Starting from this Saturday, Danes will pay an extra 30p on each pack of butter, 8p on a pack of crisps, and an extra 13p on a pound of mince, as a result of the tax.
The tax is expected to raise about 2.2bn Danish Krone (£140m), and cut consumption of saturated fat by close to 10pc, and butter consumption by 15pc.
“It’s the first ever fat-tax,” said Mike Rayner, Director of Oxford University’s Health Promotion Research Group, who has long campaigned for taxes on unhealthy foods.
The tax is designed to curb obesity and heart disease but the targeting of actual fat over problem makers such as sugars and grains has not gown unnoticed. As a commenter known as thedocument notes: Once again, governments get it wrong. Butter and meat don’t make people fat. Complex carbs and processed foods do. And even a healthy diet must be paired with exercise. What will they do next? Tax people who don’t show up to a gym regularly?
Hugh Easton adds: Anyone who has properly tried the Atkins diet knows that carbohydrates make you fat, while eating fat can actually help you lose weight. The human population group with the lowest incidence of cardiovascular disease are the Inuit who eat their traditional diet consisting entirely of meat and whale blubber. Animal fats are an essential component of the human diet and promote good health. There were a lot of experiments conducted in the 1950s and 60s that claimed to show saturated fats were harmful, but the “saturated fat” in those experiments was hydrogenated vegetable oil. There is no scientific evidence showing that non chemically processed animal fats are harmful; in fact all the evidence is to the contrary.
A 2007 study by Mr Rayner’s group concluded that a combination of taxes on healthy foods and tax breaks on fruit and vegetables could save 3,200 lives a year in the UK.
