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New York Plans to Ban Sale of Big Sizes of Sugary Drinks

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by Hightop, May 31, 2012.

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Agreed^^

Eliminate all the subsidies and then let people pay the true price point of the product. All the subsidies do is provide coca-cola (and mcdonalds ect) the revenue they wouldn't otherwise have simply because they're a corporation with shareholders. We're privatizing the wealth here and passing on the debt to the public through the subsidies along with producing and encouraging the consumption of ****ty products that make people sick in the long term.

#141 Classic, Jun 3, 2012

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Classic said: ↑

Eliminate all the subsidies and then let people pay the true price point of the product. All the subsidies do is provide coca-cola (and mcdonalds ect) the revenue they wouldn't otherwise have simply because they're a corporation with shareholders. We're privatizing the wealth here and passing on the debt to the public through the subsidies along with producing and encouraging the consumption of ****ty products that make people sick in the long term.
Click to expand...

It's about buying the votes of farmers, not pleasing corporations.

Sugar tariffs and farm subsidies make hfcs the cheaper sweetener. If sugar were cheaper, coca-cola and mcdonalds would use it.

FWIW, sugar isn't much better than hfcs from a health perspective.

#142 Commodore, Jun 3, 2012
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Commodore said: ↑

It's about buying the votes of farmers, not pleasing corporations.

Sugar tariffs and farm subsidies make hfcs the cheaper sweetener. If sugar were cheaper, coca-cola and mcdonalds would use it.

FWIW, sugar isn't much better than hfcs from a health perspective.
Click to expand...

Either way, I think the core problem here is subsidies. Our government is picking the winners motivated either through vote buying and/or corporate greed (i'm sure coca-cola is in every stock portfolio of our elected representatives) and the end result is consumers picking up the bill for the health crisis through our insurance premiums/public debt. I love it, government creates the issue and thus it can be responsible for fixing the issue.

I love how diet sodas don't seem to be subject to this proposal and yet research shows they are far worse for individuals than regular sodas. hmm

Govt subsidies--->create health issue---->Govt regulates consumer decisions---->People start drinking more diet soda----->new health issues created----->new govt problem to fix----->??

#143 Classic, Jun 3, 2012
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>Cuidado! Que thundero! Soy banning todos los clouds that contaiño more than 16oz of el raiño!</p>— Miguel Bloombito (@ElBloombito) <a href="https://twitter.com/ElBloombito/status/209407652755800065" data-datetime="2012-06-03T22:14:09+00:00">June 3, 2012</a></blockquote>
<script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

#144 Commodore, Jun 3, 2012
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I'd like to see a tax on the width of cup and straw lips. The British taxes automobile piston heads based on surface area because narrow piston engines (i.e. diesel) got better gas mileage than their fatty counterparts (sports cars). Has anybody noticed how wide staws have become in the past 20 years?

Bloomberg learnt some good negotiating skills in his journey to billionairedom. First step, propose radical sweeping changes. Second step, compromise with less harsh penaltites (taxes). Third, use radical sweeping changes as fodder to further penalize.

#145 Cohete Rojo, Jun 3, 2012
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What's up with white folks filling up a 44oz cup of soda in the mornings at the gas station? Every time I see this I always say to myself "soda in the morning?" That seriously can't be good for ones health/fitness, especially when most of these people sit at a desk all day. And most of the people that I see with their big cup of soda in the mornings are carrying a "few" extra pounds.

#146 vaioavan63, Jun 3, 2012
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Cohete Rojo said: ↑

I'd like to see a tax on the width of cup and straw lips. The British taxes automobile piston heads based on surface area because narrow piston engines (i.e. diesel) got better gas mileage than their fatty counterparts (sports cars). Has anybody noticed how wide staws have become in the past 20 years?

