Author Interviews, Diabetes, Sugar, Weight Research / 24.02.2021
State Preemption Laws Threatens Local Ability to Implement Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Taxes
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Eric Crosbie, PhD, MA
Assistant Professor
School of Community Health Sciences
Ozmen Institute for Global Studies
University of Nevada Reno
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: My colleague Dr. Laura Schmidt and I established a framework for studying preemption (when a higher level of government limits the authority of lower levels to enact laws) by studying the history of state preemption of local tobacco control policies in the U.S., which we published last year (2020) in AJPH. We noticed the same strategies that the tobacco industry employed were now being used by the beverage industry to suppress local taxation policies on sugar sweetened beverages (e.g. soda, coffee drinks, energy drinks, etc). We used this preemption framework to publish a new study this year in AJPH that analyzed state preemption of local sugar sweetened beverage taxes in the U.S. (more…)
Leighton Ku, PhD, MPH
Professor, Dept. of Health Policy and Management
Director, Center for Health Policy Research
Milken Institute School of Public Health
George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: In this study, we examined how requirements that low-income adults work in order to keep their food assistance benefits (SNAP, formerly called food stamps) affects the number of people receiving benefits. Briefly, we found, based on analyses of data from 2,410 counties from 2013 to 2017, that soon after work requirements are introduced, more than a third of affected participants lose their food assistance. This meant that about 600,000 poor adults lost food assistance very quickly.
This is important for two reasons:
(1) Work requirements create greater hardship, including food insecurity and increased risk of health problems, when poor people lose their nutrition benefits.
(2) The Trump Administration is trying to broaden this policy, expanding it further in SNAP, but also applying work requirements to Medicaid (for health insurance) and public housing benefits. This is a massive effort at social experimentation that will cause tremendous harm.
And the sad part is that we already know, from other research, that these work requirement programs do not actually help people get jobs, keep them or to become more self-sufficient. This is because the work requirements do not address the real needs of low-income unemployed people, to learn how to get better job skills or to have supports, such as child care, transportation or health insurance, that let them keep working.
Jennifer Woo Baidal, MD, MPH
Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
Director of Pediatric Weight Management,
Division of Pediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition,
Columbia University Medical Center &
New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Childhood obesity prevalence is historically high, with most incident obesity among children occurring before age 5 years. Racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities in childhood obesity are already apparent by the first years of life. Latino/Hispanic children in low-income families are at-risk for obesity. Thus, understanding potentially effective ways to prevent childhood obesity, particularly in vulnerable populations, should focus on early life.
Sugar-sweetened beverage (SSB) consumption is a modifiable risk factor for obesity and is linked to other adverse health outcomes. Maternal SSB consumption in pregnancy and infant sugar-sweetened beverage consumption in the first year of life are linked to later childhood obesity.
We sought to describe beverage consumption in a modern cross-sectional cohort of 394 low-income, Latino families, and to examine the relationship of parental attitudes toward sugar-sweetened beverages with parental and infant SSB consumption.