The minister of finance clarified that the tax will not apply to sugar free drinks
The Union really doing their upmost to have the AFD seem more appealing for the uneducated, reactionary conservatives.
I’m gonna go broke when they introduce the Spicy Tax.
Fuck you and your döner
- Bundestag, probably
Today I learned y’all dumb as fuck. What’s wrong with the comments?
I understand what you mean, dw there are still reasonable people
The UK has had this for a while. I will be honest in that I still miss the taste of full sugar drinks, that’s definitely a downgrade, however after so many years of having these other drinks available I’ve lately found full sugar to be just… Too much.
Some artificial sugars do a number on my gut though. Been drinking more healthier things as a result, though overall I suppose the sugar tax has had a positive effect?
Some artificial sugars do a number on my gut though
Do not eat any substantial amounts of candy containing xylitol. Stuff is a laxative, and lots of sugar-free candy and gum uses it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylitol
Adverse effects
Humans
When ingested at high doses, xylitol and other polyols may cause gastrointestinal discomfort, including flatulence, diarrhea, and irritable bowel syndrome (see Metabolism above); some people experience the adverse effects at lower doses.[21][36] Xylitol has a lower laxation threshold than some sugar alcohols but is more easily tolerated than mannitol and sorbitol.[37]
There’s that LA Beast video on YouTube where he goes through a large bag of sugar free haribo bears and develops an excellent relationship with his toilet. After reading hilarious Amazon reviews about how they’re a laxative.
Its also poisonous to pets, just fyi
100% fruit juices would remain exempt
Why?? Shit’s sugar. You’re not getting most of the nutritional benefit from juice, all the fiber has been removed.
Not all sugar is the same. I’ve read that natural fruit sugar is still way healthier than industrially refined sugar. Also fruit juice usually contains vitamins, electrolytes and fiber. So from a health perspective it makes sense to me to exempt 100℅ fruit juices. The alternative would be to only allow juice mixed with water or something else.
A company (Compal) in my country (Portugal) that has been making whole fruit juice since the 70’s. If they made it any thicker, you could eat it with a fork.
Spain and France also have off-brand manufacturers of this type of fruit drink. Germany could learn something
You can’t expect logic from a conservative government, silly.
My guess is because it’s unsweetened, and that the tax applies to drinks with added sugar or sweetener.
That’s not true, the tax apply to unsweetened milk alternatives.
‘We should reduce sugar and sweetener consumption, let’s not tax this drink that’s almost pure sugar because it’s natural’ is asinine. Apple juice has virtually identical sugar content to a soda.
Isn’t it fructose, or has it changed during the “jucification” process? I mean fructose is sugar, but way less bad than refined sugars.
They’re not the same types of sugar. Your body uses glucose differently than fructose.
The sugar in soda contains fructose (it is in fact 50% fructose). Soda with HFCS isn’t actually that much higher in fructose than plain sugar soda, ironically; the ‘high’ just means ‘higher than white sugar’.
The “high” means greater than 55% fructose. HFCS has to be at minimum HFCS-55 according to the FDA. Many sodas mix HFCS-55 with HFCS-90 to increase the concentration. And I never said that soda doesn’t have fructose? Don’t know where you got that.
Why not tax the actual apples then?
Because apples aren’t apple juice, metabolically or nutritionally. The fiber slows down how fast you absorb the sugar and it’s good for your gut.
Don’t get me wrong, they probs should tax it but wouldn’t that just push people to make their own juice instead and probs not change much?
I doubt it, making juice is annoying and you have a lot of apple mush to deal with.
Eh fair enough.
I motion we tax Catoblepas for being too starchy.
Yes that’s why I wouldn’t tax them extra, however you seem to be advocating for a tax on anything with sugar. So why the change? You say yourself they’ve still sugar in it so why not tax them according to your logic?
To put another way, if the presence of sugar isn’t enough to justify the tax on its own, as long as the form is somrwhat different, then why not accept the difference between added sugar and no added sugar? That’s just as meaningful a difference.
