When Mr. Nutter was fighting the soda tax battle, he kept a bottle of Mountain Dew and a container with 17 teaspoons of sugar — the amount in the bottle — on the table in the center of his office. It was a good “conversation piece,” he said, about the surprising number of calories in a typical soda.
I think this is key. Better information and transparency is having an effect. I'm glad to hear we're approaching a point where the RDA for sugar will be listed on products just like fat, sodium, and potassium. I expect this will have a major impact on consumer behavior and industry behavior, much like calorie listings on fast food menus. It still requires government regulations, but instead of challenging First Amendment principles, it embraces them.
Most consumers aren't idiots. But they're aren't scientists or academic researchers for the most part either. Bring them relevant, accurate information and they are capable of making rational choices. This article is encouraging evidence.
That's why we haven't had anyone start smoking in decades..
Soda sales are down but obesity is still up, so the calories are coming from somewhere. If you believe the other common stories, we're drinking the calories.
I'd wager they come from the rise of coffee-based beverages - which would not be considered soda - but I don't have data to back that up.
For now I think Starbucks et al are benefiting from being culturally identified as more upper/middle-class. Obesity stereotypes seem to have fixated mostly on a "people of Walmart" type image of the fat, slobbish lower classes. So even though a 12-oz Starbucks caramel latte is far worse than a 12-oz Coke, it gets a pass.
Good point, the source of calories isn't the same mix, even though the latte has more total calories (200 calories/12oz, vs. 140). Though I was thinking of the caramel latte rather than macchiato, which is a bit closer, at 27g of sugar: http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/espresso/flavored-latte....
And since it's autumn, it's now time for their signature seasonal drink, the pumpkin spice latte, 300 calories and 39g of sugar per 12oz: http://www.starbucks.com/menu/drinks/espresso/pumpkin-spice-.... You can bring that down to 240 calories and a mere 37g of sugar if you ask for no whipped cream.
I suspect these are actually healthier because of the additional calories - which come in the form of fat and protein, dulling the impact of the sugar spike from a soda.
Even if you're overweight, a latte is more nutritious and likely to make you feel full than a soda.
This suggests a strategy for improving the healthiness of soda: the government should work to make the ice-cream float come back into fashion. "Don't drink your soda plain: add a scoop for your health!"
Saturated fats make carbs digest more quickly. For example, if I have oatmeal I can go to bed immediately because it's low GI. But if I add a spoon of peanut butter then my heart will get a little bit contentuous and keep me awake.
As well, adding a new substance introduces the potential of allergens. I have a dairy sensitivity. If I have a grande latte from Starbucks I'll spend the next hour in a haze. I can have it, but it's worse than just sugar in many respects. But the equivalent soy latte leaves me refreshed. For some people the opposite might be true.
Another issue is size. In Europe or at least at many of the places I've been lately the sizes they have at Starbucks USA do not exist.
A latte for example in Paris or Barcelona is no more than ~6oz or so, maybe less whereas Starbucks USA they start at 8oz and go up to 24oz. I have not visited a Starbucks here to see the sizes. Every coke I've ordered has come in a 8oz bottle as well unlike the unlimited refills and or big-gulp sizes seen in the USA.
Ugh, as an americano drinker I'd be annoyed as hell by this. I have a 52oz water cup at my desk, for me much of things is about the quantity of liquid so I dilute everything. I get my alcohol drinks heavily cut with mixers so they last longer. If drinks are small I finish them way too fast. So a tumbler of a mixed drink lasts me 8 minutes but the same drink in a pint with little ice and more mixer is more like 40 minutes. One leads to shitfaced quick and is a nice buzz. Same for coffee. Sitting at my desk with a small drink I'll finish it without noticing I'm drinking it. 20 oz coffee with the same # of shots and It'll take 30 minutes to finish and I'll actually notice and enjoy it.
I'm an adult, I can pay attention to what I order, and I'm not embarrassed to order things that are not directly on the menu. I'm tipping the bartender and the barrista so they make it the way I want it anyway.
Coffee in Italy, France and other places in Europe is meant to be drink in small cups. Like a shot. I've asked for Americano in France and people are always making fun of me. But I will never understand why you would drink a shot for pleasure when a drink can last way longer. So yeah totally agree with you.
This varies a lot within Europe. In the Nordic countries, the norm is to drink larger cups of coffee, traditionally brewed filter coffee, but lately also various latte/etc. type drinks (overall, similar to what Americans drink), slowly over a longish period of time. That's embedded in cultural expectations as well: going out "for a coffee" is a popular type of casual socializing, and means sitting at a table and chatting for maybe an hour or so while you sip a coffee. Not the Italian-style 30-second outing, where you drink a shot of espresso at a bar standing up.
There is an Internet meme going around that purports to show a German serving size one step larger than extra-lage, called "American." I have no idea if this is real or not. Can any German/European HNers confirm or deny?
Even so, all of these have at least an egg's worth of protein and a little bit of fat, pushing them even higher in the nutrition department. Which is nice.
Tasting sugar is temperature-dependent. Generally, a given amount of sugar makes hot stuff taste sweeter than cold stuff. That's why warm soda tastes too sweet, and cold coffee tastes too bitter.
I doubt many people drink something from Starbucks with or after every meal though. Also way more expensive to do so with Starbucks. 12 pack of name brand soda where I am sells for $3.00 during a typical sale.
Adult obesity rates have leveled off for the last several years. I don't believe it's a coincidence things are moving in a better direction at exactly the same time Americans started drinking less soda (such that both Coke and Pepsi have been seeing declining sales in the US market for the last few years). What Americans aren't doing less of, is consuming fewer coffee products - they're drinking vastly more than they were ten years ago. If that were fueling obesity we'd be seeing a continued increase in obesity among adults.
