Lawsuit Challenges New York Sugary Drink Ban

An anonymous reader writes "Soda makers, along with other trade organizations, filed a lawsuit Friday challenging the New York soda ban that is about to be implemented in the city. 'Last month, the board voted eight to zero, with one abstention, to ban restaurants, mobile food carts, delis and concessions at movie theaters, stadiums and arenas from selling sugary drinks in cups or containers larger than 16 ounces. The ban, designed to reduce obesity, is slated to begin March 12. ... The lawsuit also claims that new regulations are “arbitrary and capricious,” violating a section of the New York Civil Laws and Rules. Opponents have specifically said it’s unfair that convenience stores, including 7-Eleven and its famous Big Gulp drink, would be exempt.'"

Comments

Good

[wmbetts]

The law is ridiculous hopefully it gets over turned.

Re:Good

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Ridiculous laws for ridiculous people? Mind you, many things got regulated precisely because a bunch of idiots started destroying their lives with them.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Agree. Instead of one 24-ounce soda they get two 16 ounce ones. This is soooo much healthier.

Re:Good

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Oh, one thing comes to my mind: They could allow for large servings under the condition that the glass/cup will have multiple mandatory photos of repulsively obese people on it. Just like with cigarettes and the warning labels on them.

Re:Good

[artor3]

Drinks used to be served in smaller containers, and society survived just fine. Restaurants started using larger containers to exploit flaws in human psychology, allowing them to trick customers into buying more than they want or need. This is done to make more money, and to hell with the health of the general public.

Your free will isn't as all-powerful as you think it is. There are a great many people spending billions of dollars every year on cutting edge science to control your purchasing decisions, and you don't stand a snowflake's chance in hell against them. Only as a group can we fight back.

Re:Good

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Exactly! See what those artificially sweetened drinks make people do? It's horrible, horrible, I tell you!

Re:Good

[artor3]

Advertisers spend half a trillion dollars every year to control you. Any one individual might be able to resist, but on the balance, advertising works. They wouldn't spend so much money on it if it didn't.

Re:Good

[K. S. Kyosuke]

You mean that large pages should have pictures of people with thick glasses?

Re:Good

[K. S. Kyosuke]

The liberal streets...

You Americans keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Between the government and the private sector, I know who's lied to me more about products. Hint: it rhymes with sivate prector.

Re:Good

[Fuzion]

No one's banning anything. The only thing being limited it the size of a single container. You can buy a hundred 16-oz containers of any sugary drink if you wanted to.

It's very unlikely that a black market rise because I don't see anyone willing to pay any significant amount for a single 32-oz container instead of two 16-oz containers.

Re:Good

[fibonacci8]

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/streets For those who were confused.

Re:Good

[Wrath0fb0b]

Drinks used to be served in smaller containers, and society survived just fine. Restaurants started using larger containers to exploit flaws in human psychology, allowing them to trick customers into buying more than they want or need. This is done to make more money, and to hell with the health of the general public.

Or public health officials have been tricked into thinking it's more important for people to be healthy than to eat satisfying junk food and are exploiting flaws in human psychology regarding the correlation between physical appearance and mental state (we are biased towards believing that attractive people are happier).

That's the problem with the "people are stupid" line of argumentation that's prevalent in the nanny state -- it doesn't really explain why we should prefer moving decision-making from one group of stupid people to another group of stupid people.

Re:Good

[causality]

Between the government and the private sector, I know who's lied to me more about products. Hint: it rhymes with sivate prector.

Indeed, government probably won't lie to you, on this particular subject.

When they treat adults like you as though you were a two-year-old, they will do it quite openly and honestly. And shamelessly.

But hey, at least they aren't lying, right?

Or maybe the real question is what happened to you to make you crave so many sodas instead of honestly desiring to quench your thirst the natural and most effective way, with water. Maybe another real question is why you cannot take responsibility yourself for how you eat and whether you exercise, and remedy either (or both) as needed, why you would need any corporation or government agency to tell you how you should eat and when you should exercise. That would be a revolutionary concept, huh?

