It seems we eat a steak too many in our lifetime. Recent researches show how red meat, especially the processed one, causes serious damages to our health. In 2015 the WHO (World Health Organization) declared that red meat raised the risk of cancer. But it seems that cancer is not the only consequence of a diary consumption of red meat. We have to add heart diseases, strokes and diabetes to our blacklist. And it’s still not enough because producing and processing red meat also contributes to environmental damages as climate changes.
The good news is that all this can be avoided by taxing simple and processed red meat. This sort of ‘sin tax‘ would also reduce the taxation for all illnesses derived from the daily consumption of red meat. The new research found that a 20% tax on unprocessed red meat and a 110% tax on the more harmful processed products across rich nations would cut annual deaths by 220,000 and raise $170bn (£130bn).
Governments of all around the world are already imposing ‘sin taxes’ on sugar, alcohol and tobacco and, even if people don’t like governors to tell them what to eat, public awareness is sensible to the communication of science, as the cultural shift on smoking over the last decades demonstrates. Therefore the plan of a major taxation on red meat has just to be put into action. As Marco Springmann, at the University of Oxford says: ”It is not about taking something away from people, it is about being fair”.
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