Further, the obesity rates skyrocketed starting from the early 1980s. They trace almost perfectly inline with soda, fast food, and high fructose corn syrup. They don't follow any line with the vast array of coffee products, which only took off in the mid to late 1990s.
Coffee based beverages don't explain childhood and teen obesity. Those two categories don't drink nearly as much coffee as adults.
Yes and no; if you go into Pret with a kid they will give you a free "babycino" which is some sort of caffeine-free but presumably fat- and sugar-laden hot drink. Kids are being trained early on to drink this stuff.
And I expect juice drinks are part of it as well. Same high levels of sugar and low levels of fiber. The calories aren't as empty, but they're still much easier to consume than whole fruit.
I've got a cold/sore throat and when I do I drink a bunch of OJ. I don't normally drink OJ so I get small windows into it. Every time I get it I notice less and less pulp in it. Today there were tons of "NO PULP" oj out there, even tropicana 50, which is watered and filtered oj. These things are essentially natural koolaid.
I am not sure if the consumers really like and demand no pulp OJ or if it's one of those fads that are being pushed onto the consumers by the big brands. I for one prefer high pulp OJ any day, not for the fiber, but because it makes the juice taste so much better and fruitier. Without the pulp, the juice might as well be made from artificial flavors.
If a beverage has a certain number of calories from sugar per volume, it doesn't really matter whether it's cola-flavored, orange-flavored, vanilla-flavored, tea-flavored, natural-flavored, artificially-flavored, carbonated, uncarbonated, caffeinated, or uncaffeinated. They're all functionally soft drinks, from a dietary perspective, but the graph that charts the decline in carbonated soda does not show the other members in this group.
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B)
I actually harbor a hypothesis that I have not seen explored which would explain this even if we take it on face value. Contrary to traditional sources of sugar and starch, sweet beverages cause an absorption of sugar unimpeded by the normal vagaries of digestion - there's no chewing, nothing to slow a person down, no cell walls to slowly break down in the stomach, no fiber to absorb and slowly squeeze out the calories.
In the 90's, I used to drink two or three liters of birch beer for something to do while waiting for the pizza. You can keep pouring orange soda into a human body without complaint, long after they would have vomitted up a sugar-equivalent cherry pie. And often our behavior shifts to adopting soda whenever we look for a drink, as the default, several times a day.
We know that blood sugar spikes cause insulin spikes, and we know that ghrelin, insulin, & related hormones act together to modulate the hunger & satiety responses.
My hypothesis is that rapid sugar intake via drinks, when combined with our natural impulse to slake our thirst, acts to dysregulate our hunger and satiety responses in the longer term. Through whatever processes, it detaches hunger from ad libitum consumption levels, sufficient that an extra few hundred calories per day is the 'natural' level that affected people, on average, feel they should be eating. 100 extra calories a day over burn rate is about 10lbs/year of gained weight.
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C) Obesity is a lagging indicator here. People faced with an ad libitum diet find it very, very easy to maintain their weight. There seems to be a nearly universal misconception that baseline gluttony is associated with high weight levels, but that's bullshit. A person weighing 300lbs has roughly the same neurochemical hunger/stress response as a person weighing 150lbs, when you shortchange them each by 500 calories a day relative to their metabolic burn rate: It's just that metabolic burn rate goes way up as one gains weight. Maintaining weight is the default state. The mystery is why people are on average slowly gaining weight, rather than why fat people are not losing weight.
With regard to B), this is well explored and is called 'GI' or 'Glycemic Index'.[1] High GI foods cause an insulin response in an effort to maintain blood glucose at 5.6 (fasting) - 11.1 mmol/l (postprandial), one of insulins roles is to cause cells to remove sugar from blood and store it as muscle and liver glycogen first then body fat. Once the sugar has been removed from general circulation the hungry feeling recurs.
Saturated fats provided the longest sensation of satiety, followed by protein, then high fibre carbohydrates.
Additionally, our livers have the nifty ability to create sure from pyruvate, lactate, glycerol, and glucogenic amino acids through a process called Gluconeogenesis.[2] Loosely, this is handy for the brain which usually uses glucose for energy, except during fasting when ketones are used.
@TheSpiceIsLife, do you think hijacking the "Gluconeogenesis" process is what the sugar-water industry is aware of? ie: sugar hit following sugar removal.
" A person weighing 300lbs has roughly the same neurochemical hunger/stress response as a person weighing 150lbs,"
Not sure about this. Will depend on the type of (over) eater. Do they over eat because of psychology (stress reaction), do they over-eat due to some hormonal imbalance (lower gut hormone despite eating) and subject keeps eating. Then there's binge eaters. Each of these three types of over-eating have a different "neurochemical hunger/stress response" to a normal person who has eaten enough and stops. [0]
You're missing the point: a 300lbs person who stays 300lbs is not over-eating. Over-eating isn't biologically defined against some ideal meal size, it's defined against homeostasis: consuming as many calories N as the body burns. That's what the brain's hunger feedback mechanisms are supposed to care about.
Carrying around extra fat causes N to go up.
"Getting fat people to go on diets that cause them to lose weight" is approximately as difficult, motivation-wise, as "Getting skinny people to go on diets that cause them to lose weight". It's extraordinarily difficult, because their bodies are screaming at them to go back to the refrigerator.
The novel question to answer is why overeating - consuming more calories than you burn, and thus gaining weight steadily over long time periods - is so much more prevalent now than it was in previous decades. Why people who are already fat are inclined to eat more (much more) than skinny people, is the simply metabolic reality of the body's drive for homeostasis.