Of course if you are a total victim then the "advantage" (if you are warped and perverted enough to think of it as such) is that nothing is ever your fault. You're just a leaf in the wind, powerless to change anything, totally at the mercy of corporations and government to which you have ceded all of your personal power. Then sure, you get to blame them for your problems, yeah, maybe you can convince yourself that this is satisfying, are you happy with your life yet? Or you can trade away the blame-game bullshit and do what it takes to make better decisions and see with your own eyes that they bear fruit in the form of a better life that you get to run yourself.

The victimhood mentality is astonishingly popular. I must conclude that the people who prefer it have never honestly mastered both options. It's like a computer user who swears Windows is the best OS for his needs, yet he knows nothing about any other OS. His opinion is not a valid one because he has no basis for comparison. Now if he were equally skillful in Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and OSX, and then still preferred Windows, I would call that a valid opinion.

Re:Good

[geminidomino]

Actually, even in the "You'll pry our imperial measurements from our cold, dead hands" States of America, soda is, in fact, sold in 1, 2, and (though I haven't seen them in a few years) 3 liter bottles.

Re:Good

[Mr. Freeman]

" Eat like a PIG, you pay for the heart bypass. Smoke, you pay for the cancer surgery."

Drive, you pay for the trauma doctor to patch you up when you have an accident. Walk outside, you pay for the damage to your lungs from pollution. Don't wrap yourself up in a bubble, you pay for everything.

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

The solution is to make you purchase your half pound of sugar in 3 cups. If making giving yourself diabetes slightly inconvenient is "government tyranny" then we probably need more of it.

Re:Good

[whatthef*ck]

Oh, one thing comes to my mind: They could allow for large servings under the condition that the glass/cup will have multiple mandatory photos of repulsively obese people on it. Just like with cigarettes and the warning labels on them.

Do the busybodies who are convinced they're smarter than everyone else, and hence, entitled to manage their lives, ever rest?

Re:Good

[Culture20]

We should not ban smoking, ban junk food, or reqire drivers licenses

One of these things is not like the others. Smoking and poor driving affect other people. Junk food can only affect someone else if projectile vomiting is involved.

Re:Good

[Dr Damage I]

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis

Re:Good

[artor3]

If you think advertising doesn't affect you, that goes to show how well it is working. The fact that I am aware of how well it works and take pains to avoid seeing it does not make me weak-willed. It makes me self-aware.

Obviously advertising works, but it doesn't control what I do.

Those statements are contradictory. The entire goal of advertising is to get people to do certain things. You can't say advertising works while simultaneously thinking that it doesn't allow some form of control over people.

Re:Good

[kelemvor4]

The ban, designed to reduce obesity

The government has no business trying to reduce obesity. Instead, the government should be working hard to make sure that obesity is much more quickly and certainly fatal. Say, "morbid obesity" causing cetain death within five years if the person does not lose weight. I mean just imagine. Imagine adults who are 50-100 pounds overweight or more. Before they were 50 pounds overweight they were 10 pounds overweight. Then they were 15 pounds overweight. Then 20. Then 30. You mean to tell me an adult person cannot see this happening and say "hey, I must be doing something incorrectly. if I keep doing what I am doing now, i will keep gaining weight, and if I don't change that, I will be morbidly obese"? Really? For the love of God don't let people like that vote. Don't let them drive. Letting these people vote and drive is cruel and unusual punishment without due process for every person with a shred of sense. Besides, if morbid obesity were 100% fatal within five years, the lard-asses would suddenly stop making excuses (and oh how they love giving fairytale excuses for why their bad decisions are somehow not their fault. with people like this NOTHING is EVER their fault you know, they are perfect angels and they are perfect victims who demand your false sympathy). They would suddenly start forming better eating habits and exercising. If not, well then, we don't need them clogging up the health-care system. Real consequences means good choices. Stop coddling these people who so thoroughly fail at life. If you have a shred of respect for yourself you won't be a fatass to begin with, you will take care of that before it's so severe.

We could also do the same for people with any other addiction. Alcoholics, drug addicts, compulsive gamblers, compulsive liars, sex addicts, game addicts... the list goes on and on. We would need some large camps to concentrate these people into for effective use of some sort of solution with finality. Later, the program could be expanded to include anonymous cowards and anyone with any sort of medical defect such as hair that is not blond or eyes that are not blue.

