovascular disease events and prevented 269,000 cases of diabetes.
• A tiered sugar content tax ($0.00 for under 5 grams per 8 oz drink; $.02 per ounce of added sugars for over 20 grams of added sugars per 8 oz) prevented 1.67 million cardiovascular disease events and stopped 531,000 cases of diabetes.
• A fixed sugar content tax ($0.01 per teaspoon of added sugars) prevented 1.8 million cardiovascular disease events and stopped 550,000 cases of diabetes.

Any way you sliced it, taxing sugary drinks helped prevent thousands of heart disease and diabetes cases—not to mention the money saved in healthcare expenses, and the money gained in tax revenue.

In fact, the volume-based taxes estimated bringing in $80.4 billion in federal tax revenue, and the fixed sugar tax was estimated to save $105 billion in health care costs.

This was only a simulation. But some US cities have implemented sugar taxes…  and they’re already seeing the benefits.

This study showed the benefits of implementing a sugar tax, and also narrowed down the best one to use: the tiered, fixed sugar content tax did the best job of reducing consumer intakes while encouraging manufacturer reformulations.

I’m not one for letting the government take control of my health or my wallet –– that’s why I avoid these drinks at all costs.

And if you’re also avoiding these junk drinks, you wouldn’t have to worry about the health issues – or the taxes on them. But if you need a little extra incentive to cut them out of your life, this could be just the ticket.