There is a healthcare problem, of course, with having fat people around, but the scientific question of what is making them all have weight problems at higher rates than before, is somewhat distinct from the practical problem of how we get the existing fat demographic to lose weight. Aggressive funding of bariatric surgery seems to be the least-bad method of the latter for the moment; Almost nothing else can be shown to work effectively at the levels required, since we're effectively fighting the strongest drive the body has after breathing.
These are good points. This one I'll have a stab at.
"The novel question to answer is why overeating - consuming more calories than you burn, and thus gaining weight steadily over long time periods - is so much more prevalent now than it was in previous decades."
Because it's not just about calories in but calories out too. People spending all day sitting in front of screens replacing all other forms of both work and play...
Biking could help with this, but there's so much cultural momentum against treating bike infrastructure as a first-class citizen, or heck, even a second-class citizen like walking. And without safe bike lanes, very few people will bike.
The amount of subsidies and preferential treatment we give to cars is really astounding, but at this point most people in the US can hardly think of it being any other way.
I tried that, and even if I was in the Netherlands I don't think it would apply. Biking has its constraints, you can't go at your own pace even in dedicated lanes, you have to be very actively focused on others, and you need secure parking lots if you plan to do something else otherwise 50% chances it will get stolen.
> Most consumers aren't idiots. But they're aren't scientists or academic researchers for the most part either. Bring them relevant, accurate information and they are capable of making rational choices.
In the US, cigarettes have had warning labels for almost 50 years and still ~20% of the population smokes.
I'm confused by your comments, and am asking for clarification of your perspective. What exactly is your point?
While 20% of the population still smokes, the incidence rate has hugely decreased over time[0].
According to the CDC, in 1965, ~43% of the population smoked. In 2011, it was just under 20%, with a goal of 12% by 2020.
Transparent labeling, increased regulation and awareness, plus general advances in understanding the consequences of smoking have had a massive effect on the rates of smoking. It's not perfect, but a similar reduction in obesity over the next 50 years would be an incredible accomplishment.
Now if only we could tackle that burgeoning mental health problem...
Well, some people will always want to smoke and eat poorly, and that is their choice. But cigarettes were never really insidious in the same way something like "sugar" is; I think sugar will have to be seen as a vice rather than what it is, one of the cheapest sources of calories you can get kids to eat. And that's going to have to take some deep change in the market.
And sports drinks, energy drinks, and flavored waters are certainly part of it.
The largest difference is movement. Which helps keep down obesity in many other nations: If you walk everywhere, or bike, or use transit for 90% of what you do, you will burn a lot more calories (especially grocery shopping and carrying them home via the metro).
Compared to driving everywhere, sitting at work, etc...
That study is indeed interesting. I just skimmed through it and read the abstract, definitely interesting.
The question now is, what is it? Could it be that the difference in food – not just caloric value of intake – has an influence? Did people start eating more prepackaged foods? If yes, what specifically influenced it? Why did it not influence Europe nearly as much?
The calories don't have to be replaced with anything - total intake can be down even if obesity is still rising, obesity will just be rising less than it otherwise would.
They're not necessarily sugared in the sense of a regular Coke, but I'm not sure if they differentiate for the types. Monster, which has become a rather large company, sells a lot of their zero sugar / zero calorie products.
They moved to using erythritol. I drink the products and have yet to find any counter evidence erythritol isn't drastically superior to pretty much every other sweetener. It has been shown to be very safe (with studies spanning multiple decades now), very little of it is metabolized, and it doesn't cause the gastric reactions that competing products like xylitol do.
Percentages of adults within these categories [Overweight, Obese, Extremely obese] increased gradually until the late 1970s, at which point they began to climb more quickly, leveling off somewhat around 2000.
(Scroll down to the section titled "Trends in Overweight and Obesity among Adults, United States, 1962–2010")
All the extra weight is coming from the abundance of sugars that are added to food. Especially the low-fat or fat-free foods. So we aren't just drinking the sugar, we are eating it too.
I hope people will also lay down sugar amount of apple, bagel, etc food next to these coke/dew/etc bottles of soda drinks. =)
Thing is - most of products in US has label stating clearly amount of calories and major contributors. It is SUPER easy to find approximate amount to which you need to stick. But people still over do it two/three/more times.
As much as I hate it, I think only high food costs will work. Problem is - how to keep it high enough to prevent abuse, but at the same time, keep lower income people access to enough nutrients.
Not a nutrition expert, but I'm given to understand that the form of the sugar matters as much as the amount. The sugar in an actual apple is apparently bound up in fibers or something, so basically it takes time for your body to process it and get it into the bloodstream. When you turn that apple into apple juice, even if it's entirely natural, you've freed the sugar to be absorbed by your body much faster.
That speed of absorption makes the difference - your body doesn't know what to do with so much sugar at once, so it processes it into fat and other things. Let it out more slowly, and it can actually use most of it for energy.
Replace 90% of the sugar consumed in America with erythritol or similar, and ban high fructose corn syrup as unsafe for human consumption. Obesity would begin to plunge overnight. It would remove vast amounts of calories from the typical American diet.
Alternatively, tax sugar and hfcs at to be 125% the price of erythritol/xylitol/etc. Will cause manufacturers to generally shift to polyols while still allowing consumers to have a choice and bringing tax revenue in the process.
I never understood how soda doesn't feel like it has 17 teaspoons of sugar in it because I've made lemonade with 2-3 teaspoons of sugar and it feels just as sweet.
Pick anything other than water, and you're going to be consuming sugar, HFCS or some derivative of fructose which is horrible for your body. The simple solution is to drink these in moderation and balance it with lots of water.
it also contains that pesky thing called "crystalline fructose" which apparently is a mild form of arsenic
This is literally one of the most scientifically illiterate things I've ever read. Please at least try to understand basic nutrition or even chemistry before sharing your opinion on these issues.
