Britain taxed sugary drinks in 2018 and something genuinely interesting happened before the tax even took effect. The levy was tiered by sugar concentration and announced two years ahead, and in those two years the manufacturers reformulated. Fanta, Sprite, Ribena, Lucozade, Irn-Bru. The sugar came out because taking it out was cheaper than paying.
I read that as a triumph for about a day. A tax code and a deadline pulled the sugar out of a national beverage supply, and no parent had to say no in a supermarket aisle to make it happen.
Then I looked at what replaced it, which was aspartame and sucralose and acesulfame K and steviol glycosides. And I had to decide whether I thought that was a victory or a trade.
Where I landed, and why it took me a while
I cannot endorse a policy whose measured success is a substitution nobody has shown to be safe.
I want to be careful about the strength of that, because it would be easy to overrun it and I have been wrong in this direction before. The evidence against non-nutritive sweeteners is not remotely the evidence against sugar. The World Health Organization’s 2023 guidance advising against them for weight control was conditional and rated low-certainty. The observational data is badly confounded, because people who are already gaining weight are the ones who switch to diet drinks, which makes the diet drink look like the cause of a problem it arrived after.
So this is not a claim that sweeteners are as bad as sugar. It is a narrower thing: the one real-world success in this whole field consists of moving an entire population onto a compound class whose long-term effects are genuinely unsettled, and calling that a public health achievement. I would not sign that, and my reason is precaution about an unknown rather than certainty about a known.
But the deeper problem is what the substitution preserved
Nobody needs sugar. There is no dietary requirement for it, and no deficiency you can develop from never consuming any. I have written about that before.
What I had not followed through is that the same is true of sweetness. Sweetness is not a nutrient. It is a signal — a report filed by the tongue about what is arriving, generated before anything has been absorbed and before anything can be verified. It has no requirement because it is not a substance. It is information.
Which means the reformulation did not solve the problem. It removed the substance and preserved the signal. The drink still tastes the way it did, so it is still wanted, so the category survives, so the industry survives. The tax took out the part that could be measured and left intact the part that maintains the demand.
The comparison I wanted to make, and why it failed
I had a line ready. Nobody ever invented a safe cigarette, I was going to say. Tobacco use collapsed by people not doing it, because nobody thought the habit was owed a replacement.
That is wrong, and it is wrong because of vaping.
Somebody did invent the substitute. It removes the combustion and keeps the nicotine, and it is now a very large industry with a serious argument in its favour for people already smoking and a serious problem attached to everybody else it reached.
So the parallel holds after all, and it holds harder than the version I was going to write. Look at what each substitute keeps.
Vaping removes combustion and keeps the nicotine. Diet soda removes the sugar and keeps the sweetness. In both cases the thing removed is the carrier — the measurable, indictable, chemically obvious part. In both cases the thing preserved is the signal that maintains the habit.
Combustion is to sugar as nicotine is to sweetness. That is not a metaphor. It is the same engineering decision made twice by two industries facing the same regulatory threat, and it produced the same result: a product that answers the specific charge and retains the customer.
The difference that actually matters
Two of them, and they are the whole argument.
The first is timing. Vaping arrived in the two-thousands — forty years after the Surgeon General’s report, thirty after cigarette advertising left the airwaves, long after smoking had already fallen from a majority habit to a minority one. The substitute came after the collapse. Sweeteners arrived instead of one. One followed a reduction; the other is the mechanism by which a category avoided being reduced at all.
The second is that the substitute got regulated in turn. Flavour restrictions, age limits, advertising rules, taxes on the liquid. When the industry moved, the apparatus moved after it.
Nothing of the kind has happened with sweeteners. They are not taxed, not restricted, not labelled as anything in particular, and the entire reformulation was treated as compliance rather than evasion. The substitute was not merely permitted. It was the point.
So what would I actually do
Tax the sweetness, not the sugar.
Any added sweetener, nutritive or not, by sweetness intensity rather than by grams of carbohydrate. That closes the route the British levy left open, and it is no harder to draft — sweetener content is on the label and relative intensity is a published figure.
Nobody proposes this, as far as I can find, and I think the reason is that everybody has quietly accepted that the sweetness has to stay and only the sugar is negotiable. That is the concession underneath the whole debate and it has never been argued for. It was simply assumed, by people with an interest in it being assumed.
I am not certain I am right about this. It is an opinion held by a citizen who has read the file, not a finding, and I have kept those two things apart for five years and intend to go on doing it.
But I know what it looks like when an industry answers a charge by changing everything except the thing that keeps you coming back. I watched it happen to my own body for fifty years, one product at a time, and every one of them was compliant with whatever the rule was that year.