According to the World Health Organization WHO, 85 countries have already introduced a soft drink tax to stop the global obesity epidemic, but not Sweden.

Soft drinks contain empty calories that the body does not get full from.

When sugar-sweetened beverages become more expensive, consumption decreases according to a series of studies.

In the video, you can see where in the world they have made soft drinks more expensive or forced down the sugar content in sweetened drinks.

Soda tax doesn't seem to bite guys

The UK introduced its tax four years ago.

Now a study in which they followed the weight and height curves of a million British children in preschool and middle school shows that the overweight curve dropped by eight percent in the 10-year-old girls after the soft drink tax was introduced.

However, this did not apply to the boys, and in the video one of the researchers, epidemiologist Nina Rogers, speculates why.

In Mexico, researchers also showed last year in a study that the soda tax there reduced obesity by three percent in teenage girls, but not in boys.

Since people in the British study were not randomly assigned to live with or without the soft drink tax, one cannot be completely sure that some other factor did not play a role in the result.

But this observational study is very large and according to Liselotte Schäfer Elinder, who is professor of global public health at the Karolinska Institute, the method used is accepted and she believes that the results can be trusted. 

Fantastic results according to the Swedish Food Agency's expert

The Swedish Food Agency has investigated policy measures for healthy food consumption, where soft drinks tax is highlighted as one of several possible methods.

More than half of Sweden's adult population is overweight or obese (obesity) and this is one of the main causes of ill health and premature death in Sweden.



- I think that this will be another contribution when we now move on and analyze some of these different instruments in more depth, says Åsa Brugård Konde, who is a nutritionist at the Swedish Food Agency, about the new British study.

Five percent of Swedish teenage boys drink more than one liter of soda a day.

In a year's time, the Swedish Food Agency will give its final report on which methods would be most effective in reducing obesity among Swedes.

Then they will also weigh in on the new results regarding the effect of the soda tax in Great Britain and Mexico.