Bloomberg learnt some good negotiating skills in his journey to billionairedom. First step, propose radical sweeping changes. Second step, compromise with less harsh penaltites (taxes). Third, use radical sweeping changes as fodder to further penalize.
Click to expand...

we call this soft tyranny, take away our freedoms bit by bit

#147 Commodore, Jun 3, 2012

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Michael Tomasky (born 1960) is a liberal American columnist, journalist and author. He is the editor in chief of Democracy, a special correspondent for Newsweek / The Daily Beast, a contributing editor for The American Prospect, and a contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Mayor Bloomberg Is Right to Declare a War on Sugar

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s soda ban has come in for widespread ridicule and outrage. But the policy is exactly what Fat America needs.

by Michael Tomasky | June 2, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

There’s only one way to say something like this, and it’s loud and proud and without apology: I wholeheartedly support Mike Bloomberg’s war on sugar. It’s unassailable as policy. Refined sugar is without question the worst foodstuff in the world for human health, and high-fructose corn syrup is little better. We are a fat country getting fatter and fatter, and these mountains of refined sugar that people ingest are a big part of the reason. The costs to the health-care system are enormous, so the public interest here is ridiculously obvious. Obesity is a killer. Are we to do nothing, in the name of the “liberty” that entitles millions of people to kill themselves however they please, whatever their diabetes treatments costs their insurers? We have this “liberty” business completely backward in this country, and if Bloomberg can start rebalancing individual freedom and the public good, God bless him, I say.

The surge in obesity is, of course, well-known and quite real. Before about 1980, 15 percent of American adults were obese. Now it’s close to 40 percent. Explanation? Handily enough, Lane Kenworthy of the University of Arizona blogged about this just yesterday. The standard explanation, he writes, is a combination of too much eating and too little physical activity. But Kenworthy shows that declining activity, while real to some extent, does not track with the sudden explosion in porcinity starting in 1980. Something else does, however—total calories in the food supply.

Click on the link above and look at the second chart and you will see that calories in the food supply tracks nearly perfectly with the rise in obesity levels beginning in the 1980s. And memory and common sense tell us that this is when it all started happening. Super-sized fries, Hungry Man Swanson dinners, Big Gulps, all started being laid before us around this time, as well as the explosion across the landscape of the family-casual restaurants that started serving grandmothers portions fit for Lyle Alzado.

Of course, change occurred nowhere else as it did at the movies. I recall the looks I used to get from those confused youngsters behind the counter when they asked me, roughly, “Wouldn’t you like to get a tub of popcorn three times larger for an extra 25 cents?” and I barked, “No, definitely not! And don’t even ask about the soda.” They were a symbol of that age of grotesquerie and excess, those 40-ounce sodas, every bit as much as gas-guzzling SUVs. And they’re indefensible. Completely empty calories. At least potato chips have potatoes. Snickers has nuts. But soda pop has refined sugar. Or corn syrup. There is nothing useful about them. And they have helped to create a crisis.

In New York City, Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs told me Friday that smoking still kills more people, but that line on the graph is heading down fast, while the obesity line is quickly trending up. Bloomberg had a public-policy problem on his hands, so he requested a task force to make recommendations to him concerning obesity, and this—banning most sugary drinks in sizes larger than 16 ounces—was a key recommendation. “We’re trying to reset the norm here and get away from the super-sized norm,” she says. “People will pretty much limit their consumption to what is in front of them. If 16 ounces is what’s in front of them, they’ll typically be satisfied with that.”

It’s a policy designed to guide people toward a certain kind of behavior. This talk of “freedom” is absurd. No one’s freedom is being taken away. When the rule goes into effect, probably by September, assuming the city’s board of health votes it through (it's appointed by the mayor), New Yorkers will still be able to buy these beverages. And those who really feel that they will perish unless they have 32 ounces of Mountain Dew Code Red can simply buy two. Nothing is being banned, and no one’s being arrested.

A country with half of its adults living in a condition of obesity is literally sick. Under such conditions, the state has every right to take action on behalf of the common good.

Are bacon-cheeseburgers next? As a practical matter, no. Sodas are an easy target because there is nothing, nothing, nutritionally redeeming about them. But might there come a day when the New York City Department of Health mandates that burgers be limited to, say, four ounces? Indeed there might. And why not? Eight- and ten-ounce burgers are sick things.