Re:Good

[AK Marc]

I don't understand why they don't just add a tax like $1/ounce for every beverage that contains carbs

Ending the corn subsidies and dropping all restrictions on imported sugar would have the same effect. Crash goes the HFCS, and the market will settle a little better for the consumer.

Re:Good

[SuricouRaven]

People crave sugar because it kept their ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors alive. Those who sought and consumed high energy foods when they were available stored up energy to last them through the harsh times. This continues into modern times. Humans are genetically programmed to desire foods laden with fat and sugar above all else. All that has changed is the availability - where those ancestors would have had to search for unpicked fruit or brave the bees to steal honey, modern man just guzzles down coke whenever he wants to. He always wants to.

Re:Good

[jdavidb]

Only as a group can we fight back.

But I don't want to do that. I've heard your arguments, and I don't want to participate. Should I be forced to participate anyway, for my own good?

Re:Good

[Tim the Gecko]

The solution is to make you purchase your half pound of sugar in 3 cups. If making giving yourself diabetes slightly inconvenient is "government tyranny" then we probably need more of it.

Mod parent insightful.

Here's a great New Yorker article about why the law will probably work very well.

Re:Good

[deanklear]

If there's public support for a law, it's not tyranny. It's a law in a democracy.

I find it strange that there's so much coverage of a simple law designed to reduce consumption of what amounts to a cup of poison that is enormously expensive for our society in the long run. If you really want to fill your body with empty calories and caffeine, you are free to do so. It's just slightly less convenient.

And now I get it. You can take away an American's right to due process. You can take away their right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures. But don't make the ultimate mistake and deny their right to idiotic convenience.

Re:Good

[dskoll]

so the answer to coporate tyranny is what? government tyranny on top of/next to it?

In a democracy, the government is accountable to the people. A corporation is only accountable to its shareholders.

As unpopular as this opinion may be in the USA, I'd rather have the government making these sorts of rules rather than leaving it up to the private sector. At least you get a chance to vote out the government every few years.

The New York law is a very sensible public health measure that is (alas) doomed to failure because of corporate power and the inability of the US system of government in recent times to actually achieve anything worthwhile.

Re:Good

[LordLimecat]

find it strange that there's so much coverage of a simple law designed to reduce consumption of what amounts to a cup of poison that is enormously expensive for our society in the long run.

Because its fundamentally not the job of a government to tell me how to live my life. Its job is to enforce law and order (keeping others from doing me harm), maintain basic infrastructure, and keep foreign countries from invading.

Im not sure where anyone got the idea that democracy should extend to voting on how I live my life, but that sounds awfully oppressive to me.

Re:Good

[LordLimecat]

You can't say advertising works while simultaneously thinking that it doesn't allow some form of control over people.

What youre arguing is like equating eloquence to brainwashing. Something can be persuasive without robbing you of personal volition, as is being suggested.

Re:Good

[SuricouRaven]

Because fighting instincts is hard. Telling people they just need to control their diet is about as effective as abstinance-only sex education. An effective response needs to examine the underlying instinct and either find a way to make it easier to control, or allow people to indulge while removing the negative consequences of doing so.

Re:Good

[rHBa]

How about narrower door ways, I know the cat flap was quite good at keeping my cats weight down.

Silliness

[betterunixthanunix]

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57506856-10391704/nyc-school-lunches-fall-below-minimum-calorie-requirement/

Frankly, New York City can do more to improve its citizens' health than banning certain sizes of HFCS drinks (because calling them "sugary" simply ignores the fact that soda can be made using real sugar).

Re:Silliness

[Kickasso]

Both Coca-Cola and Pepsi do make real cane sugar drinks. You just need to know where and when to look for them.

Re:Silliness

[Rockoon]

While soda can and used to be made using real sugar, they haven't from the big corps in quite awhile.

Early 1980's, import tariffs, import limits, and a mandatory price floor even for sugar produced locally were established by our "its for your own good" government. The upshot of all this is that Americans need to spend 3 to 4 times as much for sugar as the rest of the world does.