I have no idea what you’re trying to advocate for here, but a dietitian isn’t going to tell you that apple juice and an apple are the same, because they’re not; a single serving of apple juice isn’t even made from a single apple. Fruit is healthy to eat, juice is not a health drink. If you’re taxing for health it makes sense to tax the unhealthy things and not the healthy ones.
I’m not really advocating for anything other than pointing out that your argument is inconsistent. Is it about the sugar or not? If not then you’ve already accepted that there are different definitions and clearly juice is a different definition than a soft drink. Your arbitrarily deciding what’s okay and not okay from what I can see of your argument. Adding healthy is even worse. That’s an extremely subjective argument.
What about grapes? They’re extremely high in sugar and relatively low in fiber. Is that okay? Do you see what I’m saying? There’s no consistency to go on here.
Because like all laws, corruption came into the process to make it miss the goal entirely.
Taxing almost all sugary drinks including artificial sweetners but not 100% juice is not “missing the goal entirely”. That’s still hitting the unhealthiest and most marketed beverages.
I’d agree if this targeted products with added sugar and left the artificial sweetners out of it. Fruit juice is also sold in high volumes, especially to families and people beyond their prime age. They might be less marketed, but I would argue they’re not less unhealthy than soda with artificial sweetners. They might not miss the figurative goal entirely, but they sure are missing their literal goal if they are doing this to limit peoples consumption of unhealthy drinks.
There is no evidence that sugar substitutes are unhealthy and in fact have proven over and over again to increase weight loss compared to full sugar or telling people to “just drink more water”.
Hypocrisy is hypocrisy regardless of its intentions.
Fructose is worse than sugar
Not sure why you are getting downvoted, it’s established science that fructose is worse than glucose. People freak out at high fructose corn syrup, but when it’s “natural” juices it’s completely fine I guess
Huh? Those natural juices are glucose. They have some fructose still, but it’s nothing like sweetened drinks.
At least in the case of apples, cultivated fruits are mostly sucrose and fructose: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308814614013995
Sucrose is itself 50% fructose.
Sure. Maybe I’m just in a weird group of people, but I don’t know anyone that considers Apple juice to be fruit juice though. At least from a perspective of “would you like some juice”. No one is ever talking about apple juice because it’s long been just sugar water in America. There’s only like two good brands that make it anymore. When the people I know talk about juice it’s orange, pineapple, mango, etc. almost always pulpy juices.
Okay, but this is about Germany, and apple juice is the most popular juice in Germany. And apple flavored sugar water is not allowed to be labeled as Apple juice here
You’re in a weird group or a weird country then, I drink apple juice quite often, even have made it myself when there’s been a plentiful year. And it’s still pulpy.
The comments here are insane
The problem is that companies will figure out whar artificial sweeteners get around the tax.
Next a savory tax? Or Euros taxing flavor because it frightens and confuses them.
Obesity and diabetes kill people. Dangerous to your health and the health of the people around you if you are naive about the average amount of sugar consumed. Anyone arguing life is already very expensive has a point, but arguing it is a silly tax is either because you are uninformed or indifferent to the health of your community.
This is an article about how they’re going to increase taxes on sugar free drinks, which famously don’t cause diabetes or obesity
No it is an article about tax on sugar, that includes sugar free drinks. My comment is obviously about drinks that contain sugar, so is this article, it is very relevant.
They’re too busy enjoying their 600 lb life to understand that in the US.
Artificial sweeteners are arguibly often worse than sugar
If you drink 3000+ cans of diet a day you will approach the lower limit of what’s considered safe.
Weird comment knowing how little we know about artificial sweeteners and it’s long term impact on the body. Actually, quite dangerous comment.
But you can start here; https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/sugar-substitutes-new-cardiovascular-concerns
Or here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40902134/
Or here; https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10465821/
Also fun fact about sorbitol; https://source.washu.edu/2025/11/alternative-sweetener-sorbitol-linked-to-liver-disease/
Not all artificial sweeteners are the same, so it’s borderline meaningless to say we “know so little” about them.
