Scottish chocolate lovers could soon be paying more for their favorite sweet treats. A local medical committee is expected to hear opinions this week on whether or not they should ask the government to tax products containing chocolate. Customers looking for that sweet, sweet endorphin rush would pay 10-20 percent more for their favorite candy bars or boxed chocolates.

The reason chocolate's in the hot seat, of course, is because people eat too much of it. Dr. David Walker, general practitioner and general buzz killer, says that people can eat their daily calorie quota in chocolate ... on top of their regular meals. "One of the major causes of that has got to be chocolate. The quantities of chocolate being consumed now come into the same realm as alcohol, and all that has been said about the damage that is causing," says Dr. Walker.

Dr. Walker and I agree on one thing: Chocolate can be a hard habit to break. But where we part company is this idea that chocolate alone is the cause of the obesity epidemic. I mean, if you're going to tax chocolate, why stop there? A Big Mac value meal is an entire day's worth of calories too, right? And what about sugary sodas?

This idea of taxing junk food is far from new. In December, New York Gov. David Paterson proposed an "obesity tax" on non-diet sodas, an 18 percent increase for any sugary drink with less than 70 percent fruit juice. Paterson predicted it would reduce soda sales by five percent, but recently admitted that the bill would never pass. And in 2007, Oxford University researchers found that a 17.5 percent tax on sugary, salty and fatty foods could save 3,200 lives a year. "A well-designed and carefully-targeted fat tax could be a useful tool for reducing the burden of food-related disease," say the study's authors.

So there are arguments for putting a price on our favorite indulgences. Dr. Walker points out that chocolate used to be a treat, and now people eat it every day. Others point to the cigarette tax and its effect on smoking. But critics say that a "fat tax" essentially puts the government -- and lobbyists and other powerful groups -- in charge of what's "good" and what's "bad" for us to eat.

It's not an easy question to answer, but Scottish medical experts will have to wrestle with it later this week. What do you think?