Graph from USDA report on soda taxes.

Earlier this year, Council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) proposed a one-cent per ounce tax on soda and other sugary beverages to help fund her Healthy Schools Initiative, which seeks to improve the nutrition of D.C. school kids by offering them fresher, healthier foods. Under intense lobbying from the soda industry, the tax never made it into the District’s 2011 budget — though as a compromise of sorts, soda was taken off of the list of grocery items exempted from the city’s sales tax.

We’re sure Cheh felt somewhat disappointed, and recent news probably won’t make her feel any less like she was on the right path.

Via The Atlantic, a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture finds that the best way to to lower calorie consumption and, as a consequence, shrink guts in both adults and children is, yep, a tax on soda. The key graph:

A tax-induced 20-percent price increase on caloric sweetened beverages could cause an average reduction of 37 calories per day, or 3.8 pounds of body weight over a year, for adults and an average of 43 calories per day, or 4.5 pounds over a year, for children. Given these reductions in calorie consumption, results show an estimated decline in adult overweight prevalence (66.9 to 62.4 percent) and obesity prevalence (33.4 to 30.4 percent), as well as the child at-risk-for-overweight prevalence (32.3 to 27.0 percent) and the overweight prevalence (16.6 to 13.7 percent).

Of course, if this were a city of lightweights, maybe Cheh wouldn’t have much of an argument. But while adults seem to be slimming slightly, kids in the District are remaining chubby. “The District ranked ninth in the nation for youth obesity for the second year in a row. More than 20 percent of D.C.’s 10-to-17-year-olds are obese,” the Examiner reported at the end of June, citing a report by the non-profit group Trust for America’s Health.

So has Cheh scrapped the soda tax all together? Not even close. “I have not given up on the District of Columbia adopting an excise tax on soda,” she told us.

In related news, the New York Times ran a story last week explaining how a similar soda tax failed in New York State. It’s worth a read, if only to see how similar the campaign against the tax there was to the one here.