In Praxis

In 2014, when Berkeley, CA passed the nation's first soda tax, advocates and public health practitioners in San Francisco made a parallel effort to enact a similar tax on sugar sweetened beverages in their city. A testament to the beverage industry's massive funds, the measure failed in San Francisco in 2014. It would take another two years for the city to pass this measure successfully.

Janna Cordeiro from San Francisco's Wholesale Produce Market discusses her public health work on sugar sweetened beverages in San Francisco and the struggles of taking on the well-resourced soda industry. As the SFUSD parent representative to the San Francisco's Soda Tax Advisory Committee, Janna speaks to the ways soda taxes can be reinvested to advance health equity and reduce prevalence of preventable chronic diseases in working-class communities of color. She advocates for the use of soda tax revenues to support small business owners and to fund community organizations working on the ground to directly address the most urgent health issues of communities hardest hit by the beverage industry's exploitation. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes.

The information, opinions, views, and conclusions proposed in this episode are those of our podcast guests.

Christina Goette, co-founder of Shape Up San Francisco Coalition, discusses the wide range of efforts to reduce sugary drink consumption in the Bay Area and situates SSB work along the spectrum of prevention. From education initiatives, to organizational culture change, to policy advocacy, the spectrum of prevention provides multiple avenues for decreasing sugar sweetened beverage consumption. Reflecting on the journey of passing San Francisco's  SSB tax, which was unsuccessful when it was first proposed in 2014, Christina emphasizes the importance of centering the voices of communities who are disproportionately burdened by beverage industry's predatory marketing as well as ensuring tax revenues are reinvested directly back into these communities. She shares how building authentic partnerships with community-based organizations who are grounded in their communities and have community trust was central to the passing of the tax in 2016. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes.

The information, opinions, views, and conclusions proposed in this episode are those of our podcast guests.

Holly Scheider, chair of Berkeley's Sweetened Beverage Product Panel of Experts, discusses Berkeley's work to reduce sugary drink consumption and their fight against the beverage industry. She touches on the ways Berkeley's Measure D has been used to invest in community-led health initiatives for those most harmed by the negative health impacts of sugary drinks and describes how healthy checkout ordinances, city procurement policies, and other strategies can be complimentary to soda taxes in combatting the tactics of the beverage industry. Drawing on her extensive background working on clean air ordinances and other public health policy to challenge Big Tobacco, Holly connects the fight against the beverage industry to the historic public health efforts that took on the tobacco industry. Building on this experience, Holly breaks down excise taxes and helps reframe arguments of regressivity to place the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of sugar sweetened beverage industry. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes.

The information, opinions, views, and conclusions proposed in this episode are those of our podcast guests.

In 2014, Berkeley, California passed Measure D, the first local tax on sugar sweetened beverages in the nation. Sara Soka, fellow at the Beeck Center and the campaign manager for Measure D, discusses the process of passing Measure D and the importance of community in moving SSB work forward.  Reflecting on the Measure D campaign, Sara touches on the ways community-led research, storytelling, and mapping is necessary for participatory policymaking and emphasizes that equity must be centered throughout the entire SSB policy process, not just within the actual policy itself. For this to happen, community members must be at the table during decisions making and the process must center those most impacted, particularly communities of color. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes.

The information, opinions, views, and conclusions proposed in this episode are those of our podcast guests.

Jeff Ritterman, cardiologist and board member of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility working to combat medical racism and climate change, discusses his experience and lessons learned from proposing the first municipal soda tax in Richmond in 2012 and his work on the tax in his time serving on Richmond's City Council. Though the 2012 measure did not pass, it would be followed by successful sugar sweetened beverage tax efforts in other parts of the Bay Area, including Berkeley and San Francisco. Jeff highlights the importance of collaborating with and centering Black and Latinx community members who carry the disproportionate health burdens caused by the beverage industry's predatory marketing of sugary drinks and uplifts other measures, such as removing sugary beverages from health centers, to decrease sugary drink consumption. He breaks down some of the literature on the mechanisms by which excess sugar in sweetened beverages lead to diabetes and cardiovascular disease, as well as touches on the ways the beverage industry contributes to poor health and environmental outcomes in its production and distribution. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes.

The information, opinions, views, and conclusions proposed in this episode are those of our podcast guests.

