A sugar tax is needed to address deteriorating oral health across the country, the New Zealand Dental Association says.
The number of children having decayed teeth removed is steadily increasing each year, with children undergoing almost 8000 extractions of multiple teeth in the last year.
In the 2024/2025 year on 7973 occasions children aged between 0 and 14 were hospitalised to have more than one tooth removed.
That is an increase from 7351 in the 2023/24 year, 6865 in 2022/23 and 5540 in 2021/22.
Dr Robin Whyman, the director of dental policy for the New Zealand Dental Association, said dental decay was to blame.
He said 140 countries had a sugar tax, and the latest figures showed New Zealand should join them.
"Dental decay is a relatively complex range of issues that are going on, but often dietary related.
"The more sugar and more sugar-containing diets that children have, the more we tend to see in some young children very high levels of dental decay," Dr Whyman said.
Extractions for children tend to peak between the ages of three and eight, he said.
While a sugar tax was likely to increase the cost of high sugar foods, it would also encourage food producers to reduce the sugar in some items, he said.
"Those sort of measures have been shown to brings things like dental decay levels and general anaesthetic use rates down in the countries we would compare ourselves with, not the least the UK."
He said currently there seemed to be little enthusiasm from politicians for a sugar tax, however.
