Winning war against sugar

MALAYSIA announced a new Nutri-Grade labelling system alongside an advertising ban on sweet beverages, outlining these measures as bold steps in the fight against rising obesity and diabetes in line with the country’s ‘war on sugar’ campaign.

This new Nutri-Grade label would implement a multi-grading system, labelling drinks with letter grades “A-D” based on their sugar content, guiding consumers towards healthier purchasing habits.

In turn, beverages which are graded “D” (more than 10g of sugar per 100ml) will be banned from advertising, restricting their sugary influence on the market. This is a welcome start.

Malaysian adults consume 43g of sugar daily, nearly double the World Health Organization’s (WHO) stricter recommendation of 25g.

Among adolescents, the figure is a staggering 57g. Overall, the country consumes the most sugar in Asean, averaging 57kg annually (including industrial use).

This excess has fuelled a public health crisis. WHO data suggests that approximately one in every five Malaysians is living with obesity and diabetes mellitus, placing us second in obesity and first in diabetes across Asean.

Managing a population burdened by preventable illness is already a struggle of its own, straining public healthcare systems, raising costs to taxpayers, and increasing cost pressures for families.

The economic toll is larger still; non-communicable diseases are estimated to drain RM64bil from the economy in 2021, more than double the Health Ministry’s entire annual budget for that same year.

This sugar problem has long been recognised. Malaysia has already attempted two key policy responses: the Healthier Choice Logo in 2017 and the Sugar-Sweetened Beverage (SSB) Tax in 2019.

The Healthier Choice Logo uses a label to signal consumers to make healthier purchasing decisions, while the latter aims to reduce consumption through cost, discouraging the purchase of high-sugar drinks while simultaneously incentivising reformulation towards a lower sugar product.

However, Malaysia’s current approach has yet to turn the tide on the unyielding “war” against sugar.

The Healthier Choice Logo’s 5g/100ml criteria and binary labelling system allowed carbonated drinks to be labelled as a ‘healthier’ choice.

Similarly, the SSB Tax failed to affect meaningful change. A volumetric tax pushes weak price signals, alongside readily tax-free substitutes like stall beverages, preventing the policy’s overall goal to shift the demand of an already relatively inelastic good.

Furthermore, manufacturers which were quick to reformulate ensure products fall below the tax threshold.

Not only does this remove the already minimal tax hike, but it also renders future tax rate revisions redundant, exposing the feature as a potential policy loophole.

Beyond that, Malaysia also continues to subsidise refined sugar, spending RM500-600mil per year to keep retail prices low, while zero-rating it under the newly revised Sales and Service Tax.

If Malaysia is serious about a “war” on sugar, then this is akin to supplying ammunition to the enemy.

This brings us to the newly announced Nutri-Grade system. Will it do what earlier measures could not? While it does address some issues with the Healthier Choice Logo’s simplistic binary criterion, it raises questions about whether it goes far enough to change behaviour at scale.

As it focuses solely on sugar content, the measure fails to account for the wider nutritional value of a drink.

For instance, the absence of beneficial nutrients, the presence of artificial additives with questionable health effects, and the nutritional void that defines these reformulated products.

Additionally, the advertising ban, while welcome, covers very little ground. Popular drinks currently advertised, with most already labelled with the HCL, all sit comfortably below the 10g sugar threshold and are exempt anyway.

While these new measures represent a promising start, more could be done.

Policymakers should consider an upfront strategy to phase out sugar subsidies over multiple years and transition to an absolute sugar-based tax that captures actual health harms.

Complementing this with behavioural policies such as a more nutritionally rigorous multi-dimensional grading system like Nutri-Score, advertising restrictions aligned with Asean’s 2024 minimum standards, and standardising reduced-sugar levels in prepared drinks at stalls and restaurants would also assist in curbing sugar intake on a broader scale.

After all, addressing fundamental contradictions and gaps in Malaysia’s sugar policy is how we can turn a ‘war on sugar’ from rhetoric into real health gains.

FAHAD IJLAL NIZAM

Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS) Malaysia