Critical thinking: reasoned decision making MOOC

1. Project: Analysis of the official resolution to
implement the IEPS tax, to sugar beverages
Critical thinking: reasoned decision making
Roberto Martínez
edX - Tecnólogico de Monterrey
June 6, 2020
Summary
In a resolution published by the “Official Gazette of the Federation” (DOF) on
December 9, 2013 it is stated how can sugar beverages be one of the main factors
for the obesity issues in the country. The major proposition consists in imposing
a tax of 1 Mexican peso per liter on any sugary drink, nevertheless in the posed
opinion of this paper the mentioned tax will not prevent obesity and neither will
people stop to purchase sugary beverages.
Keywords: health, obesity, sugar, beverages
1 What are the arguments of the DOF article?
Through the first sentences of the article (Ley del Impuesto Especial sobre Producción y Servicios
(IEPS), 2013) it is possible to discern the key arguments. To start with, a high consumption
of sugar added in beverages contributes notoriously to the excessive caloric intakes leading
to overweight and obesity in Mexico. It is fundamental to have a state policy to change food
consumption and physical activity patterns, because the high prevalence of overweight and
obesity represent a problem for public health in Mexico. Therefore comes the establishing of the
new 1 peso tax in sugar added beverages.
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2. 2 Which consistencies or inconsistencies did you find in the
document?
Figure 1: Sugary beverages.
Clearly there is a problem with the consistency of the article. At
the beginning the impact of sugar added beverages is mentioned,
and later it mentions changing the food habits and physical
patterns.
Following, there is a shift turning towards protecting, pro-
moting and preventing the improvement of health and all the
chronic diseases related to weight and diet habits (hypertension,
diabetes, etc.). At the end of the article focuses exclusively on
the taxing of sugary beverages and forgets the rest, ignoring
completely the first mentioned statements.
3 Which biases or errors did you find in the arguments (bad ar-
guments, fallacies, omissions, false inferences and deceptive
statistics)?
The article is overlooking other factors that can contribute to overweight and obesity in Mexico,
for example fast and junk food.
There are incomplete arguments, missing hard facts and statistics, letting the reader come
up with false inferences due to lack of concrete information. Logical fallacies can be found
across the article like:
• Ambiguity: the most frequent and important factor is the ambiguity with a lack of detail
and poor statistics.
• False cause: relating sugary drinks prices to chronic diseases such as hypertension, diabetes,
overweight and putting a tax on this will help the prevention.
• Either/or fallacy: in this case it is implied by the author that if there is a tax in the sugary
drinks this will affect directly to the reduction of obesity and diabetes, without considering
all the other options.
4 Can conclusions be drawn from the arguments?
The submitted arguments are not strong enough, they do not have a statistic information
supporting them and the reason for increasing a tax to sugary beverages. For the article to
propose adding new taxes, it should include the hard data about how the sugar added beverage
is increasing obesity and chronic diseases; also establish how it can be prove that adding this
taxes will decrease the consumption of this product and at the same time improve the health
of the Mexican people. It is wrongly assumed that due to the increase on taxes, people will
no longer buy sugar added beverages, and then decreased obesity. There are other factors
causing this problem and they need to be considered to have a significant change in the health
of Mexicans.
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3. 5 Is the person’s point of view derived from research?
After the thorough analysis it is determined that the point of view of the document is not derived
from research because the article does not present statistics about how overweight is in Mexico
and the relationship to the consumption of sugary beverages. Additionally, they proposed
to add a tax to the beverages that has any type of sugar added, ignoring the establishing of
standards about type and amount of sugar that could be dangerous to health (ANAPRAC, 2020).
6 How are you ordering your own arguments (to avoid being
unfocused)?
1. Search and analyze the arguments of the document.
2. Look for supporting information for each argument including any kind of hard data or
reference related to the subject.
3. Analyze the possible errors or bias of the arguments.
4. Make a conclusion about the overall document and arguments.
References
ANAPRAC. (2020). Industria de bebidas [Online; accessed 5-June-2020]. http://anprac.
org.mx/. (Cit. on p. 3)
Ley del Impuesto Especial sobre Producción y Servicios (IEPS), I. (2013). Bebidas azu-
caradas, para bajar la obesidad. Official Gazette of the Federation (DOF) (cit. on
p. 1).
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