Calories is not the only way to measure how healthy something is.
It also matters how it affects the body, and in that regards orange juice and soda are not the same. You feel much fuller after orange juice, so clearly the body recognizes it as food, unlike soda.
I asked why "real" orange juice was "much healthier" than Minute Maid orange juice, not juice vs. soda. (Quoting text from hisham_hm; they aren't meant as scare quotes.)
Just take some time next time you're in a supermarket and walk down the cereal aisle, it's just incredible. It's all sugar and carbohydrates in colorful cartoony boxes meant to appeal to children. Just a cup of cereal has many calories and people and children eat huge bowls of this stuff.
So I think an anti-cereal campaign might also help. I often wonder what would happen to national obesity rates if cereal aisles in supermarkets just disappeared overnight.
If you are going there, you may as well evaluate the entire store. Most processed foods are not healthy, and most grocery stores are stocked with processed foods. It is not like the frozen dinner/pizza aisle has many good choices either. The produce sections are good, though.
The design of grocery stores has actually evolved in such a way as to make it pretty easy for you to shop healthy, though not on purpose. (At least, it did in the US, I don't know if other countries follow the same pattern.)
The standard supermarket layout consists a "perimeter" running around the sides and back of the store, with a "center store" made up of aisles in the middle. Center store is where the shelf-stable, processed and frozen foods go, while fresh/perishable foods -- produce, dairy, meats, seafood, bakery, etc. -- are placed along the perimeter. (More on this here: http://limn.it/all-lost-in-the-supermarket/)
So if you stick to shopping the perimeter and only duck into center store when you absolutely need to, it's not hard to come away with a cart that's mostly fresh foods. It's when your shopping consists mostly of running up and down the aisles of the center store that you get in trouble.
These colorful sugar-cereals have completely overtaken the cereal market in Estonia. In fact, my neighbourhood supermarkets no longer sell any major brand whole grain cereal at all. They used to, but the number of options kept decreasing, until it reached zero a few years ago. Now I either have to buy generic components and mix the cereal myself, or eat something else.
I'm not convinced that cereal as a product is bad. Sure things like Lucky Charms are clearly terrible for kids, but Cheerios or Honey Bunches of Oats? They are the best combination of cheap, easy, and quick that someone can get for breakfast. My biggest worry with an anti-cereal movement would be that people would just start skipping breakfast (even more than they do), leading them to consume MORE calories at lunch and dinner to make up for it.
Lucky Charms has 110 calories per 3/4ths a cup.
Honey Nut Cheerios has 110 calories per 3/4ths a cup.
They both have 22g of carbs of which Lucky Charms has 10g of sugar while Cheerios has 9. Don't confuse branding with health. If your cereal doesn't taste like cardboard, it's probably bad for you.
110 calories in 1 cup serving. 1.2 grams of sugar, 3 grams of fiber.
I started eating these plain in the morning when I got to the office and after less than 10 months of eating it, my cholesterol dropped another 5 points. I already had healthy levels, and this dropped it even more.
There some much healthier options in there if you know where to look, but unfortunately its not easy to identify them, and even things like granola which are colloquially thought to be healthy are often jam packed with sugar.
Exactly. They put extra sugar/sweeteners in absolutely everything these days. You have to look at the ingredients and calories on anything you buy.
Even super healthy-eeming things like granola or dried fruit usually have sugar added. Yogurt is still promoted as a healthy snack, but most of them have as much added sugar as a candy bar.
Maybe the solution is to require sorting on the shelves by sugar content. This way not only healthier options will be easier to find but you would need to take a few additional steps to get your high sugar option.
Those additional steps to get to the end of the shelf may even turn into a walk of shame kind of thing with enough cultural pressure.
Thats the right direction. But why put the burden onto supermarkets? Producers of food should be required to visually indicate the proportional sugar content on the packaging. Imagine a box of cereals, the bottom third of which has to be white in order to indicate that 1/3 of its contents is indeed sugar. No more searching & parsing fine print with unintuitive text.
> even things like granola which are colloquially thought to be healthy are often jam packed with sugar.
Also instant oats with added flavor (brown sugar and maple, cinnamon, banana bread, what have you) can contain a lot of added sugar, compared to plain oats version.
Or if they just stopped advertising it. In the UK the government tried to ban food advertising to children but there was massive lobbying from Kellogg's and they dropped it.
Regarding Kellogg's , they also started the whole "Breakfast is healthy and most important meal in the morning" BS. Since I've started intermittent fasting 16/8 (from 20.00 to 12.00) I've been loosing fat easily.
I'm interested in the 20h to 12noon fast. Is that literally nill by mouth for that period or do you have a drink of water or unsweetened tea when getting up?
I'd go for porridge at lunch on a regime like that. A younger colleague at work referred to porridge as 'warm icecream' the other day so there is hope I think.
The guy also makes great videos about bodyweight training, which I also implemented beside weights.
I usually eat dinner before 20.00, but after that nothing. Water refreshes me in the morning (I stopped with coffee 2,5 years ago and am clean since), although as written in the article above coffee ain't that big deal either.
The thing is that you get used to the "empty" feeling to the point you kinda prefer it, since you're way more focused. I also stopped drinking everything else then water, because it's the only thing that actually clenches the thirst and also supresses the "hunger" feeling (I've put hunger in quotes because actual hunger is being a day or more without food, not couple hours that many modern humans think). A great after effect is also much greater sensitivity to sugar, when you occasionally drink something sweetened like a soda or juice. You won't believe how sweet the drinks are today, when you're drinking just water for a month. This is also why I believe people keep consuming sugary products and are surprised by the amount of it inside - when your taste adapts to sugar all the time, you have no idea and as a result you might even start eating more sugary things to even taste it's sweet.
