It’s fairly common knowledge that soda isn’t healthy, but the federal government seems to think it’s necessary to spend thousands of taxpayer dollars to remind us.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is spending over $160,000 to study adding warning labels to soda, reports the Washington Free Beacon.
According to the grant awarded to the University of California, Davis, the study aims to use warning labels similar to those used on cigarette packages and other tobacco products on “sugar-sweetened beverages (SSB)” in hopes of curbing consumption in adolescents and adults.
The study will be conducted in a school cafeteria on UC Davis’s campus, and if successful, will be promoted as “an approach scalable to policy and defined locations like colleges and workplaces”:
“The prevalence of adolescent and adult obesity is higher than it has ever been in the U.S., and strong evidence indicates that sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) are a major contributor to unhealthy weight gain and type 2 diabetes. Little is known about scalable approaches to reduce SSB consumption in older adolescents and adults, but a promising approach used in tobacco control that has been unstudied for SSB consumption is product warning labels,” the grant’s “public health relevance statement” reads. “The proposed study will test the impact of SSB health warning labels on SSB consumption among adolescents and young adults in a cafeteria setting, which, if found to be effective, may be an approach scalable to policy and defined locations like colleges and workplaces.”
Leading researcher and assistant professor at UC Davis Jennifer Falbe said she hopes the warning labels will “‘nudge' consumers toward healthier dietary choices.”
"My long-term career goal is to become an independent investigator who will reduce the prevalence of obesity and diet-related chronic diseases by identifying a spectrum of scalable and effective interventions that can ‘nudge' consumers toward healthier dietary choices," the grant states.
The study began on Jan. 1, 2018 and has received $164,094 to date. It is scheduled to run through Nov. 30 of this year.
It has already been ruled that forcing beverage advertisers to add warning labels to their products is unconstitutional. A federal appellate court in 2017 ruled that a law enacted by the City and County of San Francisco requiring beverage advertisers to warn that "drinking beverages with added sugar(s) contributes to obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay" was in violation of the advertisers' First Amendment rights to free speech.
Though, California does have a way of dumbfounding us all.