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Research finds soda taxes decrease sugar intake, not regressive

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December 20, 2022

Soda taxes help decrease sugar consumption and are not, as some have claimed, regressive (having a disproportionate impact on lower income consumers.)

Those are the findings of researcher James Flynn, a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder's Department of Economics, according to a medicalxpress.com report.

Flynn compared data from the U.S. government's semi-annual Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System, which includes data from Philadelphia, San Francisco and Oakland, California — both of which have soda taxes — to data from cities with no soda tax.

Flynn's findings were published in September in the journal, Health Economics.