An awesome benefit is also that you're way way less obsessed with food, because you don't constantly surround your thoughts about it (like for 5-6 meals per day). Just eat 2-3 meals and that's it. Sometimes I even eat at 14.00 if I'm busy or something, not really an issue. The only caveat is to not to pig out in the afternoon. Actually after a while when you're used to being empty more, you won't even want to eat large amounts of food, specially if you're drinking water through the day.
I'm not saying it's the best thing since sliced bread, so as with everything, give it a full go for a month and check the results.
I didn't know someone does this on purpose. I just have a low appetite in the late evening and the morning, so I've been doing this for a few years now.
I heard that you you want to lose fat, you need to speed up your metabolism which means eat more often. I wonder how this works with this kind of diet.
As weird as it is, things are improving in the U.S.
I met an ad exec who ran the Joe Camel campaign. People will do what works. The free market will end up with really effective but unwanted solutions. Marketing to kids is one of those places where simple regulation makes a lot of sense.
It's crazy how easy it is to eat a healthier diet by simply avoiding the cereal/chips/soda isles. Sugar (especially corn syrup), and processed carbs literally make up these two massive aisle's in every store. Combine that with a moderate amount of activity throughout the week and you'll be in pretty decent shape.
Case in point: I live in a walking city (NYC), avoid the junk described above, yet I eat/drink out often and at 31 years old I'm in above average shape without any serious exercise (other than walking up lots of stairs, and around the city, daily). Of course I could do more, but the point is cutting out some simple items from your diet can go a very long way.
I was a cereal addict as a kid. Killed a couple boxes of the stuff a week. And I was super skinny, probably because we played outside to the point of exhaustion every single day.
Yeah, was the same like like you as a kid. Was super skinny. Even as an adult, I'm not nearly as active but I do count my calories. IMO, banning things like cereal is not the answer when the more effective approach is to teach kids how to burn their calories and/or limit their calorie intake per day.
Kids' bodies work differently than adults'. Most of their caloric intake goes to the vastly more demanding process of growing than it does to fueling activity. It's like how a mother gains a huge appetite during pregnancy that would have made her fat otherwise.
The problem is that habits formed as kids die hard. You keep eating the same way as you did when you were 12, but have nowhere to put it all, except your belly / thighs / butt. Before you know it you're 27 and huge.
It's interesting to me that diet soda consumption has dropped from its peak. I would have guessed that sugary soda would have been replaced by diet soda, but it appears that water has replaced sugary soda more frequently. Mind mildly blown.
A lot of people just can't get over the terrible taste of artificial sugar. If someone ever creates an artificial sugar indistinguishable from sugar or corn syrup, it'll be a multibillion dollar invention.
I'd give my right arm for zero calories coke, I'd rather have a perrier than diet coke.
Like many of the posters here, I realize that much of the food and drink sold is unhealthy. On the other hand, I don't think that nanny state regulations are the answer. Plenty of unhealthy things abound (when overused): chips, candy, pizza, fast food, cookies, ice cream, video games, television, etc. Maybe some of the same marketing tactics used to sell the unhealthy things can also be used to counter them with healthier alternatives.
That's a pleasant thought, but it seems unlikely. Food advertising gets circa 1000x as much money as healthy eating [1].
I think the simple step here would just be to ban advertising of unhealthy food the same way we've banned advertising of tobacco products. Citizens would still be free to produce and consume junk food, but corporations would no longer be allowed to indulge in industrial-scale manipulation of consumers' habits.
That won't happen either, of course, because there's an enormous amount of lobbying money from those industries (and from the advertising/PR/marketing industries). But I can dream.
Under a socialized healthcare regime, every sick person is a problem for the whole society in that we have to pay for it. So, being careless with your health is a crime against the people. If you are in the USA, consider that you have been funding healthcare for some of the worst offenders for decades by paying taxes which fund hospitals. Now with the healthcare reforms in mind, which have itemized your contribution to social healthcare separately from your taxes, take a walk around Walmart and consider all the preventable health issues you see in the crowd. Do you really want to pay for that? I feel like you and I should have the freedom not to, and our collective freedom not to is more important than any individual's freedom to eat and drink his way to costly, lifelong illness.
It's easy to advocate for collectivism when you think you are in the majority. I am a proponent of universal healthcare, but your comment has me reconsidering. Throwing individuals or subgroups under the bus so disdainfully is just as damaging to our social fabric as eating unhealthily, if not moreso.
We need to unify and enlighten ourselves, not look for more excuses to feel morally superior. So whatever solution we can find to obesity, it has to be one that uplifts, not one that alienates.
I don't think "nanny state rules" would be throwing anyone under the bus. I certainly believe that the collective poor health of the country in general is a good argument against socialized healthcare. But I want it to work. But I don't think that everyone is ready for the responsibility, so we should guide them with a heavy hand. After all, universal healthcare means that everyone must be included.
Just because I happen to be healthier than some of the people around me doesn't mean I am better than them in any way. I meant to highlight that we in the USA don't have to look very far to see why our insurance premiums went up so much.
Perhaps there can be screenings at some frequency to determine one's health. If a person consistently shows a lack of inclination to take care of themselves and follow advice, that behavior is logged and they automatically get de-prioritized when waiting lists are involved. I would assume that generally healthy people are just more of a positive investment, but if someone makes the motions of good health but encounters some life-changing event then they can be said to have shown an inclination to take care of themselves.
