Will a sugar tax be a boon or another gimmick?
‘It will always be our responsibility to be healthy and keep our family and loved ones healthy’
Is sugar a real sweet poison or are there many other poisons available on shelves that need our attention and concern? Why do we single out sugar? If we talk about a sugar tax, we also need to talk about a trans-fats tax, a fat tax and carbohydrate tax and many such taxes and levies.
Has a tax on tobacco products reduced their consumption? All these industries are multibillion dollar industries and are flourishing. Even though most of these products carry statutory health warnings, I don’t think people care until it is too late. Many corporations want to make money without bothering or even giving the slightest attention to people’s health, ethics and corporate social responsibility. It will always be our personal responsibility to be healthy and keep our family and loved ones healthy.
Bad habits are always easy to adopt and hard to drop. Good habits need mind training and self-control. We are heavily influenced by the media, advertisements and endorsements. In today’s fast paced world, marketing and advertisements can sell anything, even though the product may be unhealthy. Once a product is endorsed by a celebrity, we tend to fall for it even though most of us know that these same celebrities might never use any of those endorsed products.
No tax or statutory health warnings will benefit us, unless there is a self-realisation or we wish to learn it the hard way after compromising our health and the health of our loved ones. Most of us think that certain packed food products, like fruit juice, margarine, processed meats, energy bars, frozen meals and breakfast cereals are healthy for our body, but most of these are made from artificial flavours without any real nutritional values. These foods are full of sugar, salt, fats, trans-fats, sodium and cholesterol, packed with unhealthy chemicals and are extremely bad and will certainly damage our body in the long run with obesity, diabetes and cancer.
It would be better if we all wake up from this artificial life and lead a natural fit and healthy lifestyle. We need to follow our own natural way and return to the basics.
- The reader is a chartered accountant based in Dubai.
