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The Fresca Rebellion
theodp writes "They can ban the Marlboros, tax the Cokes, and zone the Whoppers, says Slate's William Saletan on the subject of today's morality cops. But it's time to put the brakes on the paternalistic overreaching of the food police, Saletan argues, when they come after his editor's beloved Fresca ('there are concerns that diet beverages may increase calorie consumption by justifying consumption of other caloric foods'), which will have to be pried from his cold, dead hands. '40 states have enacted special taxes on soda or junk food. And the soda taxers are becoming ever bolder. Their latest manifesto is an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, co-authored by the health commissioner of New York City, the surgeon general of Arkansas, and several others. It declares soda fair game for government intervention (PDF) on the grounds that "market failures" in this area are causing "less-than-optimal production and consumption."' Where do we draw the line?"
As an avid soda drinker, I don't have any problem with a 'soda' tax. I have much more of a problem when the government outright bans something. Keep it legal and tax it, I say. I would much rather the government got income through 'sin' taxes than through the income tax.
I'm not in favor of higher taxes in general, but I would like to shift taxes. Carbon taxes would be much more efficient than income tax, for example.
Instead of people choosing their foods based on preference, we'll have politicians picking our foods based on how much money is contributed to their campaigns!
Clearly, then, we need to ensure Food Neutrality to prevent exactly that problem!
dependence culture in the US. I've lived in both East Asia and Europe for the past 6 years of my life and every time I come back home I am just shocked at the utter disdain towards people who don't drive. In much of Europe(and a lesser extent in Japan), cyclists are treated with respect when they are on the road and there are a lot of facilities set up for cyclists to commute, futhermore in residential areas there are plenty of pedestrian areas. As a result kids(and adults) can work exercise into their daily routine safely and easily. Now compare that with most of the United States, where if there are any pedestrian signals at all, they last for a very short period of time(I was in Phoenix and I swear the walk signal only lasted for 15 seconds when crossing a 6 lane road), there are few special paths for pedestrians, and anyone that doesn't drive a car is treated as if they are worthless as a human being. I've heard tons of stories from cyclists in the US detailing how people in vehicles purposely drive as close as possible to them, cut them off, throw things at them etc.
As a result most Americans never walk anywhere simply because it isn't safe to do so. We only walk from our front door to the car and from the parking lot to the office. Its no wonder why Americans are the fattest people in the world. We need a radical cultural shift away from this whole notion that people who don't drive are worthless human beings and away from this dependence on cars
Monstar L
If government doesn't take care of the unwashed masses, corporate interests will step up to the plate. I don't know about you, but I'd rather have the nanny be the one without the profit motive.
Waiting for the science fiction movie that takes this principle to its logical extreme: widespread application of herd health management practices, developed for livestock, to humans.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Diet sodas make your body expect energy.
Why?
I could accept the same argument for just about anything else, but a liquid?
Evolutionarily, our bodies "expect" exactly one substance to enter our bodies when we drink - Water. And water has no calories.
That does segue into one of my own objections to the topic, however...
"there are concerns that diet beverages may increase calorie consumption by justifying consumption of other caloric foods"...
Well, yeah! I started drinking diet soda (despite a preference for real sugared sodas) primarily because I don't prefer the sugared version enough to give up literally one meal a day to offset the calories. What next, will they regulate going to the gym because of "concerns" that people might actually exercise solely so they can have an extra serving of dessert after dinner?
I don't eat more as a result of diet sodas... I just don't have to eat less.
But what about the poor corn farmers???!????
Their subsides basically end up in the pockets of the big grain companies. In the first section of "The Omnivore's Dilemma", there's a farmer who explains how the government subsidies actually has distorted the relationship between supply and demand pushing prices down and down. Basically, the farmer gets less for his corn, has to produce more to get paid more and get more subsidies, which then because of greater supply, the price falls, so the farmer having to make payments, produces even more corn, and down and down we go. The benefits go to the HFC/Corn processors. They're getting cheap corn at the expense of the tax payers.
I can't remember the farmer's name, but he actually wants the subsidies to end because it will allow corn prices to increase - at least when he was interviewed.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Slavery? Get a grip. What we have NOW is fascism - how is socialism any worse? What we have now is corporations running unfettered through society keeping us addicted to whatever they can keep legal while our health disintegrates - which they then try to patch up by selling us even more shit to fix the problems THEIR SHIT CAUSED. And when someone can't pay for their shit who pays for it?
YOU AND ME.
Every time we go to the hospital and pay 500 bucks for an ER visit, 50 bucks for an aspirin, 5 grand for an operating room and 8 grand for an anaesthesiologist.
Being held accountable for your behavior toward society is not socialism, it's what freaking Jefferson wrote about.
The difference is that you vote for government, but you don't vote for Coca Cola's board of directors.
Score: i, Imaginary
I find it funny that, being the United States the land of the free and all, most Americans just can't warp their heads around the fact that they've been brainwashed for the past 70 years into thinking that anything even remotely resembling socialism is evil. This is especially obvious considering the fact that a lot of Americans regard Obama as a dangerous socialist. Those who actually know what socialism is cannot help but laugh at such an idea.