The only solution is to make it illegal to try to legislate new victim-less crimes into existence, because unlike the "crimes" they are trying to prevent.. these legislations arent victim-less.

That is seriously an unhealthy amount

[Anonymous Coward]

The daily reference intake for sugar states that added sugar should nto exceed 25% of calories.
For a 2000 Cal intake that is 500 Cal. The 7-eleven shitty "super gulps" and whatever exceed this
in a single serving.

If you ask me they should just go and make a law that a single serving cannot contain more than
50% of the reference intake. That way you can sell those stupid 5 pint "drinks". You just would not
be allowed to have half a pound of sugar in them.

Re:That is seriously an unhealthy amount

[hawguy]

Plus, why could I not then just drink multiple ones?
Makes as much sense as those TSA rules about x amount in a bottle. So instead of one big bottle that's not allowed, you put the solution in two small ones, each of which is allowed.

> I cannot sell you this 16oz cup of soda, but you can buy these two 8oz for the same price.

It doesn't make sense if the goal is to prevent all people from consuming more than x ounces of soda.

However, public health policy is not about solving every fringe case - it's about changing behavior in the general population. Sometimes public health policy decisions can even be harmful for certain individuals, but the overall health benefit is worth it (i.e. a small percentage of the population may be allergic to a vaccination, but overall vaccinations save more lives than are lost to complications from the vaccine).

I can believe that banning soda sizes larger than 16 ounces will result in a net decrease in consumption. There are certainly going to be some people that, when limited to a "tiny" 16 ounce soda, they'll get around the ban by buying two 16 ouncers when they really just wanted a 24 ounce soda, but 2 sodas are harder to carry than one, and are in general more expensive (though I wouldn't be surprised to see 2-for-one specials after the ban (Buy one 16 oz and get one free!). It seems unlikely that many people are going to buy a hot dog from a vendor and try to juggle two 16 ounce sodas in their hands - but if they really need that much sugar, they still have that option, which is why these plaintiffs will probably not win this lawsuit.

A liberal city.

[MindlessAutomata]

I'm not conservative... But I have to say, I recall a LOT of liberals flaming conservatives for implying that laws such as these would ever be passed in health care related arguments... Looks like the right was on the money about that for once.

Re:16oz is very small

[Anonymous Coward]

16oz is HUGE. You know that soft drinks used to be sold in 6 (yes, SIX) oz bottles, and that was considered a reasonable serving size? People would drink the 6 oz soft drink and be quite content with that.

You live in a world that has gone mad, and your idea of what is "normal" has been formed in that mad world. It's why over 80% of the population in many areas is considered either overweight or obese. It's why childhood obesity used to be nearly unheard of, and is now common. It's why diabetes is impacting more and more of the population each year.

I don't think restricting portion sizes is a good idea, but good god, people need to stop thinking 16 oz is a "normal" serving size for a sugar soda.

soda ban science misinterpreted

[jayrtfm]

Bloomberg has cited a study as evidence that the ban is needed. Too bad that the scientists who did the study say that he totally missed the point.

I don't think so.

[mosb1000]

Your free will isn't as all-powerful as you think it is.

I seem to be able to decide for myself which products I buy. I can't recall the last time I bought something and later regretted it, but then again I don't buy much. I don't have some superhuman form of free-will. I just take the time to think about what I'm doing before I do it. Just because some people don't do this doesn't mean that everyone lacks self-control. If you were to legislate to the lowest common denominator, you'd have to legally prescribe every action a person can take to make sure they were all safe.

On the other hand, I do seem to be incapable of resisting the government. The threat of imprisonment is enough to compel me to pay my taxes and conform to federal rules and regulations. So you can see why I'd be concerned by frivolous government interventions such as this ban. Every one of them has the potential to harm me.

There's nothing wrong with enlisting the support of others to stop abuse, but there are other ways of doing that which don't have so much collateral damage.

Re:Ban Orange Juice Too

[artor3]

You're right that OJ is also high in calories, but how often do you see people ordering an entire quart of OJ to drink in one sitting the way they do with soda?

16 oz is less than 500ml

[FooAtWFU]

500ml bottles are common in the industry and correspond to a 16.9oz beverage. My conclusion is: this policy is a secret attack on the metric system.