Taxing Junk Food

Why Should the Government Tax “Junk Food”? The duty of ensuring a healthy life for the citizens is the government’s in the first place, then the citizens’ their selves. The reason is that the citizens provide their necessary supplements from the markets, almost markets that are legalized by the government, and their job is to sell feasible foods. Some foods lack the nutritional values that are necessary for health; they’re called junk food, and they’re being sold and used by people. These kinds of foods lead to serious health issues, so they should be reduced, and the most effective way to do this is to impose governmental taxes to help preventing junk food. One of the disadvantages of junk food is that it leads people to get overweight by time. The reason behind this phenomenon is that junk food contains no nutritional values, and it contains empty calories, and a high level of saturated fat, salt, or sugar. The stomach finds it a problem digesting junk food. In addition to that, people get used to eat junk food weekly or daily and the reason of this belong to the availability of junk food in fast food restaurants. Overweight is a serious problem that mostly leads to death. For example, in the United States, 300000 Americans die each year because of overweight (McCuen, 1.). Usually, and as the medical reports say, junk food is unsafe. We can explain this in an easy way. Most of the restaurants that serve fast food do not serve healthy and safe food to people where as they serve junk food. “Unsafe food” means that the reference of the food is unknown. If we take meat as an example, because it is used in most fast food restaurants’ sandwiches, we do not know whether the health organizations in the government approved that this kind of meat which is being sold in the fast food restaurant is clean and healthy or is not appropriate to be eaten. People do not know the reality, but they have a big field of research they can do so they know more about junk food. Researchers and scientists consider junk food as an unsafe food because it leads to serious illnesses for most of people who eat it a lot. One of my relatives was used to eat fast food daily for about two years. After this period, he felt that something wrong is happening. After a blood test, he realized that he got cancer in his legs’ bones. So eating junk food turned to a dilemma for him. After reading many stories about people who got illnesses and taking my relative as an example, I think that junk food widespread should be highly reduced. Governmental taxes play a big role in reducing it because when it comes to paying money, citizens try to limit their usage of junk food. A huge amount of money is spent on junk food each year. There are many situations in which money is spent because of junk food. First of all, there is a huge amount of money which is being used on health issues, like cancer. People spend a lot of money to get cured of such illnesses because these kinds of illnesses are hard get cured of; they do not think of preventing getting these illnesses by not eating junk food. Second, we can see that junk food is not expensive, but there is a huge amount of money which is being used on it. Because junk food is not expensive and very easy to get addicted to, people start eating junk food from time to time, and then it changes to be weekly and daily, so overall it starts to cost a person lot of money to provide junk food. Rationally, governmental taxes can stop people’s overspending of money by imposing high taxes.
To explain the idea of getting addicted to junk food, I’ll mention an example I read. “In study of rats, the more fattening foods they ate, the more they wanted.” (Goodwin, 1.) In his article, Junk Food ‘Addiction’ May Be Real, Jennifer Goodwin talks about the time when researchers gave the rats a huge amount of many kinds of junk food and sweets they like to eat, they got addicted to them in a way of searching for them daily. The main reason of getting addicted to junk food is the fat in which it contains. Humans’ body highly acquires fat when it’s available.
Another subject with money which is related to junk food is the solution for people to change spending money on junk food to spending money on healthy food. This means that people can spend this amount of money on healthy food instead of spending it on junk food to get a much more beneficial life (Michael, 1.) This solution should come in an effective way which is taxing junk food. Most people concern about paying money because it is not easy for any family to pay taxes for things they do, so they start to decrease their usage of junk food. By doing this, the government can subsidize the prices of healthy food. So it becomes easier for most people, who can afford neither healthy food nor junk food, to get healthy food with cheaper prices. In a result, people are the main group that benefits from being taxed because they are being prevented from doing something harmful for their selves by a coercion from the government. To talk a little more about money and junk food, I will ask a question. What are some other benefits of the governmental tax on junk food? These taxes reduce junk food in the first place and we talked about this. In addition to that, there are other things. In his article, Paul Michael talks about other benefits of taxing junk food, the ones that help the government build a better life for the citizens. He mentions, “Let the government tax our fatty treats, and let them use that money to pay off some of the debt, or create new jobs, or rebuild the crumbling bridges and infrastructure.” (Michael, 1.) In conclusion, I think that governments should strongly fight junk food, or those which they do should maximize their concern fighting junk food by increasing taxes. The reason is that junk food does not have any benefits for people, all it has is disadvantages. So why to continue producing and providing junk food if it is not beneficial? This is the question which people who provide and people who eat junk food should ask their selves before providing and eating it.