This is a good idea, and the people in the comments are rightly pointing out sugar's problems. But just as problematic as sugar are vegetable oils which are in almost every packaged product you can buy at the grocery store. They cause all sorts of health problems because the vegetable oils are extremely reactive (due to being unsaturated fats and so having double bonds that can react with other molecules inside your body). These are not called out as a health risk because the American agriculture industry makes an enormous amount of money exporting them and selling them to companies that make packaged/processed foods.
Edit: just to clarify it is the poly-unsaturated fatty acids that are the problem, not fats in general. Fats like butter (saturated) or olive oil (mono-unsaturated) do not have these problems, while canola oil, soybean oil, etc. are poly-unsaturated and highly-reactive.
These are from a lipid scientist rather than from nutrition scientists, so they are focusing on internal biological processes rather than health outcomes. I have not seen good nutrition studies on poly-unsaturated fats. However, studies of fat consumption that break out fats into saturated, mono-unsaturated, and poly-unsaturated fat categories generally show worse health outcomes for people consuming high intakes of poly-unsaturated fats. I will try to find a good study.
These ingredients are not well studied, which is surprising when you consider how rapidly they've been added to the food supply (basically not at all present 100 years ago, to in every processed food today).
OP here is correct. PUFAs are the baddies. This is way too large a subject for me to even try backing up atm but I do recommend you do research into it.
> (due to being unsaturated fats and so having single hydrogen bonds that can react with other molecules inside your body).
What do you mean by "single hydrogen bonds"? C-H bonds are always single bonds, and I am unfamiliar with any kind of "double" hydrogen (intermolecular) bonding. Unsaturated fats, by definition, have at least one double bond, between carbon atoms.
Sorry, you are correct. I fixed my comment. What I meant was the carbon-carbon double bonds replace a hydrogen atom that would otherwise be there, so the bond can be easily broken when interacting with other molecules (because the carbon-carbon bond is electron rich).
> studies of fat consumption that break out fats into saturated, mono-unsaturated, and poly-unsaturated fat categories generally show worse health outcomes for people consuming high intakes of poly-unsaturated fats. I will try to find a good study.
This is counter to any study that I am familiar with and flies in the face of all nutritional recommendations. Studies that support MUFAs and PUFAs over saturated fats can be found in the references section of https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2016/12/19/satu....
I believe this study does not control for whether the fat is hydrogenated or not. So they are really measuring the effects of trans-fats, which are already known to be bad.
That is my general concern with almost all of the nutrition research on fats. They are not grouping the fats appropriately. If you group butter and hyrogenated vegetable oils together because they are both "saturated" fats and then do your analysis lumping them together then you can't distinguish whether the problems caused by saturated fats are due to the hydrogenization or due to the butter being saturated or both.
Saturated fat consumption is decreasing, while unsaturated fat consumption is increasing, but people continue getting less healthy. So it seems the premise that saturated fats are that bad needs to be questioned. Or at least we need to ask if it's really saturated fats like coconut oil and butter that are bad or something that happens to the fats like canola oil when it is hydrogenated.
Edit: also as anecdotal evidence, what is the one common feature of almost all food generally considered harmful? Lots of processed vegetable oils in it, often in conjunction with sugar. I have not seen a reasonable explanation of how this can be the case if poly-unsaturated fats are as healthy as they are claimed to be.
Any kind of concentrated sugar product is going to be unhealthy regardless of the process that got it there. Fresh squeezed orange juice and honey aren't refined, but they're still much too sweet to be consuming large quantities of.
I've read that Safflower oil or Avocado oil are one of the healthiest oils to cook. Safflower oil is supposedly even good for you. As with everything, moderation is a key factor.
"Everything in moderation" isn't actually great diet advice. There's a paper floating around somewhere showing that people with a limited diet of healthy things fare better than people with a very wide diet that included unhealthy things.