Which is precisely why some of us are opposed to socialised healthcare. Once you have it, every little decision you make becomes everyone else's business.
You make "socialised healthcare" sounds like we have a NHS food police tracking us and sending us off to a health re-education camp if we don't eat 5 bits of fruit and veg a day.
I completely agree. This is why I've been skeptical of socialist healthcare - your business becomes everybody's business. We MUST have a private option; a way to opt-out of public benefits for healthcare, if we are to maintain the option of freedom.
I would like to see a decline of "Big water". It astonishes me that bottled water is consistently sold for more than sugar water and not one bottler breaks from the pack and sells it for less. That can only happen with industry wide collusion to fix prices and yet no one in the government does anything about it.
Premium brand water might be $2/bottle (let's forget luxury brands that might be $4+) but you can get store brands in 24/48 packs for $2.99/$3.99 at large retailers.
Even some brands like Dasani or Deja Blue are 1/$2 at gas stations
That said, i imagine kevin_thibedeau was referring to the situation in the US. Perhaps bottled water is more expensive there. Or perhaps sugar water is cheaper.
Is that bad? People buy bottled water for the convenience, and because it's filtered tap water which tastes better than regular tap water.
If you want to reduce bottled water purchases you should advocate for a law requiring water fountains to have carbon filters for taste. (Although I kinda like knowing there is chlorine in there when I drink from one.)
I pay $4-$5 for 24 to 32 packs for Deer Park Water, which isn't tap water (but is owned by Nestle). $0.16 per bottle for spring water is incredibly cheap.
Well, you don't always have a water bottle and a place to fill it up from. That said, I agree that general societal pressure to reduce the number of pint/quart-size throwaway bottles is desirable in the same vein as reducing the use of throwaway plastic grocery bags. At the same time, given the choice between people buying bottles of water and bottles of soda, the former counts as progress in general and I'm not sure we want to discourage it.
If you work in retail then you are interested in profit, not making a good deal for your customers. If the proper branded product gives you a nice 37% margin (with that being 37% of a proper price), what is the incentive for selling something with a lower margin at a lower price?
The proper branded products have some distribution arrangements that mean you cannot sell their stuff at a low price, i.e. lower than everyone else. This is not 'price fixing' in a way the government can outlaw. Salesman from brand simply phones retailer's buyer and has a few words, implicit being the threat not to re-supply them. Large buyers will have negotiated a better price so long as they sell at the agreed price, clearly this privilege goes if they break their part of the deal, so next time they will have to buy at the official trade price, which is higher than what they need to make a profit.
Ma and Pa stores don't have the bargaining position - they buy from a 'cash 'n' carry' that might be supplied by another distributor (and an importer) all levels taking a percentage. They can stock 'off brand' products, but, even in a Ma and Pa store every square foot has to pay for itself, so why sell a low value, low margin, low $$$ turnover product?
Supermarkets sell own brand alongside branded products to present choice so you can buy big bottles of water at a price you would think does not make it worth them to stock. But check out the lunch purchases aisle, we are back to branded products at normal retail prices.
There is no conspiracy just capitalism and 'free market' practices. Having said that, water does have competition from a) the tap and b) the natural world. If you really wanted cheap water you could always run a tap (in the first world) or even collect your own rain water, filtering accordingly.
Oh yes, this can certainly be effectively outlawed. Create a barebones agency that manages a eBay like site for wholesalers. If Coca cola ever declines to sell to someone or offers preferential prices, then that's price collusion.
The article states that the industry is fearful of water as as substitute because brand preference is not as strong and there are plenty of cheap competitors.
I don't really mind if "big water" is a thing, but I'd like to see better packaging for it. It's amazing how many people regularly drink bottled water instead of tap water.
"Soda companies" are already moving to controlling water supply in many countries. In Brazil, it's already hard to find in some stores water which is not owned by either Coca-Cola or Nestlé.
Does the "water supply" of most citizens of most countries come from a grocery store? Or does it still come from things like municipal plumbing or rural wells?
What are restaurants doing to combat the loss of their highest-margin items? Another bonus of drinking water instead of a soft drink is a cheaper bill at lunch.
They're just increasing the prices of everything else. In earlier decades, restaurants used to sell their food at a near-loss because everyone had a couple of high-margin alcoholic drinks with their meal. When that started to go by the wayside, the restaurants had to increase the menu prices of the actual food. I expect we'll see the same thing happen if people stop buying beverages entirely, especially at fast-food restaurants where the soft drink is almost always the highest-margin element of the meal, making up for loss leaders like the "dollar menu".
Soda isn't inherently evil. Education on how to track calories and understand the density of some foods is more important. Of course, since sodas don't have really any nutrition, it is hard to drink a lot of them.
You can't single out soda while you still have people eating "healthy" salads that are twice as big as they should be, covered with dressing and cheese and olives and fatty meats.
You can't single out soda while you let people drink "coffee" (which by itself is fine) that includes 1000 calories worth of additives like cream and sweeteners.
And oil is extremely calorie-dense; simply cutting in half the number of fries that you eat would go a long way.
With a proper diet and exercise you can certainly have a couple of sodas a week. There is also a better way to drink soda: don't use a straw. Just try to get through a 32 oz. soda when you sip it a bit at a time; you'll find that you don't really drink it that fast, that it tastes better, and that a small amount is still satisfying. After awhile it'll seem much more natural to order a small soda.
pro-tip for anyone trying to kick a soda (or alcohol) habit: get yourself a seltzer maker, and an assortment of bitters (Fee Bros Cranberry, Walnut, and standard Angostura are a good place to start).
