With state legislative seasons wrapping up and official deadlines approaching, activists placed their hopes to end beverage freedom on a California soda tax proposal. Now, legislators have placed it in the “suspense file,” which effectively kills it. Proponents had hoped that the tax would reduce obesity, but there’s no evidence that it would. And it appears that attempts to hoodwink the public with promises of a “children’s health promotion fund” despite evidence that politicians are creative in their fund-avoidance schemes have failed as well.

Our Senior Research Analyst praised the legislators’ restraint, telling the U-T San Diego: “No one needs a government busybody telling them what they can eat and drink, whether it is through regulation or taxation […] In the end, this bill was a tax, plain and simple.” Proponents vow to resurrect it next year, but for now at least, Californians’ beverage freedom is safe. (If you choose to celebrate with your favorite fizzy drink, try not to spill it like this guy did after New York’s soda ban was overturned.)

Meanwhile, we’ve taken to the Press-Enterprise editorial pages to warn about a new and evolving threat to Californians’ choices. Earlier this session, a legislator introduced a bill that would allow state bureaucrats to restrict the sale of products that they deemed contributed to a “public health epidemic.” It’s a truly horrific idea that will do little more than empower anti-choice bureaucrats. Our Senior Research Analyst writes:

That mandate is so broad that presumably anything, from California cheese to Napa Valley wines to labor-saving products like dishwashers, could face regulation under this latest Sacramento scheme in the name of fighting obesity. But there’s no evidence that this concoction will actually do this.

Interestingly, the sponsor of the bill, Mark DeSaulnier, is a “repeat offender” in the anti-consumer choice campaign. In 2006 as a county supervisor, he tried to pass a regulation that would ban fast food restaurants in the name of obesity prevention (and possibly help his restaurant, which he later shuttered).

Fortunately, this bill does not appear at all likely to pass. That said, California consumer choice supporters should remain perpetually vigilant.

Anti-soda activists are out in force blaming the simple pleasures for Californians’ love handles and medical bills, despite little evidence that extracting more money from people’s pockets will slim them down. Indeed, a research team from Yale, Emory, and the University of Washington warned in a recent commentary that “evidence suggests caution in enacting sugar-sweetened beverage taxation legislation with a core purpose of obesity reduction.” Evidence shows that people faced with soda taxes don’t switch to water but instead get their tasty liquid in the form of equal-calorie off-brand sodas, milks, juices, and even beer in response. And it’s not like calorie consumption from soft drinks is surging: A Centers for Disease Control study released last week found that Americans are consuming roughly 40-70 fewer calories from soft drinks per day than ten years ago.

The bait-and-switch comes from promises that a “children’s health promotion fund” will guarantee that revenues will lead to increased healthcare and anti-obesity spending. Unfortunately for California consumers, the evidence from the state’s lottery—by law, profits are put in a fund for education—indicates that new fund contributions will replace, not supplement, general revenue contributions to those programs.

Politicians are able to hide the special interest pet-project games behind the veneer of the “fund,” even if they don’t openly raid it, which they might. Promises of a “health promotion fund” can be undone by a future legislature, and politicians in other jurisdictions have taken expansive views of what basic government services can be paid for by similar “funds.” The proposed tax now will be analyzed by state number-crunchers before being voted on and possibly receiving a vote in the full Senate. Supporters of beverage freedom should watch closely.

Chasing this year’s well of food-related publishing cash, namely screaming from some New York park bench that food is being made “addictive,” she’s written a book titled Obsessed blaming the food industry for life’s problems. Echoing a political attack ad, she insinuates that food companies are waging war on women by making foods that are, um, easy to prepare, convenient to buy, and pleasing to the taste buds. (Or perhaps companies are simply giving people what they want.) Despite research from Cambridge University finding that “criteria for substance dependence translate poorly to food-related behaviours,” Mika claims that this means all sorts of regulations and lawsuits are needed to punish food makers.

In an interview, Mika points to the fact that she ate Nutella while sleep-walking. Far from making Nutella addictive, this highlights the side effect of a drug she was taking. As it turns out, sleepwalking, sleep-eating, and, scarily, even sleep-driving are reported side effects of the prescription sleep aid Ambien that Brzezinski said she was taking. Oh, and cases of Ambien dependence (i.e. addiction) are frequently reported in the medical literature.

So the food industry is innocent of at least one of Mika’s anecdotal charges. But there’s even more cash behind Mika’s sob stories. When the New York soda ban was announced, some noticed that Mika praised the ban on one hand and appeared to guzzle large quantities of Starbucks coffee (all glory to the latte loophole and Rich People’s Big Gulps) with the other. She did this because Starbucks is the main sponsor of Mika’s show.