My take is that "everything in moderation" is a mental crutch that people adopt when there's some part of their diet that they know isn't _good_ but that they don't want to give up completely. It is true that we can sneak in unhealthy food here and there without hugely detrimental effects, but that doesn't mean it's a good baseline practice.
The one scenario where it might be useful advice is with somebody whose diet is terrible, and you want to ease them towards a somewhat nutritionally positive diet; even in this circumstance, a more direct approach of "eat less crap and more good stuff" would be more accurate.
You generally want to avoid smoke, so safflower oil and avocado oil are the best choices choices. But probably even better to not cook in oil at all, and just add olive oil (or your favorite source of fat) at the end
You are wrong, there's nothing indicating that PUFAs are as problematic as sugar or even problematic at all, on the contrary the evidence we have show they are beneficial.
It concerns me that your comment is the top voted, as it can lead to dangerous dietary extremism, say avoiding all PUFAs which are among other things implicated in helping the immune system "Paracrine interactions between adipose and lymphoid tissues are enhanced by diets rich in n-6 fatty acids and attentuated by fish oils. The latter improve immune function and body conformation in animals and people. The partitioning of adipose tissue in many depots, some specialised for local, paracrine interactions with other tissues, is a fundamental feature of mammals."https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15946832/
1. You shouldn't just throw in links to "support" your claims - to me this shows you don't understand what you're talking about, you should cite the relevant text otherwise it's just hand waiving.
The studies you cite are about radicals generated from PUFAs that are naturally a part of cell membranes, not from diet, and even goes against your claim by saying that PUFAs from diet help generate antioxidants that eliminate such radicals.
"Any change in the cell membrane structure activates lipoxygenases (LOX). LOX transform polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) to lipidhydroperoxide molecules (LOOHs)." i.e. cell membranes naturally have PUFAs."..."In order to remove LOO* radicals, plants and algae transform PUFAs to furan fatty acids, which are incorporated after consumption of vegetables into mammalian tissues where they act as excellent scavengers of LOO* and LO* radicals." - hey eating PUFAs help cells make radical scavengers. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17914157/
2. Omega-3 is a polyunsaturated fats - yes they are less stable than SFAs, but that probably does not matter at all unless you're eating rancid oils. Polyunsaturated fats are not "extremely" reactive either whatever you mean by that.
Then we know that diets rich in PUFAs and MUFAs have positive effect on cholesterol ratios "We conclude that a mixed diet rich in monounsaturated fat was as effective as a diet rich in (n-6)polyunsaturated fat in lowering LDL cholesterol. "
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2761578/
Is it the vegetable oil or the fact that processed foods come with vegetable oil? Sauteed vegetables with a drizzle of olive oil is a bit different than a TV dinner.
It's a great idea in in theory, in practice I'm highly skeptical it will do anything but give police a new way to extract fines (bribes) from shopkeepers.
Why anything containing psychoactive drug is actually legal to sell to kids? There's a lot of reports how bad is caffeine to underdeveloped brain. And look at any developing nation: everyone is hooked to Coca-Cola.
> There's a lot of reports how bad is caffeine to underdeveloped brain.
Not going to do well on this site if you make baseless nonsensical claims like that.
Paper[1] from 2009 stating that: 1. We actually use caffeine as a first-line treatment in premature infants for treating apnea and 2. Nobody has done the research on adolescents to assess any negative impact on brain development.
> And look at any developing nation: everyone is hooked to Coca-Cola.
Everyone (more or less) is outside a few liberal, urban, health-focused pockets of the US, too. Or to sweet tea, or some other sugary caffeine drink. Unless you intended "developing nation" to cover those parts of the US, as well :-)
[EDIT] Not sure what rubbed people the wrong way about this, but if it's the qualifiers then it's my understanding that both "liberal" and "urban" are, independently or together, correlated with smaller waistlines and healthier lifestyles, in the US. Almost certainly including consumption of sugary drinks (indeed, this seems to peak in the "deep red" South, in the US, from what I can find). If that's wrong I'd be interested to know about it.
