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Junk Food Tax

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Junk Food Tax
Junk Food tax is defined as“taxing less nutritional value food such as sugary pop while food with high nutritional value will not be taxed.” (Rupert Taylor, 2009). Junk Food is generally consumed by people with a wide range of ages, a majority of children, adults or even elderly love consuming junk food. It is likely to say that junk food contains quite a lot of fat and food additives which have low nutritional value and bad to our health. Research appears to show (Dr. Michael Booth, 2009) that the problem of obesity in children is not because of the lack of exercise by them, but the consumption of high calories junk food. Times have moved on, more people are having fat-related diseases. Some of the countries have set up law of junk food tax, Denmark is the first country to do so. Junk food tax may lower the chances of having those diseases by some of the citizens. This essay examines why junk food tax seems to be beneficial to citizens

To begin with, taxing unhealthy junk food can highly decrease the consumption of it by citizens. According to the New England Journal of Medicine (Kelly D. Brownell, Ph.D., 2009), the author suggested that through taxing of sugary food, the decrease in consumption could be more than 10% which indicates that citizens may tend to buy less unhealthy junk food after taxation. The reason for this phenomenon is that the change in price of food will directly affect our preference of consumption. When the price of junk food becomes higher, people will tend to buy less. If people buy less junk food, there should be lower chance for them to over consume it. Therefore, junk food tax can lower the consumption of unhealthy beverages by citizens.

Some would argue that tax may not be able to change the long-term behaviors of some of the people, as they may treat the behaviors as habits. (Mark Bittman, 2011) However, as mentioned above, the price of a product will probably lower the incentive of consumption of people. At the same time, junk

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