No Starbucks cash would mean no show, and no show means Mika would have no soapbox from which to sell books. So obviously some sugary beverage choices are more equal than others, even if they have roughly equal calories. (A Starbucks 20-oz soy caramel macchiato has 300 calories, while a 20-oz regular cola has around 250.) Last time we checked, women drink lattes too.

Of course, in the world of diet police trying to restrict your food choices, taking sugar money in one hand while cashing in on bashing sugar is simply par for the hypocritical course. Whether it’s New York Times commentator Mark Bittman, who wants us all to be vegans before dinner while he finishes his two-egg breakfast; Kelly Brownell, who demands fat taxes while he is himself extremely rotund; or the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which sues food companies for doing something similar to what it also does, many food cops are known hypocrites. That Mika is among them isn’t surprising at all.

They neglect to acknowledge the Congressman’s more important points: Not all the grants went for true education about choices. Some may have gone to backhanded lobbying for policies most Americans don’t support. Evidence suggests that the CDC took money allocated to it by the fiscal stimulus and gave it to local authorities to push states and local governments to impose steep taxes on soft drinks.

Even the supposedly “educational” spending often went to propagandistic attack ads rather than factual information. Federal taxpayers subsidized gross-out ads that put safe, legal products in the cross-hairs. (New York City’s scientifically dubious anti-soda ads were among them.)

The CDC’s campaign proved not to be about putting the facts before the public and letting people make responsible decisions (or accept the consequences of irresponsible ones). Instead it became agenda-driven activism, and until the CDC learns the difference it might just need to told the difference by the people’s representatives.

But shouldn’t activists instead promote the personal responsibility that has made progress and ask for more of it? Of course, if they did that they might have to recognize that their anti-food campaigns are abjectly failing at their supposed goal of reducing obesity in the absence of relying on personal responsibility and physical activity first and foremost. Recall the statement of former CDC obesity boss William Dietz from a few months ago in response to reports that children’s calorie consumption had declined (with our emphasis):

The only way that we can explain the decline in calories and the increase in obesity in boys, flat in girls, is that physical activity has declined. And if that’s the case, that’s a real concern, because physical activity plays a major role in the prevention of chronic diseases, including obesity.

The anti-food campaign is failing because it doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge the role of physical inactivity in causing obesity and fails to empower people to take responsibility for their own lives. By demanding even more government intervention to take choices away rather than educating people to make smarter choices about eating and exercising, the sugar scolding movement will not reduce America’s waistlines. And if their latest tactic, declaring foods the equal of real drugs like cocaine and heroin, is any indication, the scare-and-regulate activists haven’t learned any lessons.

J. Justin Wilson, the Center for Consumer Freedom’s Senior Research Analyst, released the following statement regarding the proposed tax:

Senator Bill Monning’s soda tax proposal amounts to nothing more than a money making exercise for California’s cash-strapped government. A penny-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages will have little to no effect on Californians’ waistlines. Despite claims by Monning and his allies, soft drinks are not a unique cause of obesity. Soda provides just 7 percent of our daily calories according to recent government data.

It is unlikely the revenue from the proposed tax would even fully fund the proposed health initiative. Look no further than California’s lottery sales, which were originally meant to supplement education funds but have been used through the years to supplant general state expenditures. Government budgets are fungible, meaning lawmakers have the ability to defer the tax revenue to other more immediate needs.

Politicians should tighten their wallets before making Californians swallow this not so-sweet tax.

British researchers now demand that the government put “cigarette-style” warning labels on soft drinks. But as Canada’s largest national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, noted when a similar hysterical proposal—which also applied to pizza, snacks, and fruit juices—saw the light of day in the Great White North, the comparison is incorrect and misleading.

For one thing, smoking actually causes smoking-related illnesses. On the other hand, over-consuming any product with calories or being a couch potato—as opposed to simply drinking soda—can lead to obesity. (Soft drinks provide only seven percent of our daily calories, according to government data.) That’s to say nothing of other small choices that reduce physical activity and also contribute to potential calorie imbalance. If the government is going to put vomit-inducing obesity warning pictures on sodas or pizzas, it should also logically put them on sofas, computers, televisions, chairs, and automobiles too, no?

Warning labels are a classic food activist fever dream straight from mid-2000s Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) propaganda. (CSPI itself has moved on to Prohibition.) It’s also a ploy used by animal liberation “nutrition” activists who want people to associate lean meats with unseemly things.

The precedential possibilities of this proposed government overreach are endless. But Americans are justly skeptical of government overlords in their pantries, since the remedies the Yale-and-Bagels elite have chosen for them violate personal freedoms (and won’t work to boot). As some of the commentariat are beginning to recognize, it might just be time for a new approach, not a bad idea rehashed from old copies of CSPI’s bulletins.