I don't know what the reports are about, but I don't think there is evidence that caffeine has negative impact on adolescent brains, most of the issues seem to be caffeine pills or caffeine drinks mixed with alcohol.
Maybe so, although CICO (calories in, calories out) is a little oversimplified. In reality not all calories are equally satiating, nor are all calories equally digestible.
Additionally, measuring calories in food is done in a purely chemical fashion - the food is burned and the amount of heat energy released is measured. This of course does not actually measure how much energy your body is actually able to absorb (for example, dietary fiber burns just as well as refined sugar, but isnt absorbed the same in the body).
After 40 everything once was good/tasty needs to be reduced a lot and or cut out of our diets. Our U.S. arteries are clogged no matter if your obese or not.
The title is a little misleading, this is happening in the state of Oaxaca only. I guess that if it works the government is going to try and implement it across the whole country.
OK, we've replaced the title with the more narrowly scoped language from the first paragraph.
Another issue here is the phrase "moving to". That's not the same thing as actually doing it, and frequently the processes that articles like this are describing end up outputting to /dev/null.
Lots of US federal law started as California state law first. According to labeling, there are a few things in life that are known to cause cancer only in California.
Improving diet would be one of the simplest ways of improving population health. Unfortunately any real changes will cause large, politically powerful corporations (Cargill, ADM, Coca-Cola, etc.) to lose a large amount of money[1], so I'm bearish on the ability to actually create meaningful changes. But just looking at photos on people on beaches from 2019 vs 1970 makes it clear how unhealthy the population is.
[1]: In the US many of these companies are large exporters too, so it is very hard to do anything that hurts them since our exports are generally not very competitive.
My concern is that if we can't trust the government to create a healthy recommended diet, how can we trust them to ban the correct foods? Their incentives seem to be more in line with propping up producers of large scale cheap pseudo foods with big lobbies than finding an actual healthy diet.
it's probably safe to say that this is a global public health imperative, given the suffering/costs/economic loss around the world that these beverages and food-like products cause. would also like to see some money from things like corn driven to healthy food subsidies e.g. spinach (or pick your favorite) to offset any increase in costs from taxation
Coca Cola is very aware of the health issues and has been diversifying for a long time.
Around 2015 IIRC they got into the diary game with Fairlife milk, they own core power. They do lots of business in tea (gold peak and others) as well as coffee.
You can recognize the bottles for a lot of the products because they use the same one with a different wrapper - core power, illy, fairlife and others share. (Note: illy is a partnership)
I’ll also point out their zero sugar line, out since 2017, is fantastic - much better than the older diet technology in terms of taste.
I have some severe concerns about the artificial sweeteners in Diet Coke - I kicked the soda habit a while back but I always stayed well away from diet sodas.
So it's not controversial to suggest a poor diet leads to things like type 2 diabetes and heart disease, nor is it controversial to suggest that the novel coronavirus is much more deadly for people with preexisting conditions like type 2 diabetes and heart disease.
For some reason though, if I put those two things together and suggest people eat healthier during this pandemic, it's this incredibly controversial thing to say, at least where I live in the US.
People just hate being told what to eat - it's as simple as that. I've given up trying to explain that dietary preferences are surprisingly elastic, and highly dependant on what you've recently eaten. It's something that's obvious to anyone who's dabbled with any sort of dietary modification (e.g. cutting down on carbs, or trying out vegetarianism for a bit, or just cutting out soda). Your tastes change surprisingly fast. Something that you previously loved, like a burger, or a big hunk of steak, can transform from a regular craving to something that sounds kind of gross in a matter of a couple months.
But just trying to explain this phenomenon to people is often met with extreme defensiveness. You'll hear: I could NEVER give up pasta/meat/whatever. But they absolutely could, and it wouldn't be nearly as hard as they're imagining.
