Soda Ban In New York Spreads To Boston, Worries Local Restaurants

Looks like Hightop does not like democracy at any level of government. That's fine, but it must make living in the United States very stressful for him.

 

Hightop is a Fascist.

 

supersized drinks, you must be like 500 lbs if you think getting rid of a 64oz giant gulp is some life-altering change in the US

 

You want to keep kids from being obese, limit the use of Xboxes and computers..then make their fat asses play outside like we did. We all drank a lot of soda and ate junk food. Very few of us were overweight. We burned it all off playing outside.

This really isn't difficult. You don't ban things to get the result...you change the culture.

 

He doesn't even realize it.

 

Hightop is not facist, he is anarcho-capitalist. He doesn't believe that the state is ever justified in doing anything beyond protecting property rights. He is not necessarily against democratic government, he just is against it so far as it goes beyond this box that he thinks it should be in, which is a box much smaller than the grant of power expressly given by the Constitution. So, basically he thinks the Constitution is an illegitimate document which impermissibly justifies the use of force by the state. It's a tough life he lives here in this representative democracy where he can never be truly happy, never allowing himself to love another more than himself, and never acknowledging that his desired utopia will never and could never exist.

 

Exactly, it's a lifestyle change.

Taking away one thing will only lead people to fill the void with something else. And how does banning supersize drinks stop the habitual drinker from downing a coke at breakfast, lunch and dinner, every day? How will this stop the apathetic parents from taking their kids to McDonalds for lunch on weekends? Will this prevent the teenager from plopping down on the couch and playing Modern Warfare? Will this stop state governments from cutting funding and forcing schools to cut physical education programs and recess?

And how the hell does this have anything to do with Michelle Obama? Oh right...it doesn't.

 

How about a tax on supersized drinks, where revenues are used to fund more nutritious school lunches?

 

The connection between size and weight gain is pretty clear. We will eat food if it is front of us. We will drink, eat, and consume merely if it is there.

You put cookies on a table, and people tend to eat them, more than they would ask for if they didn't see any there. Makes sense, we are programmed to eat and build up fat.

Standard human psychology.

We all feel we are making a choice, but in reality, we are incentivized to get the biggest size. That's because they charge a lot less for a given amount of soda for a size upgrade, but their cost says flat. The cost to serve a super-big-gulp compared to a 16 ounce soda is nearly identical, but the price is dramatically different.

They have big sizes to attract more customers.

Now, I am against the ban. Until they ban alcohol and cigarettes, I can't see how banning sugary food can be justified. Alcohol and cigarettes are far more damaging after all.

instead a one penny per ounce tax would take away a lot of the incentive to increase size and keep happy

 

Couldn't agreee more.

Doesn't make sense that we can't have more sugar, but we can drink as much alcohol as we want and chain smoke.

Tax it and/or put pictures of fat people on Big Gulps like cig packets.

 

If you go to the emergency room and you need your foot Amputated because of a disease that has gone untreated (diabetes or smoking related) does our current socialized medical care (emergency room) pay for it. Don't know the answer but I would like to...

 

I tend to agree with you on this one, Lou.

However, it bothers me that people keep focusing on foods and sodas when discussing obesity. The largest part of the problem is sedentary lifestyles. The human body was designed to move. When you do not ove your body (exercise), bad things like obesity tend to happen.

As long as our kids do not play outside and play in lieu of endless hours of sitting in front of a computer or game system, there will be a child obesity problem regardless of what foods or drinks are banned.

 

You're right; being able to serve large sizes HAS drawn customers to those restaurants. If you put an artificial cap on the serving size, say 16oz, then there is no added incentive to go to a certain restaurant, let's say for example in Houston. Then all the customers start going to restaurants in LA, NY, MIA where all their friends are.

 

Instead of banning the bad choice, how about you teach the people why choice is bad and hope that they can make the right choice by them self's?

 

Here's the rub: people are weak, lazy and often too dumb for their own good.

Without endorsing this policy, I'll point out that the movement to put nutritional labels on EVERYTHING including fast foot menu's has had little/no effect on the consumption rates.

Right now physically taking the XXXL cheeseburger out of a guy's hand and replacing it with a M cheeseburger has a slim chance of working; the education plan doesn't.

A random analogy that comes to mind are the Korean starcraft players who died because they didn't leave the arcade for 36 hours or sleep. After enough died, the government put caps on how long people could stay at those arcades.

 

Agree with the point about lifestyles contributing to being morbidly obese. It's no secret that walkable cities with good transit and sidewalks, etc. are without exception healthier and less overweight than cities where everyone drives cars.

 

Maybe, perhaps, it is because today soda is the number one source of calories in the American diet. If you think a kid playing outside an hour a day offsets their caloric intake along with the subsequent insulin release to stabilize the blood sugar levels, you're quite mistaken. Good try though.

The problem is the overall source of calories today is much different than it was 30 years ago. High Fructose Corn Syrup is not the same as other forms of sugar, regardless of what the corporate propoganda would have you believe.

It would appear for once, thankfully, the FDA is doing their job:

 

After the law has been passed...

Ahh for the day when, before a law is passed, we ask the people what they want.

 

I suggested that not too long ago.

Anything over a certain % of grams from fat, it gets a big fat guy in a wheelchair/fat girl in a bed in front of the TV. Any alcohol, gets pictures of nasty livers or people passed out with marker all over their face or a car wreck.

Why stop at smokes?

 

Human psychology, isn't that all the more reason for this law to be in place? You're saying we can't control ourselves, hence something needing to be done to help put a stop to, with no exaggeration, one of the biggest health concerns facing our country. We as a people were too stupid to wear seat belts, even though knowing that they could/probably would save our lives in a crash, so it was made into a law.

I don't remember anywhere saying that sugary foods are banned, if I missed that somewhere please show me. This law does the best it can to help curb the amount of sugary food ingested, the exact same way the increase in the price of cigarettes and warning labels works for cigarettes.

Your last statement is absolutely untrue. A very poor diet has the potential to do just as much damage as smoking/drinking, and in fact the results of which can be seen within days to weeks where as smoking or drinking will take months to years. The idea that knocking back sugar like it's water isn't that big of a deal is what got us here in the first place.