Unhealthy Food Tax Analysis

The New Zealand government should establish a tax on all unhealthy food and beverages
If you were to walk down the street right at this moment and look around, what would you see? You would most likely see street signs, animals, buildings and people. However if you were to look specifically at the people you would most likely find that not many people are in good shape, they are either overweight or obese. According to the world health organization, obesity worldwide has doubled since 1980 and in 2014 it was recorded that 1.9billion adults were obese. Thirty-nine percent of the adults were overweight and thirteen percent were obese. In 2013 it was recorded that 42 million children under the age of five were either overweight or obese. Unfortunately, …show more content…
According to the food industry Asia they state they state that junk food won’t have any effect on society. They support their point by using research from…. ……..Saying that “the proof of the pudding: Denmark’s fat tax fiasco highlights how the imposition of fat taxes in Denmark in 2011 had not been an effective deterrent to obesity”. They then discuss the statistics stating that “it found that 80% of Danes did not change their shopping habits despite their increase in prices”. This suggests that putting a tax on junk food won’t be very popular and will not have an effect on the obesity rate which will mean that if the government taxed junk food, it will only regress. This is because a lot of people out there still enjoy those foods or have an addiction to junk food so they will continue to consume those foods and especially the people who are on lower incomes because junk food has always been sold at such a cheap price, these people have been only eating junk food as it’s all they could afford, so therefore they are grow an addiction to eating these foods and the people on lower socio economic groups will therefore spend a higher percentage of their income on junk food to get their fix. This will affect the economy as it will mean that the kids of or other family members in these lower socio economic families will have to go without more because a …show more content…
By doing this type two diabetes and obesity and the health issues that have been derived from these epidemics will decrease this will mean that more people will be healthier and therefore live longer. At the moment junk food is ludicrously cheap; you just have to go into your local supermarket to see that a bottle of coke is sold for only a dollar whereas a bottle of low fat milk is sold for $2.50 another example…… Now if you were on a low income, of course you would pick the cheaper option and by increasing the price on junk food and making the healthy food cheaper the people in the lower socioeconomic groups may have no choice but to buy healthy food. So therefore the government needs to increase the numbers of farmers markets and provide zoning incentives so they can place supermarkets in low socio-economic areas so people can buy healthy food at an affordable price. This means that kids will be able to go to school with healthier lunches. This could mean that kids will be much healthier as well as the adults. Consuming junk food is not the only problem; a lot of people in today’s society don’t have enough intellect when it comes to making healthy choices and eating a healthy, balanced diet. This is due to the lack of education about living a healthy lifestyle and the fact that there are a substantial amount