I'll always encourage anyone curious about tweaking their diet to just go for it, but I've given up entirely on trying to nudge people toward a healthier lifestyle if it's not something they're already working toward.
the line between trying to encourage someone to be healthier via weight loss, diet, exercise, etc. and making someone feel bad about their appearance isn't always clear, especially from two different people. being healthy isn't as simple for someone as it is on paper, just saying "calories in < calories out" ignores all the other factors that promote health that people who are already healthy already have. take having built habits already, learning what exactly to do, finding time in a busy schedule, etc. the bottom line is being healthy is hard, especially when you don't have a background in it
stemming from this, I think the most important thing is that people "get fit" for the right reasons. that they want to have better health, be able to do more activites, etc. vs some of the more usually toxic reasons like trying to meet conventional beauty standards, hating their own appearance. far too often I have seen people who "rush" trying to get fit, or do it for the wrong reasons, and just set themselves up for failure in the long run - or potentially much worse, like depression and the like.
so I think things like having a good measure of "self love" and self worth no matter what you look like, patience, consistency, etc. are all keys to succeeding over just "eating less" or whatever
I think in the US people see it as an assault on freedom. Concern that what starts as a suggestion will turn into a tax, and then the tax into a ban. Some value freedom over health.
That may seem illogical since you can't have freedom if you're dead, but we ask people to make a similar trade-off (risk life/health for freedom) when joining the military, and many do.
i mean it does sound kind of jerk-ish because it's not like telling someone who is obese right now to eat better is going to drastically reduce his pandemic risks in a week.
I'm generally sceptical of tying this kind of advice to crises anyway. It's a social and long-term issue. We ought to eat better not just so that we are better prepared for a pandemic but because it's the right thing to do in general.
It’s not just encourage. What we’re finding is that the government has to be authoritarian. China welded people into their homes to keep them from spreading COVID. They literally caged them like animals and threw them into trucks. Now Mexico is denying children potato chips.
Think about universal healthcare and alcohol. How much money is spent on alcohol related issues? The best answer is to ban its sale. Same for tobacco. Enough people have shown then are unable or unwilling to do the right thing. As a result junk food, booze and smokes need to go the way of freedom of speech. We need to ban them.
That doesn't really go any way towards explaining why Canada, Europe or the Oceania[1] democracies have done so well in the crisis - nor does it explain how Brazil has done so poorly.
I think there is more counter evidence then supporting evidence for authoritarian governments being necessary for dealing with pandemics.
1. Please note - comparatively well, Canada, Europe & Oceania aren't doing perfect they're just doing significantly better than the states.
There's a difference between allowing adults and children to consume things. Children have limited agency and we consider it a social duty to protect them from some of life's extremes until they're better capable of understanding the consequences of their actions.
You don't have to ban things not be authoritarian. Smart governments just price in externalities, which is why you slap tobacco and alcohol with extra taxes to offset the increased costs of health care and reduced adult lifetimes.
Or... how about we provide treatment for people who are abusing alcohol, drugs, etc? There are billions of people who can responsibly use alcohol. Banning it doesn't make any sense for those who aren't addicts.
You are being downvoted (nice username btw haha) but you are onto something. My belief is that for certain things, the government MUST be authoritarian: Public Health, education and safety (police, firefighters, etc). That's why I think a more centralized government like the one in Mexico might find it easier to implement sensible policies and apply them "in an authoritative way" to the whole country without state resistance.
Now, if only the government was not as corrupt as it is in Mexico...
It's interesting how quick people are to blame US corporations when it's the US government that subsidizes cheap carbs through the farm subsidy program (and on the flip-size in the US, subsidize the purchase of junk food via food stamps).
Also, banning sales to children doesn't solve the real culprit - parents buying the junk food for their own children. At least in America, watch any parent fill up their carts and pay attention to what they buy.
