Community Corner

Patch Poll: Should We Tax Soda To Curb Obesity?

Recent studies suggest that drastic methods must be taken.

The big news coming out of last week’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Weight of the Nation conference in Washington, D.C., was a public health report that predicts that if Americans keep getting heavier at the current rate, 42 percent of the population will be obese by 2030.

Childhood obesity in the U.S. has more than tripled in the last 30 years, according to the CDC, which states that in 2008, a third of U.S. children were overweight or obese. The percentage of children 6 to 11 defined as obese rose from 7 percent in 1980 to almost 20 percent in 2008

And, America’s obesity problem may hinder the number of organ donors. The pool of potential living kidney donors may be shrinking because of the national obesity "epidemic," ABC News reported May 13. In a single-center study, almost a quarter of willing donors were initially excluded because they were too heavy, Dr. Mala Sachdeva of North Shore-LIJ Health System Transplant Center on Long Island, N.Y., and colleagues reported at the National Kidney Foundation meeting in New York. And only a small percentage of those patients were ultimately able to lose enough weight to donate a kidney, despite their initial motivation, Sachdeva said.

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There are many ideas about how to fight this battle of the bulge. One is taxing soda, as Chicago is considering.

Is that a small step toward the solution? Take the poll and tell us what you think.

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