The bill’s supporters hope the tax will “eradicate” obesity, to quote one particularly enthusiastic San Franciscan blog headline. Science says it will do no such thing, however. A recent commentary in a scold-friendly policy journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned, “Evidence suggests caution in enacting sugar-sweetened beverage taxation legislation with a core purpose of obesity reduction.”

Instead of switching beverage choices to zero-calorie drink scold-approved water, scientific studies and lived experience indicate that people respond to soda taxes by fleeing jurisdictions to shop elsewhere or replacing soft drinks with equally caloric juices, milks, and even alcoholic drinks. Multiple studies confirm that these effects render any reduction in calorie consumption—and therefore obesity reduction—trivial at best.

Even if California (which just passed a massive tax increase last November) is strapped for cash, the tax has more problems than benefits. The tax falls on the poorest Californians with the most severity, which is why Kelly “Twinkie tax” Brownell’s colleagues are desperately seeking to “reframe” that particular issue. Combine that with a lack of health benefits, and you get a terrible proposal that eats the grocery budgets of the working classes to salve the consciences of the latte loophole crowd. (Paging C.S. Lewis.)

And a recently conducted Harris Poll shows that Americans are also livid with the suggestion that Yalies and billionaire mayors should dictate beverage choices. Respondents objected to the idea of a soda tax by a 2-to-1 margin. Over half also didn’t think that a soda tax would reduce obesity. (Evidence shows that they’re right.)

As our Senior Research Analyst told HealthDay News, “[P]eople prefer incentives to penalties.” Indeed, the general Bloomberg-style idea of food choice regulation proved even more unpopular than soda taxes in this most recent poll, with over two thirds of Americans actively opposed.

These results confirm a longstanding trend in the national conversation: Only a small group of self-appointed elites have any desire to regulate their fellow Americans’ food choices. (Not their own, of course, as the Rich-People’s-Big-Gulps-excluding latte loophole in Mayor Bloomberg’s invalidated soda prohibition shows.) An analysis of an Associated Press poll showed that Americans of all political stripes balk at the effort to seize control of our dinner plates.

California voters agreed to $6 billion in tax increases through last fall’s Proposition 30. But some state legislators found that hike insufficient to satisfy their insatiable appetite for revenue, so now they’re coming for middle-class Californians’ grocery carts and restaurant tables. State Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, wants every Californian to stump up an extra $1.44 per standard 12-pack of soft drinks purchased for the state coffers.

He says that the tax will combat obesity in the state, but there’s no evidence that it will do so. Instead of reducing medical expenses, the tax will only crimp the budgets of Californians and send more money to Sacramento.

Despite the fictional claims of Monning and his allies, soft drinks are not a unique cause of obesity. Consuming more calories than you burn causes obesity. Government data demonstrate that soft drinks provide only 7 percent of our daily calories.

The fundamental problem with soda taxes is that they don’t address the causes of obesity. Changes in society that we rightly credit for making our working lives easier and easing our home lives have reduced the amount of calories we expend in daily life. Office jobs, expansive suburban communities (cars have replaced short walks), and labor-saving devices from power lawn mowers to washing machines all make our lives better, but the price is less physical activity and possibly more obesity.

And even on the “calories in” side of the equation, a soda tax doesn’t address the problem appropriately. A recent study in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that a 40 percent sales tax on soda – in the ballpark of Monning’s proposed tax – would reduce calorie intake by a trivial amount. It turns out that rather than choosing water, people drink something else with equal calories, like juice or milk. By doing so, they dodge the intent of the tax and don’t lose weight.

This substitution led the researchers to find another surprising result: The lowest-income consumers were most adept at switching products and did not reduce their calorie consumption.

Instead of receiving a state-sponsored weight-loss program lubricated with sparkling tap water, the poorest consumers buy the same amount of calories, just from beverages they like less. Since the weight of the tax falls disproportionately on lower-income people anyway, the failure to show benefits makes soda taxes doubly regressive, in choices as well as prices – an unsavory reality that even the tax’s promoters acknowledge.

Obesity should not be fought by government with taxes and bans that are discriminatory and prejudicial. That is why the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the association of certified nutrition professionals, affirms that “the total diet or overall pattern of food eaten is the most important focus of healthy eating.” By focusing on regulatory holy wars against single products rather than holistic, life choices steeped in personal responsibility, the proponents of soda taxes make a grave mistake.

Research has found that people lose weight when they make a personal commitment to do so. The record of state mandates and taxes is far worse.