> Also, banning sales to children doesn't solve the real culprit - parents buying the junk food for their own children. At least in America, watch any parent fill up their carts and pay attention to what they buy.
I grew up in Mexico. There's definitely a culture of drinking soda with meals for example. Parent's are definitely responsible for that.
There's also definitely a lot of children buying junk food with their allowances. The individual bag of chips is very popular, and it's sold in every "corner store" on every neighborhood (I've seen less of these in the USA, but they're everywhere in Mexico).
Initiatives like this has always appeared to me as a cheap way for societies to improve the health of their population.
Perhaps better done in the form of a tax - in the sense that junk food causes an externality in the form of health problems, that does seem warranted. The underlying problem is that the incentives are not aligned.
We tax alcohol and cigarettes because they are bad for you, but are totally fine with binge eating as much junk food as you like. Obesity is a massive epidemic. Heart attack and stroke are the number one killers, with obesity the highest cause. I'm all for putting warning labels on food showing the potential problems of overconsumption.
Any amount of cigarettes or alcohol [0] will harm you.
"Junk food" is a pseudo-scientific designation selectively targeting certain kinds of calorie dense foods. These foods may epidemiologically contribute to obesity, but on an individual level they're far from universally bad.
I think warning about food over-consumption would be great. But selectively targeting some foods only misinforms the public.
[0] And alcohol is still getting far less attention than cigarettes. Most places still don't have warning labels about the risk of cancer or even broad public awareness, despite 3.5% of cancer deaths being alcohol attributable.
Warning labels aren't going to do anything aside from trigger busybody soccer moms when they go to buy their kid's cereal because they won't stop screaming for it. Taxing it is better, but still ultimately is not going to solve the root problem, which I think is the government's over-subsidization of corn and the overabundance of HFCS.
Ban HFCS/similar garbage sweeteners in all food products, and incentivize farmers to grow something other than corn. Give them grants to build all-year-round hydroponic farms to grow vegetables or something. And then from there, I think we can start to address other ailments like school lunches and the like.
Yeah, I think we'll eventually get to the point where junk food prices in the externalities and it'll go back to being a relatively rare treat (i.e. sustainable). Currently sugar is artificially cheap. The cost is just being kicked down the road, coming back in the form of health problems and hospital bills.
That sugary drinks are similarly priced or even cheaper than a bottle of water is completely backwards. Soda, juice, etc should be the expensive option (which they are in the long-term!) and water the default, smart choice both in terms of health and immediate cost at the counter.
I feel like we were always taught that taxes were significantly better at curbing usage compared to bans or limits - the classic example being the cigarette tax
Cigarette tax is a scam to raise money from selling drugs. Cigs have inelastic demand. In Germany they hit a point where a price rise (in the name of health) resulted in reduced smoking and less tax collected and they immediately wanted to reduce tax. That caused a scandal so they changed tack to homogonize tax across the eu which, incidentally of course, would reduce tax in Germany.
Tax is charged on cigs because it works and no other reason, its regressive tax too.
I prefer that to a ban, but let's not pretend selling cigs at high prices is in the interest of cig smokers.
The only place it works is where there are nicotine alternatives.
To be fair, cigarettes have additional restrictions like where and to whom it can be sold, and also advertisement. Or even being explicitly called out on media ratings: PG-13, contains smoking!
I don't know if anyone has quantified the effects on sales of each measure, but they certainly add up with the additional taxes.
I think if the goal is that you want kids to eat less of this stuff, then just don't let kids buy it.
If the goal is to raise money, then maybe some sort of tax is the better bet, but you have to keep in mind who benefits from the raised money vs how much of their money you're taking. This would be a regressive tax & poorer people tend to eat more junk food and have more health problems, too. I mean, don't discount the externality that such a tax would disproportionately punish poor people for buying certain snacks.