Michael Jacobson, senior scientist at and co-founder of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), tracks the rise of soda consumption, proliferation of research on its health effects, and industry responses over the years. As former Executive Director of CSPI for 40 years until 2017 and author of books such as Nutrition Scoreboard: your guide to better eating and the recently released Salt Wars: The Battle Over the Biggest Killer in the American Diet, Mike draws on decades of experience as a nutrition advocate. He describes in depth the deeply politicized nature of the fight for SSB taxes and efforts to preempt them both on local and national levels. In addition to SSB taxes, Mike explains the wide array of innovative strategies advocates have used to reduce sugary drink consumption, including removing sugary beverages from schools, children's meals, and checkout aisles and the need for research to assess both efficacy and messaging around various strategies. While he notes that there has been a 25% reduction in per capita consumption of carbonated soft drinks since 1998, Mike argues that further decreasing SSB consumption across the nation--and centering equity in these efforts-- will require deep engagement with the communities and geographies most impacted. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes.

The information, opinions, views, and conclusions proposed in this episode are those of our podcast guests.

Winnie Huston, Policy Strategist at DC Greens, discusses the importance of relationship building in the work of food justice and shares her personal journey to the work. Through wisdom garnered being on the ground in DC, Winnie speaks to the power of connecting personally with community members in food spaces and bringing community members and policymakers together to collaborate in the fight against inequitable outcomes due to sugary drinks and other unhealthy foods. Centering the ways sugar sweetened beverages inequitably impact communities of color through targeted marketing and disparate resource access, Winnie affirms the need to direct SSB tax funds back to those most impacted for nutritional services and educational initiatives. She makes the case for innovative and grounded ways to communicate the negative health impacts of SSBs to these communities. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes.

The information, opinions, views, and conclusions proposed in this episode are those of our podcast guests.

Rod Lew, Executive Director of Asian Pacific Partners for Empowerment, Advocacy and Leadership (APPEAL), discusses how the negative health impacts of sugary beverages can be best understood in the context of a long history of racism and structural oppression as well as toxic relationship building between industry and marginalized communities. Building on this, Rod makes the case for systems change and calls for equity based policy processes in SSB taxes and building community power through reinvestment to challenge the negative health outcomes caused by sugary beverages. From APPEAL's work on tobacco, Rod also draws parallels between the tobacco industry and the beverage industry in their tactics regarding claims of regressivity in opposition to taxes on their products and threats to their profits. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes.

The information, opinions, views, and conclusions proposed in this episode are those of our podcast guests.

According to the USDA, 99% of Navajo Nation is a "food desert." However, Denisa Livingston from Dine Community Advocacy Alliance and the Slow Food International Council, holds that the lack of healthy foods in the Navajo Nation is more accurately described as food apartheid. Reflecting on the multigenerational impacts of unhealthy foods and drinks in the Navajo Nation that stem from a history of dispossession and harm, Denisa discusses how the fight to reduce sugary drink and other unhealthy food consumption is a matter of reclaiming indigenous lifeways and foodways. She talks about the Healthy Dine Nation Act of 2014, a 2% tax on unhealthy foods and foods with minimal-to-no nutritional value, and the importance of uplifting food as medicine. Further drawing from her lived experience and work, Denisa discusses the need for the struggle for food sovereignty to center community connection and healing and the ways language and culture are central to the fight. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes.

The information, opinions, views, and conclusions proposed in this episode are those of our podcast guests.

According to the CDC, half of Black and Brown children born in 2000 can expect to develop diabetes in their lifetime. Xavier Morales, Executive Director of the Praxis Project, reflects on the structures that drive such inequities in communities of color and makes the case for a transformative systems approach to health inequities caused by sugar sweetened beverages. Challenging us to think of health equity as a verb, rather than a noun, he uplifts community-imagined and -led health and education initiatives as critical tools in the fight against the beverage industry. Drawing on SSB tax work done in Oakland, Berkeley, and Philadelphia, he argues that reinvestment of SSB tax revenue into communities most impacted by the beverage industry's predatory marketing to do this work is necessary to build the power needed to oppose the industry's exploitation and obfuscation of the truth. This episode of In Praxis is a part of Season 2: Sugar Sweetened Beverage Taxes.