We have a health crisis in this country. A country with half of its adults living in a condition of obesity is a sick country, quite literally, spending probably not billions but trillions on the associated illnesses and maladies. Under such conditions, the state has every right to take action on behalf of the common good. We once had an epidemic of traffic deaths. We didn’t ban driving. But we came up with a device that is a minor inconvenience at most. And so seatbelts became mandatory, and now the epidemic has receded. A few people still foolishly oppose seatbelts. But most of us accept them and understand that whatever little dollop of our freedom is taken away as we latch up is more than countervailed by the practical upside.

One day, if the country comes to its senses, we’ll reverse the obesity trend and, just as we now chuckle at the prevalence of smoking on Mad Men, we’ll say, “Can you believe people used to peddle this treacle in 64-ounce doses?” We will not only have done something about obesity. We’ll have won an important victory over Libertarianism Gone Wild, a far bigger threat to society than even Sunkist Orange.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...mberg-is-right-to-declare-a-war-on-sugar.html

#148 Hightop, Jun 3, 2012
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Hightop said: ↑

Michael Tomasky (born 1960) is a liberal American columnist, journalist and author. He is the editor in chief of Democracy, a special correspondent for Newsweek / The Daily Beast, a contributing editor for The American Prospect, and a contributor to The New York Review of Books.

Mayor Bloomberg Is Right to Declare a War on Sugar

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s soda ban has come in for widespread ridicule and outrage. But the policy is exactly what Fat America needs.

by Michael Tomasky | June 2, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

There’s only one way to say something like this, and it’s loud and proud and without apology: I wholeheartedly support Mike Bloomberg’s war on sugar. It’s unassailable as policy. Refined sugar is without question the worst foodstuff in the world for human health, and high-fructose corn syrup is little better. We are a fat country getting fatter and fatter, and these mountains of refined sugar that people ingest are a big part of the reason. The costs to the health-care system are enormous, so the public interest here is ridiculously obvious. Obesity is a killer. Are we to do nothing, in the name of the “liberty” that entitles millions of people to kill themselves however they please, whatever their diabetes treatments costs their insurers? We have this “liberty” business completely backward in this country, and if Bloomberg can start rebalancing individual freedom and the public good, God bless him, I say.

The surge in obesity is, of course, well-known and quite real. Before about 1980, 15 percent of American adults were obese. Now it’s close to 40 percent. Explanation? Handily enough, Lane Kenworthy of the University of Arizona blogged about this just yesterday. The standard explanation, he writes, is a combination of too much eating and too little physical activity. But Kenworthy shows that declining activity, while real to some extent, does not track with the sudden explosion in porcinity starting in 1980. Something else does, however—total calories in the food supply.

Click on the link above and look at the second chart and you will see that calories in the food supply tracks nearly perfectly with the rise in obesity levels beginning in the 1980s. And memory and common sense tell us that this is when it all started happening. Super-sized fries, Hungry Man Swanson dinners, Big Gulps, all started being laid before us around this time, as well as the explosion across the landscape of the family-casual restaurants that started serving grandmothers portions fit for Lyle Alzado.

Of course, change occurred nowhere else as it did at the movies. I recall the looks I used to get from those confused youngsters behind the counter when they asked me, roughly, “Wouldn’t you like to get a tub of popcorn three times larger for an extra 25 cents?” and I barked, “No, definitely not! And don’t even ask about the soda.” They were a symbol of that age of grotesquerie and excess, those 40-ounce sodas, every bit as much as gas-guzzling SUVs. And they’re indefensible. Completely empty calories. At least potato chips have potatoes. Snickers has nuts. But soda pop has refined sugar. Or corn syrup. There is nothing useful about them. And they have helped to create a crisis.

In New York City, Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs told me Friday that smoking still kills more people, but that line on the graph is heading down fast, while the obesity line is quickly trending up. Bloomberg had a public-policy problem on his hands, so he requested a task force to make recommendations to him concerning obesity, and this—banning most sugary drinks in sizes larger than 16 ounces—was a key recommendation. “We’re trying to reset the norm here and get away from the super-sized norm,” she says. “People will pretty much limit their consumption to what is in front of them. If 16 ounces is what’s in front of them, they’ll typically be satisfied with that.”

