YP Letters: Sugar will be harder health enemy to defeat than tobacco

From: Brian H Sheridan, Lodge Moor, Sheffield.
Will the sugar tax reduce obesity?Will the sugar tax reduce obesity?
Will the sugar tax reduce obesity?

AMANDA Jayne Turpin may have a point in arguing that an increase in sugar tax will have no effect on obesity because sweet-tooths, like smokers, will still pay more to get their fix (The Yorkshire Post, April 9).

However, diabetes and obesity are now reported to be costing the NHS more than smoking-related and all other diseases. Despite strenuous efforts from the tobacco industry, smoking has now become so stigmatised as to become unacceptable. This has been achieved by education, fittingly lurid publicity and, not least, by legislation making smoking so inconvenient that many smokers decided it just wasn’t worth the hassle.

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Sugar will prove to be a more intractable adversary than tobacco. Whatever the cost to the NHS, unlike smoking, obesity is not anti-social.

Like the tobacco industry before it, the sugar industry has spent millions to minimise the dangers of its product and millions more on advertising it. This must be countered by unpalatable publicity, as scary as anything put out to discredit tobacco. It’s up to the Government and, of course, parents.

From: Aled Jones, Bridlington.

WHAT disturbs me most about the new tax on sugar is the Government’s pathetic lack of research. Not only is the health case against sugar weak, but in several countries which implemented sugar taxes, most notably Denmark and France, obesity rates have either risen or stayed constant.

From: Dr David Hill, CEO, World Innovation Foundation, Huddersfield.

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WHEN people ask why the NHS is busting at the seams, one has only to look into the net immigration numbers of people coming to the UK for the answer.

For according to the ONS in 2017, the population of the UK will grow by a further 7.3 million over the next 25 years and 80 per cent of that is projected through immigration (5.84 million) and a recipe for an NHS meltdown.

For although we know that our NHS is 35 per cent supported by people from other lands (EU and the Commonwealth in particular), the numbers coming into the UK are unsustainable and something has to change, or all manner of things will happen that none of us wish to see.

In a perverse way, the import of cheaper workers for British industry will impoverish the British people. The trouble is of course that some people, like our politicians, just do not listen.

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