Hell, aspartame is literally the most studied food additive in the history of the FDA, and has never been shown to have any adverse effects in any reputable study.
and has never been shown to have any adverse effects in any reputable study.
Again, dangerous comment. Please actually spend a minute looking around before making such bizzare claims.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8373935/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23097267/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24700203/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35324894/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36638072/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39547074/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41765137/
There are like 30 other studies showing negative effects in mice and rats.
EDIT: Accidentally gave one bad study (see comment below), removed it. Rest seem valid.
I usually don’t bother answering a Gish Gallop, but…
1 - They didn’t complete the study, it was only 13 people with an existing history of mental disorders
2 - They basically said it’s so within the tolerances that it’s probably just chance, and that regular soda did as bad or worse
3 - Could only get the abstract, and it says nothing about their findings
4 - Combines aspartame and acesulfame-K, so it’s hard to tell from the abstract. The methodology doesn’t fill me with a lot of hope for it though.
5 - Seems to be the same study as 4 (same group of French people, same author), but for cardiovascular disease instead of cancer? Which, yeah, fat people drink diet soda, have heart disease, and get cancer more than thin people. I’m not sold on their methodology
6 - It’s a rat study. Again, I can’t see anything but the abstract, so it’s hard to say. But any study that doesn’t do a comparative analysis against regular sugar is suspect in my book
7 - Like 2, this one says that it’s probably just chance in the conclusion.
And look, if this was some new chemical on the block, maybe I’d agree that it should have some more testing. But it’s aspartame. It’s been being actively studied since 1965. It’s had a lot of negative PR backed by Domino (et al), which has created a huge amount of public concern. And will all of that, the studies still come out a hundred to one that there’s not really any link to anything.
Yes, you can find studies that say “aspartame scary.” But they’re basically like all the ones you linked above. Dubious. Most even admit they’re dubious (as seen above). And almost none of the ones that push the “scary” rhetoric compare the effects against regular table sugar, which is also heavily linked to increased cancer/heart disease risk. So it’s not even intellectually honest, even when their numbers happen to random out to slightly agreeing with them.
I just opened up the last link and it took me 5 seconds to find this:
Rats that had received aspartame (1000 mg/kg b.wt.)
One liter of coke zero has 240mg of aspartame.
https://juiceradvices.com/how-much-aspartame-is-in-coke-zero/
1000mg per kg would mean, in a human with, let’s say 80kg, we’d need 80000mg to replicate the study case.
Since we - usually - don’t eat pure aspartame, that would mean you’d need to chug 333.33 liters of diet coke per day to replicate the aspartame intake of the rats in the study.
These studies are so far off of reality that I barely know where to begin.
These studies are so far off of reality that I barely know where to begin.
And here I thought that, if anyone knew, it would be you!
Challenge accepted.
I asked chatGPT and it said not to believe you because your links won’t even open
The links open, champ.
Nope I just tried again, chatGPT said they won’t open
Oh come now, none of these articles even address the risk of sand mites or magnetic resonance.
Am I on reddit?
Last I remember it lowers the body’s tolerance to sugar which increases how much food people eat overall.
And the fructose in fruit juice isn’t “healthy” in any way. Even though it doesn’t hit insulin, it does the liver, and the caloric impact is the same.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/heart-health/abundance-of-fructose-not-good-for-the-liver-heart
Why do all these bills always amount to “fuck whatever it is poor people eat”?
The fructose isn’t, but fruit juices contain a bunch of other important elements. Moderate intake of orange juice (1/2l per day) has been proven to be beneficial.
So if we added some vitamins to Coca Cola, should we drop the tax?
There shouldn’t be a tax in the first place.
wtf are you talking about. Soda costs more than juice. At my local store it’s literally DOUBLE the cost of soda.
These bills are taxing things that people are addicted to that are demonstrably bad for you. There is nothing good for you about soda. Juice is at least partially good for you. It has glucose and nutrients you actually need. Not high fructose corn syrup.
Juice is at least partially good for you. It has glucose
Not high fructose corn syrup.
lol
