A new estimate of the health impact of soda taxes in Mexico sheds some light on what’s at stake. In cases of heart disease and diabetes averted, the model suggests that, in Mexico, those levies are on track to save close to a billion dollars and powerfully improve lives.

After increases in consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and obesity, Mexico has become one of the fattest countries on Earth. In 2014, it adopted a 10 per cent excise tax on the sale of sugared drinks.

The beverage producers said soda taxes would do little to reduce consumption. But market surveys show that Mexicans reduced their purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages by an average of 6 per cent per household in 2014.

And by December 2014, that drop in purchases was at 12 per cent.

If Mexicans sustain this pattern of consuming fewer sweetened beverages, the model developed by researchers predicts that over 10 years, the 10 per cent excise tax could prevent 189,300 new cases of Type 2 diabetes, 20,400 strokes and heart attacks, and 18,900 deaths among adults ages 35 to 94.

From 2013 to 2022, the reductions in diabetes alone could yield savings in projected health care costs of $983 million (Dh3.6 billion), the researchers concluded.

Among the largest beneficiaries of these tax-related health benefits are Mexico’s substantial population of younger adults — those 35 to 44 — whose consumption of sugared drinks is the highest. In this group, half of the new diagnoses of diabetes projected for the study’s 10-year period could be averted. That same group would see the greatest reductions in coronary heart disease diagnoses as well.

On the whole, men — who in 2012 consumed close to nine servings a week of sugar-sweetened beverages — would get the greatest health gains from the 10 per cent excise tax, the researchers concluded. Women, who consumed about six servings a week before the tax was levied, would see more modest health improvements.

The model was devised by a team led by University of California, San Francisco, internal medicine specialist Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo and reported in the journal “PLoS Medicine”. In their projections, the researchers assumed that Mexicans would compensate for their reduced sugary-drink consumption by taking in 39 per cent of those lost calories in some other form, such as milk.

Its projections of the health impact of Mexico’s soda taxes are “likely conservative”, the authors of the model write. While the model predicted the taxes’ effects on adults older than 35, Mexico’s fast-growing population and the country’s heaviest citizens — also its heaviest consumers of sugary soft drinks — are younger than that.

As this younger generation ages, the impact of reducing their sugar intake — and close to half of added sugars come from sweetened drinks, experts say — could dwarf predictions pertaining to their elders.

If some combination of excise taxes and other public health measures could drive sugary soda consumption down further — by 20 per cent of 2012 consumption levels — the model predicted that diabetes diagnoses would drop by 9.5 per cent for a total savings of nearly $1.9 billion.

Whether Americans would respond to a tax on their sugary drinks as Mexicans have is open to debate. Unlike in Mexico, where the soda tax is national and consumers cannot travel to neighbouring towns to avoid it, Americans have resisted such taxes. The beverage industry and its allies have quashed or defeated many soda-tax proposals at the state or federal level. So soda-tax initiatives have largely been taken up at the local level.

–Los Angeles Times