In addition to that, the federal government set new labeling rules for food. Processes food has to display a big-ugly sign as part of their label if the product contains more calories, sugar, salt or fat than the recommended dose:
Readit News
Edit: just to clarify it is the poly-unsaturated fatty acids that are the problem, not fats in general. Fats like butter (saturated) or olive oil (mono-unsaturated) do not have these problems, while canola oil, soybean oil, etc. are poly-unsaturated and highly-reactive.
Edit 2: research for these claims:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223779598_Lipid_oxi...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12013175_Peroxidati...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5931176_The_Importa...
These are from a lipid scientist rather than from nutrition scientists, so they are focusing on internal biological processes rather than health outcomes. I have not seen good nutrition studies on poly-unsaturated fats. However, studies of fat consumption that break out fats into saturated, mono-unsaturated, and poly-unsaturated fat categories generally show worse health outcomes for people consuming high intakes of poly-unsaturated fats. I will try to find a good study.
These ingredients are not well studied, which is surprising when you consider how rapidly they've been added to the food supply (basically not at all present 100 years ago, to in every processed food today).
What do you mean by "single hydrogen bonds"? C-H bonds are always single bonds, and I am unfamiliar with any kind of "double" hydrogen (intermolecular) bonding. Unsaturated fats, by definition, have at least one double bond, between carbon atoms.
Deleted Comment
This is counter to any study that I am familiar with and flies in the face of all nutritional recommendations. Studies that support MUFAs and PUFAs over saturated fats can be found in the references section of https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/2016/12/19/satu....
That is my general concern with almost all of the nutrition research on fats. They are not grouping the fats appropriately. If you group butter and hyrogenated vegetable oils together because they are both "saturated" fats and then do your analysis lumping them together then you can't distinguish whether the problems caused by saturated fats are due to the hydrogenization or due to the butter being saturated or both.
Saturated fat consumption is decreasing, while unsaturated fat consumption is increasing, but people continue getting less healthy. So it seems the premise that saturated fats are that bad needs to be questioned. Or at least we need to ask if it's really saturated fats like coconut oil and butter that are bad or something that happens to the fats like canola oil when it is hydrogenated.
Edit: also as anecdotal evidence, what is the one common feature of almost all food generally considered harmful? Lots of processed vegetable oils in it, often in conjunction with sugar. I have not seen a reasonable explanation of how this can be the case if poly-unsaturated fats are as healthy as they are claimed to be.
sugar in a whole fruit aren't bad, the fibers in the fruit help your body break down and absorb the sugar over a longer period of time.
just don't eat refined food.
My take is that "everything in moderation" is a mental crutch that people adopt when there's some part of their diet that they know isn't _good_ but that they don't want to give up completely. It is true that we can sneak in unhealthy food here and there without hugely detrimental effects, but that doesn't mean it's a good baseline practice.
The one scenario where it might be useful advice is with somebody whose diet is terrible, and you want to ease them towards a somewhat nutritionally positive diet; even in this circumstance, a more direct approach of "eat less crap and more good stuff" would be more accurate.
You generally want to avoid smoke, so safflower oil and avocado oil are the best choices choices. But probably even better to not cook in oil at all, and just add olive oil (or your favorite source of fat) at the end
It concerns me that your comment is the top voted, as it can lead to dangerous dietary extremism, say avoiding all PUFAs which are among other things implicated in helping the immune system "Paracrine interactions between adipose and lymphoid tissues are enhanced by diets rich in n-6 fatty acids and attentuated by fish oils. The latter improve immune function and body conformation in animals and people. The partitioning of adipose tissue in many depots, some specialised for local, paracrine interactions with other tissues, is a fundamental feature of mammals."https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15946832/
1. You shouldn't just throw in links to "support" your claims - to me this shows you don't understand what you're talking about, you should cite the relevant text otherwise it's just hand waiving.
The studies you cite are about radicals generated from PUFAs that are naturally a part of cell membranes, not from diet, and even goes against your claim by saying that PUFAs from diet help generate antioxidants that eliminate such radicals.