It’s a policy designed to guide people toward a certain kind of behavior. This talk of “freedom” is absurd. No one’s freedom is being taken away. When the rule goes into effect, probably by September, assuming the city’s board of health votes it through (it's appointed by the mayor), New Yorkers will still be able to buy these beverages. And those who really feel that they will perish unless they have 32 ounces of Mountain Dew Code Red can simply buy two. Nothing is being banned, and no one’s being arrested.

A country with half of its adults living in a condition of obesity is literally sick. Under such conditions, the state has every right to take action on behalf of the common good.

Are bacon-cheeseburgers next? As a practical matter, no. Sodas are an easy target because there is nothing, nothing, nutritionally redeeming about them. But might there come a day when the New York City Department of Health mandates that burgers be limited to, say, four ounces? Indeed there might. And why not? Eight- and ten-ounce burgers are sick things.

We have a health crisis in this country. A country with half of its adults living in a condition of obesity is a sick country, quite literally, spending probably not billions but trillions on the associated illnesses and maladies. Under such conditions, the state has every right to take action on behalf of the common good. We once had an epidemic of traffic deaths. We didn’t ban driving. But we came up with a device that is a minor inconvenience at most. And so seatbelts became mandatory, and now the epidemic has receded. A few people still foolishly oppose seatbelts. But most of us accept them and understand that whatever little dollop of our freedom is taken away as we latch up is more than countervailed by the practical upside.

One day, if the country comes to its senses, we’ll reverse the obesity trend and, just as we now chuckle at the prevalence of smoking on Mad Men, we’ll say, “Can you believe people used to peddle this treacle in 64-ounce doses?” We will not only have done something about obesity. We’ll have won an important victory over Libertarianism Gone Wild, a far bigger threat to society than even Sunkist Orange.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...mberg-is-right-to-declare-a-war-on-sugar.html
Click to expand...

This is something I would expect to read on The Onion

#149 Realjad, Jun 3, 2012
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Ban smoking, alcohol, candy, BBQ, all fried food, cakes, butter, and anything else high if fat or sugar.

We can all eat wheat grass and be healthy. Seriously, this is just stupid. Banning foods because some people can't control their diet is just awful. It's almost as if Bloomberg is trying to legitimize the crazy tea party claims that the left wants to create a nanny state...except for the face Bloomberg is a republican.

#150 Sweet Lou 4 2, Jun 3, 2012
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Sweet Lou 4 2 said: ↑

Ban smoking, alcohol, candy, BBQ, all fried food, cakes, butter, and anything else high if fat or sugar.

We can all eat wheat grass and be healthy. Seriously, this is just stupid. Banning foods because some people can't control their diet is just awful. It's almost as if Bloomberg is trying to legitimize the crazy tea party claims that the left wants to create a nanny state...except for the face Bloomberg is a republican.
Click to expand...

Bloomberg isn't a Republican.

#151 tallanvor, Jun 3, 2012
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tallanvor said: ↑

Bloomberg isn't a Republican.
Click to expand...

He was. Independent now, but only because he found the right wing xenophobic views distasteful.

#152 Sweet Lou 4 2, Jun 4, 2012
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vaioavan63 said: ↑

What's up with white folks filling up a 44oz cup of soda in the mornings at the gas station? Every time I see this I always say to myself "soda in the morning?" That seriously can't be good for ones health/fitness, especially when most of these people sit at a desk all day. And most of the people that I see with their big cup of soda in the mornings are carrying a "few" extra pounds.
Click to expand...

Well, to be fair, a cup of soda isnt worse than a cup of coffee yet coffee is the accepted thing for people of all weights to be addicted to.

I dont drink anything bigger than a 20 oz bottle(which lasts me all day), but since I dont drink coffee, I go for a soda first thing in the morning for the caffeine boost.

Tea just doesnt seem right first thing in the morning....but I do go thru several cups of tea a day.

Someone needs to pound it thru these scumbag politicians heads that I dont need their help regulating what I put in my body....age does a fine job of restricting how much I can eat and drink.

#153 Rockets2K, Jun 4, 2012

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Rockets2K said: ↑

Well, to be fair, a cup of soda isnt worse than a cup of coffee yet coffee is the accepted thing for people of all weights to be addicted to.
Click to expand...

