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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsBanning the Big Gulp Ban (Mark Bittman)
A very good article by Mark Bittman about the NYC soda ban. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree (after some thinking, I'm in favor), there are a lot of plainly silly arguments going around. For example:
--This is not the first step towards the government telling you to how to dress and forcing you to brush your teeth.
--This is not without precedent -- NYC banned the use of trans-fats in restaurants, and shockingly this didn't give rise to re-education camps, or to an underground trans-fat trafficking mafia. In fact, the ban is widely seen as having been successful and helpful.
--This is not a power grab by Bloomberg. The push was from the NYC Board of Health, which voted unanimously in favor.
--The ban doesn't prevent people from drinking a lot of sugar. What it does is prevent food vendors from selling unhealthy sugary drinks in large volumes, thereby profiting from the well-documented fat that the amount of something people consume is highly dependent on the size of portion it is presented in.
Most DUers seem in favor of laws that prevent banks, credit cards, or payday loaners from exploiting the inability or unwillingness of most consumers to account for the actual cost of certain financial transactions (i.e. it's not 500% a year, it's just 10% for a week!). And this is despite the fact that that payday loans and high-rate credit cards with hidden fees are contracts that the consumer enters into voluntarily.
I would guess that most DUers are in favor of, say banning lead household paint, even if it were clearly marked as containing lead, and even given the fact that anyone with an internet connection could easily find out that lead paint is harmful and thus make an informed decision of whether the benefits of lead paint outweigh the health risks.
In fact, the list of regulations similar to the big gulp ban is enormous, and yet when it comes to sugary drinks, which there is no doubt are a significant contributor to preventable diseases, somehow all we hear is "nanny state".
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/19/banning-the-big-gulp-ban/
Nor do the proposers of the ban, Mayor Bloomberg and the health commissioner, Thomas Farley, seem like capricious guys to me. In fact, Farley is an intensely serious man who, as I wrote last year, believed the ban to be the best option available for the city to move forward in its struggle against obesity, metabolic syndrome and associated diseases, which kill thousands thousands of New Yorkers each year.
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Not that theres anything wrong with that, except that the conflict avoidance by these individuals and agencies, their unwillingness to take on Big Sugar, is deadly. We eat, on average, teaspoons of sugar that are added to food or drink (this includes high-fructose corn syrup, about the same thing); those are worth something like 350 calories. All other things being equal (most of us would have to run more than three miles to burn that off), youd gain a pound every 10 days at that rate, or more than 35 pounds in a year. And all other things are not equal: theres plenty of evidence that sugar calories are worse for you than calories from other foods.
The beverage industrys decision to grow default soda sizes (a Coke was seven ounces when I was a kid, and that seemed plenty) was a cynical profit grab that is a direct and leading cause of obesity, metabolic syndrome and therefore illness, sometimes fatal. The soda ban would have increased choices in many movie theaters, where 32 ounces is the smallest size you can buy. If this is about freedom, its about the freedom of marketers to sell vectors of disease; we should all be in favor of restricting that freedom.