This is just my personal experience, but I found that most of the unhealthy drinking I was doing was out of habit and boredom. I’m just as happy with a seltzer + a few dashes of bitters as I was with a beer or a coke.
Even if you don't get something like that, just having a glass of water nearby is a great way to reduce consumption. I drink a lot of diet soda and it's mainly out of compulsion to constantly drink liquids. If I keep a nice cold cup of water near where I am, the soda consumption drops super fast. Once I start drinking water during that day, that's usually what sticks.
For me, it's almost all about the habit of constantly drinking. That said, even though I know how to kick the habit, I still tend to drink a lot of diet soda because it's a nice pick-me-up.
Anyone that wants legalized drugs, wants regulated and taxed drugs. A minority advocate anarchy, but most just want access to these drugs, if they personally deem them appropriate.
Drug advocates still want all nutritional info and negative effects plastered all over the boxes so that they can personally make educated decisions about their lives. For example, look at the Canadian cigarette boxes: http://www.smoke-free.ca/filtertips-5/images/Marlbo4.jpg (I don't know how people still smoke them... /mindblown)
Meanwhile people that do not like sugar, aren't trying to ban sugar (some minority of them may want sugar banned). The majority, just want consumers to be informed and make educated decisions. I'd like to personally add (and I think this opinion is shared): I would like it if we limit the abilities of marketers to hide the negative aspects of these substances. For example, a company shouldn't be allowed to advertise cereal to minors through colorful pictures and cartoons.
Can you imagine if cereal boxes needed 40% of their surface to be covered with pictures of diabetics with amputations/ulcers?
Or instead of a toy inside, you get an insulin monitor? How about pictures of cavities and decaying teeth?
I think in that world, very few children would want to eat that product, and even fewer parents would continue to buy them.
I haven't seen anyone suggest that sugar should be banned the way drugs are, just limited in how much can be contained in a product marketed as food. Similarly, I don't think that many people who support drug legalization would support allowing drugs to be added to products that are marketed as food rather than marketed as drugs.
For starters, I don't think there's any conceivable risk of boxes on supermarket shelves being stuffed to the brim with cocaine.
If you want to look at the number of cumulative life-years lost to drugs vs. sugar in the past several decades, my intuition is that it's not even remotely a close contest.
You don't think there is a risk that if drugs were totally legal, food produces wouldn't start adding addictive drugs? These companies are already trying to engineer the most addictive dorrito possible.
People love stuff like red bull and coffee because of their stimulant properties.
I bet there is a huge market for Frosted (with Coke) Flakes.
What we really need is a limit on advertising. Corporations manufacturing packaged sugar like coke, cereal etc. should not be able to manipulate young children to get them addicted to their crap. Sell this stuff in plain white boxes, ban advertising to young children, and in general, limit the free speech of soulless legal fictions when they target children.
Young children don't do the grocery shopping. Parents need to take responsibility and not buy unhealthy food for their kids. I'd say children up to a certain age are drinking this stuff simply because their parents bought it for them (How else?).
Plus, "when they target children" would simply become harder to define as companies would modify their ads, but the problem would remain if parents aren't taking an active role in educating their children themselves as to what is unhealthy, and making purchasing decisions that are healthy, instead of depending on the government (or corporate advertising) to do it for them.
I sure did, and when I was 11 years old we had soda machines at our public school. Sold soda at the lunch counter, and had free soda give away days where the distributor would hand out free new/trial products.
Kids can buy whatever they want if they have money. And surely, they'll buy the shiny thing thing they saw on TV or the internet when they encounter it in the shop and see it's cheap.
Again, kids won't do "whatever they want" if their parents do their job and instill proper discipline, education, and consequences for behavior that they don't want.
If you want the government to do your parenting for you, I don't know what to tell you. Not my idea of good parenting, and I think the results will be disappointing. We can agree to disagree on that.
> Again, kids won't do "whatever they want" if their parents do their job and instill proper discipline, education, and consequences for behavior that they don't want.
Clearly you aren't a parent, and I suspect you also have never been a child. It would be handy if what you wrote were true. But children aren't robots, and parents aren't the only people who influence them. The reason that food companies target children in their advertising is that it works to manipulate them.
When it comes to "Where do children get their food while at home?", I think it's fair to say they get 90+% of it from "Whoever does the grocery shopping".
This isn't a binary choice. Parents and advertisers can both take responsibility for what they are doing. Power and responsibility go together. And there's no denying food advertising is powerful; if it weren't, we wouldn't be enduring many billions of dollars worth every year.
Regulating advertising then gives control to whatever organization makes those decsisions. Are their interests always going to be in alignment with our own?
From working in a non-commercial radio station for years-- I think applying non-commercial criteria is pretty easy:
1) No mentioning of prices
2) No calls to action
3) No aggrandizement of product. Underwriting can be a neutrally-worded description of product.
I've really come to believe that all media that could be described as public (the outdoors, network television, radio, perhaps much more...) should abide by these rules, insofar as commercial advertising pollutes it horribly.
What we really need is education. Children and adults alike should better understand nutrition and what they are putting in their bodies. It's no secret that soda and so many other drinks are packed with sugar, but no one seems to care or understand.
What we really need is fewer people speculating about what other people need. Follow in the footsteps of your forefathers[0] and mind your own damned business.
You realize that the advertising industry, which clears north of $200 billion a year in the US, is entirely devoted to manipulating what other people need, right? If those people will stop trying to mind (and control) everybody else's business, there'd be a much smaller problem here.
You realize people are going to do what people are going to do.
The only thing you can really control is yourself and your reactions to things. I don't watch TV, read newspapers, watch football games, browse the web without an ad blocker, or live in a city. I haven't seen an ad in years. When I do venture into the city, I recognize that I must have seen ads, but I can't recall what any of them were; I'm too busy thinking about other things.