It has way more sugar. Not to mention a ton of other bad stuff.

I would say it is easily way worse than coffee.

#154 Bandwagoner, Jun 4, 2012
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CaseyH said: ↑

It has way more sugar. Not to mention a ton of other bad stuff.

I would say it is easily way worse than coffee.
Click to expand...

LOL

When Im anywhere near a coffee pot, I see damn near everyone dumping in lots of sugar and cream...I suppose that has no sugar at all huh?

#155 Rockets2K, Jun 4, 2012
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Rockets2K said: ↑

LOL

When Im anywhere near a coffee pot, I see damn near everyone dumping in lots of sugar and cream...I suppose that has no sugar at all huh?
Click to expand...

Nothing close to how much coke has, and many people use little to no sugar. I think you are under estimating how much sugar coke has. 8 fl oz has 27 grams which would be like floating 12-13 sugar cubes in each cup of coffee.

#156 Bandwagoner, Jun 4, 2012
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65% of Americans oppose the ban

the fact that it's not above 90% is very scary to me.

#157 tallanvor, Jun 4, 2012
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But a pair of new epidemiological studies reveals that these attempts to wring money out of the obese are misleading and misguided. Worse, the obesity cost estimates used to justify them are a danger to public health.

The first paper, published by a Dutch team in the journal PLoS Medicine, challenges the basic assumption that fat people are more expensive to treat. It's true that if you compare two people of the same age and wealth, one slim and the other obese, you can expect the fatter one to have more chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension. The fatter patient will also make more visits to the doctor, buy more prescription drugs, and otherwise ring up higher medical bills in a given year.

But this analytical approach—used routinely by Finkelstein and other obesity number crunchers—ignores one important fact: Obese people have shorter life spans. Since the elderly are by far the costliest patients, it's possible that early deaths save taxpayers money in the long run. In fact, fatal diseases almost always return net-cost savings to public health care. Smoking, which causes a host of particularly deadly conditions, turns out to be especially cheap—which is to say, government attempts to curb nicotine addiction have actually cost the United States money. (Niggling mental disorders and musculoskeletal diseases tend to be more expensive.)

That's how the numbers played out in the Dutch study. If we somehow figured out a way to "cure" obesity—with a pill, an injection, or a law like the one they're proposing in Mississippi—we'd increase the burden on taxpayers. More people would make it to old age, hastening the Social Security crisis and pushing up the costs of Medicaid. Indeed, the analysis in PLoS Medicine revealed that lifetime health expenditures were highest for healthy-living people of optimum weight.
Click to expand...

Source

#158 gwayneco, Jun 4, 2012

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Rockets2K said: ↑

LOL

When Im anywhere near a coffee pot, I see damn near everyone dumping in lots of sugar and cream...I suppose that has no sugar at all huh?
Click to expand...

You probably should have qualified your statement then, because comparing straight coffee to soda is crazy. Black coffee is not bad for you at all in moderation.

Even a bit of creamer and a sugar packet is light years better than soda.

Soda and fast food is the driving force behind obesity in this country. IMO the less educated do not equate drinking soda with getting fat because it is not food.

#159 DieHard Rocket, Jun 4, 2012
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DieHard Rocket said: ↑

You probably should have qualified your statement then, because comparing straight coffee to soda is crazy. Black coffee is not bad for you at all in moderation.

Even a bit of creamer and a sugar packet is light years better than soda.

Soda and fast food is the driving force behind obesity in this country. IMO the less educated do not equate drinking soda with getting fat because it is not food.
Click to expand...

I suppose it would have saving some explaining if I had been more specific about what I meant.

I guess the folks I see preparing coffee over the years have been special cases, cause the majority I have seen use more than one sugar and cream per cup...I assumed that was standard behavior for coffee drinkers given the extreme popularity of the various flavored, whipped, sweetened and whatever else is done to poor unsuspecting coffee drinks at the thousands of very busy Starbucks.

And then, my one soda a day probably doesn't measure up to the folks that have multiple coffees and frapachinos and other sweetened coffee drinks.

I would have been more specific about the various coffee-style drinks, but as don't drink them, I don't know all the names.

#160 Rockets2K, Jun 4, 2012

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