One day soon, you may have to pay more for a bag of potato chips or pint of ice cream. Charging a “fat tax” for sugary, salty and fatty foods may be one way to curb people’s enthusiasm for unhealthy junk foods, according to researchers at Oxford University.

They found that charging a “Value Added Tax” (VAT) of 17.5 percent on unhealthy foods would cut consumer demand and reduce the number of heart attacks and strokes. Overall, they say the tax could save 3,200 lives a year in Britain.

They arrived at this number using a mathematical model, so no one really knows how a fat tax would be received by the public. For one thing, it’s estimated to raise average weekly household bills by 4.6 percent. And experts fear that low-income households -- which tend to spend a higher proportion of their income on food -- would be unfairly burdened.

There is also the issue of what is truly an “unhealthy” food. Public health officials could easily classify butter, coconut oil and other high-fat, yet healthy, foods as subject to being taxed simply because of their saturated fat content.

Of course, old-fashioned willpower also comes into play here. If someone really wants to eat a candy bar, are they going to pass it up just because it costs a few cents more? Probably not.

Eating healthy needs to be a personal choice that you make for yourself. I suspect that once many of you try it, you will feel so great mentally and physically that junk foods you once craved will no longer have control over you, fat taxed or not.

Yahoo News July 12, 2007