We'll have to draw, as in most things, an arbitrary line by consensus. Spinach is on one side, sugar on another, Milk is on spinach's side, tobacco on sugar's, and so on.
This is stuff that we should decide as a society to keep ourselves safe from corporate psychopaths.
Why not? In fact, why not go even further and enforce that all websites have only a black serif (or monospace) font on a white background? No more screaming colors, moving parts, confusing adverts - just plain content.
You can ban it from TV and radio if there's a compelling government interest but even the head medical chied of the ADA says there is no definitive proof that sugar causes diabetes. (See my link above)
I'm not sure what the 'first amendment test' is when it comes to corporate advertising but our government already limits how alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and marijuana can be advertised. We also limit what and how things can be advertised to children. So I'm not really sure your sentence is correct.
Well if you wanted a ban on advertising sugary cereal to kids, you would have to pass the "Central Hudson" test. You would have to prove a compelling government interest to ban the ads to children. The ADA chief medical scientist has already said there is no conclusive proof that sugary food causes diabetes. Also I don't know if you've seen any kids cereal commercials recently, but they're not making deceptive claims (like "eating this cereal will make you healthier").
We're all just commenting on your vague original comment. If you wanted to add context, that was the time to do it - not later as a defense of your original comment. You've specifically focused on "sugary cereal" in your comment to me - okay, that's fine. But your original comment was in reply to a much broader comment yet you decided to just make a blanket statement.
>The first amendment shouldn't really apply to corporations.
Should the feds be able to shut down Hackernews? It's a corporation. NY Times? It's a corporation.
The distinction you want to make is commercial speech should be able to be regulated. And it is. False advertising is illegal but lying about politics is a first amendment right.
Also, sugar isn't harmful in moderation.
Plus the science of diet is hilariously poorly understood. 15 years ago people would have been trying to ban fatty food. Now all the sudden fat is good?
And that goes triple for popular diet advice. It's all fads. We still can't figure out a diet that works for whole population long term.
That's not true. There is a scientific consensus on cigarettes and lung cancer. There is certainly no scientific consensus on sugar and diabetes/cancer.
If the first amendment should apply to corporations, should the New York Times be restricted on what articles it can print? What about the movie documentaries you see on Netflix?
I think that sort of hyperbole isn't helping any arguments against sugar. No need to ratchet up the rhetoric - this is already a hot topic. Sugar is bad, yes, but if it was thought to be "as harmful" as tobacco it would have warning labels and you'd have to be a certain age to use it.
> It’s clear that soda’s calories contribute to weight gain and obesity, but whether its impact is greater than that of other unhealthy foods has not been conclusively demonstrated. Nevertheless, the change is already underway.
I think that if you consume a lot of sugary stuff, like drinking soda all day, you're going to get used to the taste of sugar. If you cut soda, consume a lot less sugar, you may find you have less desire for other really sweet products like ice cream, cake, candies, etc., because they are just so sweet and at the very least won't feel like eating a whole bunch of it any more.
A small number of reposts is ok if a story hasn't had significant attention yet [1]. After that, we bury reposts as dupes.
This is the main device for migitating the randomness that otherwise dominates which stories make it off /newest [2]. Basically, it's ok to roll the dice a few times.
If we see a good-by-HN's-standard story that fell through the cracks, we've been emailing the submitters and inviting them to repost it. We invited coloneltcb to repost this one. This is the latest in a series of experiments that I've written about at [3] and [4] if anyone's interested.
I was aware of that. That's why I didn't flag the duplicates.
My purpose in providing back links on each duplicate to the earlier posts was to try to avoid fragmenting the comments. When there are two submissions 18 minutes apart, there is a decent chance comments will be split between them.
> If we see a good-by-HN's-standard story that fell through the cracks, we've been emailing the submitters and inviting them to repost it. We invited coloneltcb to repost this one
That seems pretty inelegant for a site named "Hacker News". Why can't you diddle the database to give the original another shot? The "invite a resubmission" approach makes the submitter have to figure out a different URL, and increases the risk of comment fragmentation.
I don't think we need worry about comment fragmentation on posts that have few points and no comments and are more than a few hours old. The odds of new comments appearing there are minuscule. On live threads, yes, but we often move those [1].
We do give originals another shot, by rolling the clock back on them internally, if they're up to a few hours old. Beyond that, it feels weird to have a story on the front page with just a few points and a timestamp that says e.g. "23 hours ago", let alone "163 days ago".
We don't change the user-facing timestamp, because that feels like rewriting history, the sort of thing that HN users wouldn't like. It would also make /newest look weird as neighboring posts could then have different ages.
The repost invites don't require users to come up with a different URL. You click on a link and the software fills that in for you.
Probably our next step will be to add a setting to user profiles that people can turn on if they want the software to do such reposts for them automatically. In that case, no need for an email, plus the software could pick a good time to do the repost. On the other hand, it's already clear that many users like getting these emails. The positive feedback has been striking.
An open question is what to do in cases where the submitter has no email address in their profile, or doesn't check their email.
If you or anyone knows of a more elegant solution, please tell us! We would love that.
I think this is key. Better information and transparency is having an effect. I'm glad to hear we're approaching a point where the RDA for sugar will be listed on products just like fat, sodium, and potassium. I expect this will have a major impact on consumer behavior and industry behavior, much like calorie listings on fast food menus. It still requires government regulations, but instead of challenging First Amendment principles, it embraces them.
Most consumers aren't idiots. But they're aren't scientists or academic researchers for the most part either. Bring them relevant, accurate information and they are capable of making rational choices. This article is encouraging evidence.