My battle against the bulge has been long and hard-fought. I have tried all manner of tricks to lose weight, but remain borderline obese. A sedentary job has been tackled with regular exercise; poor eating habits with fresher food - to little avail. I was about to hoist the white flag of surrender this week on the grounds that genetics seemed to be in the way when I chanced upon US President Barack Obama's controversial health care reforms.
The US health care system is broken and Obama has made fixing it his domestic priority. Funding his planned changes will be expensive and that is where the greatest opposition lies. The president has come up with a novel option to help raise the cash: he has determined that soft drinks are a major contributor to obesity and asked the Senate to impose a tax on them.
Given Americans' love of what they call sodas - they each drink on average the equivalent of 11/2 330-millilitre cans every day of the year - a 1 US cent tax per can would raise US$1.5 billion. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that a 3 US cent federal tax would bring in US$24 billion over the next four years - a sizeable chunk of the US$1 trillion needed for the reforms. A by-product of the increased cost would be lower consumption - which would lead to fewer overweight and obese people.
I have long been aware that soft drink makers liberally lace their products with sweeteners. Generally, the sugar of choice is high-fructose corn syrup. Another key ingredient is caffeine. What I was not aware of was the body of research pointing to soft drinks being a significant factor behind the global obesity pandemic.
Soft drinks have long been part of my working routine. A can provides a pick-me-up at times of mental need. One or two cans have, for the past few years, been consumed each working day. In an effort to shed kilograms, I last year switched to diet colas.
Learning of Obama's tax idea spurred me into research mode. I encountered a host of American studies plainly marking out soft drinks as obesity-makers. The typical 18-year-old was only slightly taller than counterparts from three decades ago, but weighed 6kg more, a Centres for Disease Control and Prevention study found. In that time, the number of calories consumed from soft drinks had risen from 70 a day to 190. This represented about half of the total daily caloric increase. Obesity in that time more than doubled.