"Any change in the cell membrane structure activates lipoxygenases (LOX). LOX transform polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) to lipidhydroperoxide molecules (LOOHs)." i.e. cell membranes naturally have PUFAs."..."In order to remove LOO* radicals, plants and algae transform PUFAs to furan fatty acids, which are incorporated after consumption of vegetables into mammalian tissues where they act as excellent scavengers of LOO* and LO* radicals." - hey eating PUFAs help cells make radical scavengers. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17914157/
2. Omega-3 is a polyunsaturated fats - yes they are less stable than SFAs, but that probably does not matter at all unless you're eating rancid oils. Polyunsaturated fats are not "extremely" reactive either whatever you mean by that.
Then we know that diets rich in PUFAs and MUFAs have positive effect on cholesterol ratios "We conclude that a mixed diet rich in monounsaturated fat was as effective as a diet rich in (n-6)polyunsaturated fat in lowering LDL cholesterol. " https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2761578/
Not going to do well on this site if you make baseless nonsensical claims like that.
Paper[1] from 2009 stating that: 1. We actually use caffeine as a first-line treatment in premature infants for treating apnea and 2. Nobody has done the research on adolescents to assess any negative impact on brain development.
[1] https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2009.01.001
Everyone (more or less) is outside a few liberal, urban, health-focused pockets of the US, too. Or to sweet tea, or some other sugary caffeine drink. Unless you intended "developing nation" to cover those parts of the US, as well :-)
[EDIT] Not sure what rubbed people the wrong way about this, but if it's the qualifiers then it's my understanding that both "liberal" and "urban" are, independently or together, correlated with smaller waistlines and healthier lifestyles, in the US. Almost certainly including consumption of sugary drinks (indeed, this seems to peak in the "deep red" South, in the US, from what I can find). If that's wrong I'd be interested to know about it.
Any other explanation is hiding the truth for some half-reasoning which mich the real point
Additionally, measuring calories in food is done in a purely chemical fashion - the food is burned and the amount of heat energy released is measured. This of course does not actually measure how much energy your body is actually able to absorb (for example, dietary fiber burns just as well as refined sugar, but isnt absorbed the same in the body).
Another issue here is the phrase "moving to". That's not the same thing as actually doing it, and frequently the processes that articles like this are describing end up outputting to /dev/null.
[1] https://www.milenio.com/estados/comida-chatarra-tabasco-proh...
[1]: In the US many of these companies are large exporters too, so it is very hard to do anything that hurts them since our exports are generally not very competitive.
it's probably safe to say that this is a global public health imperative, given the suffering/costs/economic loss around the world that these beverages and food-like products cause. would also like to see some money from things like corn driven to healthy food subsidies e.g. spinach (or pick your favorite) to offset any increase in costs from taxation
also: bearish for coca-cola long term?
Around 2015 IIRC they got into the diary game with Fairlife milk, they own core power. They do lots of business in tea (gold peak and others) as well as coffee.
You can recognize the bottles for a lot of the products because they use the same one with a different wrapper - core power, illy, fairlife and others share. (Note: illy is a partnership)
I’ll also point out their zero sugar line, out since 2017, is fantastic - much better than the older diet technology in terms of taste.
https://www.coca-colacompany.com/brands
For some reason though, if I put those two things together and suggest people eat healthier during this pandemic, it's this incredibly controversial thing to say, at least where I live in the US.
But just trying to explain this phenomenon to people is often met with extreme defensiveness. You'll hear: I could NEVER give up pasta/meat/whatever. But they absolutely could, and it wouldn't be nearly as hard as they're imagining.