But I digress. We've had what you call "universal health care" in Europe (and I don't mean the left bloc countries; I mean western and northern Europe as well) for decades, and in general it has worked acceptably, thank you very much. I've never seen the governments of any of those countries pushing to regulate what people eat and drink, how much exercise they make, when they go to sleep, or when they die. I don't know where you get the idea that universal health care implies that, but keep in mind that saying so does not make it true.
Sadly, the real question behind the universal health care debate really is the one most often forgotten, because you're too busy discussing how much control the government will have over you, and how much money the rich will have to fork over for universal health care to work. The real question is what should we do about people who absolutely cannot pay for health care or health insurance, because they are unemployed and have no savings; because they were marginalized and no one will give them a job; because they have become permanently disabled and cannot work. Should we let them live a miserable life and even die in the name of small government and the right to be rich? Until the "no universal health care" camp gives an acceptable answer to that question, their arguments are all moot to me.
Score: i, Imaginary
The first thing we need to stop doing is calling fat people "obese" or "overweight" or any other feel-good term like that. We need to call them "fat", with all of its negative connotations, because that is what they are.
Second, we need to go back to ridiculing them like we did in the 1950s and before. Aside from the very small number of people who are legitimately fat, because of some disease or disorder out of their control, most fat people today are fat because they make stupid diet and exercise decisions.
Some sissies may think ridicule is mean, but it's just a form of positive peer pressure. I know from personal experience. When I was growing up in the 50s, I used to like chocolates and sweets too much. They made me fat, and then people around me started ridiculing me. Even as a child, I knew that it was my diet that was to blame, and so I admitted I was at fault, and changed my ways. I started exercising, stopped eating so much fucking candy, and became skinny.
We don't need soda taxes. We just need to tell these fat fucks that they're fat and that they need to lose weight. Either they'll disregard us and face more and more ridicule, or they'll change their ways for the better.
It does NOT take a village to enforce thinness.
You've raised an interesting point. It DOES take a village to prevent obesity.
Obesity is a classic example of a behavior in which there is good evidence from rigorous scientific studies that the behavior is determined by community influence, rather than individual choice. Nicholas Christakis showed in NEJM that people are far more likely to become obese if they have a close friend, sibling, or spouse who is obese. People in a community become obese together and loses weight together. The most effective weight loss methods are community-based.
Christakis demonstrated the same thing for smoking. He has great computer-generated diagrams of social networks over time, as people gain and lose weight together in nodes.
The only way to deal with obesity effectively is to approach it as a community problem, like sexually transmitted disease.
After extensive studies, they identified soft drinks as one of the worst contributors to the problem (obesity, not STD), and the one most vulnerable to intervention.
That's why they're going after soft drinks.
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/4/370
New England Journal of Medicine
Volume 357:370-379 July 26, 2007
The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years
Nicholas A. Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., and James H. Fowler, Ph.D.
Background The prevalence of obesity has increased substantially over the past 30 years. We performed a quantitative analysis of the nature and extent of the person-to-person spread of obesity as a possible factor contributing to the obesity epidemic.
Methods We evaluated a densely interconnected social network of 12,067 people assessed repeatedly from 1971 to 2003 as part of the Framingham Heart Study. The body-mass index was available for all subjects. We used longitudinal statistical models to examine whether weight gain in one person was associated with weight gain in his or her friends, siblings, spouse, and neighbors.
Results Discernible clusters of obese persons (body-mass index [the weight in kilograms divided by the square of the height in meters], â¥30) were present in the network at all time points, and the clusters extended to three degrees of separation. These clusters did not appear to be solely attributable to the selective formation of social ties among obese persons. A person's chances of becoming obese increased by 57% (95% confidence interval [CI], 6 to 123) if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval. Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the other would become obese increased by 40% (95% CI, 21 to 60). If one spouse became obese, the likelihood that the other spouse would become obese increased by 37% (95% CI, 7 to 73). These effects were not seen among neighbors in the immediate geographic location. Persons of the same sex had relatively greater influence on each other than those of the opposite sex. The spread of smoking cessation did not account for the spread of obesity in the network.
Conclusions Network phenomena appear to be relevant to the biologic and behavioral trait of obesity, and obesity appears to spread through social ties. These findings have implications for clinical and public health interventions.
(In case that link doesn't work http://www.media6degrees.com/about/pdf/Spread%20of%20Obesity%20in%20a%20Large%20Social%20Network.pdf)
I'm not opposed to regulation, but every idiot who bought a house they couldn't afford is also partly responsible. Hell, at least there is a chance that the government will actually profit on the Wall Street bailout, as opposed to the money that was given away to try to prop up the housing market.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
You're absolutely right that the actual equation is more complex, but the basic truth of it is still perfectly valid.
On a side note, despite the fact that I generally hate so-called "reality" shows, I have found myself hooked on "The Biggest Loser" for the past couple seasons. I like it because a) it actually helps those on the show, b) it offers something worthwhile for those who see it. On the show, they talk about some of the metabolic challenges and apparent paradoxes (for example, you have to eat at least a certain amount to lose weight properly) that my overly simplistic equation left out.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
Look up recision. In the private health insurance market (ie. not through your employer) if you start racking up significant medical bills, you have a ~50% chance that your insurance company will find some excuse to cancel your insurance coverage on any technicality they can come up with.
THAT is what an unregulated health insurance industry will get you. It's cheaper to only insure people who won't get sick, so everyone will find some way to eliminate those with any chance of major bills, or worse, discontinue their insurance for no reason when they actually start to need it.
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