I'll always encourage anyone curious about tweaking their diet to just go for it, but I've given up entirely on trying to nudge people toward a healthier lifestyle if it's not something they're already working toward.
stemming from this, I think the most important thing is that people "get fit" for the right reasons. that they want to have better health, be able to do more activites, etc. vs some of the more usually toxic reasons like trying to meet conventional beauty standards, hating their own appearance. far too often I have seen people who "rush" trying to get fit, or do it for the wrong reasons, and just set themselves up for failure in the long run - or potentially much worse, like depression and the like.
so I think things like having a good measure of "self love" and self worth no matter what you look like, patience, consistency, etc. are all keys to succeeding over just "eating less" or whatever
That may seem illogical since you can't have freedom if you're dead, but we ask people to make a similar trade-off (risk life/health for freedom) when joining the military, and many do.
I'm generally sceptical of tying this kind of advice to crises anyway. It's a social and long-term issue. We ought to eat better not just so that we are better prepared for a pandemic but because it's the right thing to do in general.
Deleted Comment
Think about universal healthcare and alcohol. How much money is spent on alcohol related issues? The best answer is to ban its sale. Same for tobacco. Enough people have shown then are unable or unwilling to do the right thing. As a result junk food, booze and smokes need to go the way of freedom of speech. We need to ban them.
I think there is more counter evidence then supporting evidence for authoritarian governments being necessary for dealing with pandemics.
1. Please note - comparatively well, Canada, Europe & Oceania aren't doing perfect they're just doing significantly better than the states.
You don't have to ban things not be authoritarian. Smart governments just price in externalities, which is why you slap tobacco and alcohol with extra taxes to offset the increased costs of health care and reduced adult lifetimes.
Now, if only the government was not as corrupt as it is in Mexico...
I sincerely hope there is someone there to stand for you.
Also, banning sales to children doesn't solve the real culprit - parents buying the junk food for their own children. At least in America, watch any parent fill up their carts and pay attention to what they buy.
I grew up in Mexico. There's definitely a culture of drinking soda with meals for example. Parent's are definitely responsible for that.
There's also definitely a lot of children buying junk food with their allowances. The individual bag of chips is very popular, and it's sold in every "corner store" on every neighborhood (I've seen less of these in the USA, but they're everywhere in Mexico).
Perhaps better done in the form of a tax - in the sense that junk food causes an externality in the form of health problems, that does seem warranted. The underlying problem is that the incentives are not aligned.
I don't think the obesity epidemic is from lack of information.
"Junk food" is a pseudo-scientific designation selectively targeting certain kinds of calorie dense foods. These foods may epidemiologically contribute to obesity, but on an individual level they're far from universally bad.
I think warning about food over-consumption would be great. But selectively targeting some foods only misinforms the public.
[0] And alcohol is still getting far less attention than cigarettes. Most places still don't have warning labels about the risk of cancer or even broad public awareness, despite 3.5% of cancer deaths being alcohol attributable.
Ban HFCS/similar garbage sweeteners in all food products, and incentivize farmers to grow something other than corn. Give them grants to build all-year-round hydroponic farms to grow vegetables or something. And then from there, I think we can start to address other ailments like school lunches and the like.
That sugary drinks are similarly priced or even cheaper than a bottle of water is completely backwards. Soda, juice, etc should be the expensive option (which they are in the long-term!) and water the default, smart choice both in terms of health and immediate cost at the counter.
Tax is charged on cigs because it works and no other reason, its regressive tax too.
I prefer that to a ban, but let's not pretend selling cigs at high prices is in the interest of cig smokers. The only place it works is where there are nicotine alternatives.
I don't know if anyone has quantified the effects on sales of each measure, but they certainly add up with the additional taxes.
If the goal is to raise money, then maybe some sort of tax is the better bet, but you have to keep in mind who benefits from the raised money vs how much of their money you're taking. This would be a regressive tax & poorer people tend to eat more junk food and have more health problems, too. I mean, don't discount the externality that such a tax would disproportionately punish poor people for buying certain snacks.
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https://www.milenio.com/ciencia-y-salud/nuevo-etiquetado-est...