[quote=AN]
So does, sex, excerise, listen to soothing music, spicy food, sun light, laugh, cry, and chocolate.
Again your crack and sugar analogy is ludicrousness.
Even if I agree with your premise, it’s impossible to regulate. Unlike tobacco, which doesn’t go into anything else. If you attack the root of the sweet problem, which is sugar and not soda, and tax it, then you all of a sudden introduce artificial food inflation, since sugar is in a lot of different things. Which mean you’ll be hurting the poor and middle class the most, since food cost will affect them the most.
If your goal is to stamp out obesity, then sugar shouldn’t be your own target. Work hours, vacation days, portion size, fat, complex carbohydrate, video games, computers, and many other should have the same amount of scrutiny. After all, if we go back to single income family and mom make home cook meals for dinner and dad and kids brown bag for lunch, then the obesity probably would probably be a non-issue or at least drastically reduced. Also, if kids go outside to play like they used to, instead of sitting in front of the TV or computer, then they would burn off the sugar they consumed.[/quote]
You can not refine and process sex and exercise. You can not box up sex and put a tiger on it and advertise to kids with the tiger saying “they’reeeee ggggrrreeeaaaatttttt.” can you tell me how many commercials on “exercise” a kid sees during Saturday morning cartoons? Compare that to how many commercials kids see on sugary food and drinks.
The point you keep missing here is crack ultimately came from a plant, it is the processing that eventually made it so potent and addictive and deadly. it is the cheapness that made the epidemic of addiction so widespread. This is the same problem with processed food. The processing made the food potent and addictive and deadly, and the cheapness made the epidemic of obesity so widespread.
You are absolutely right, this is going to the hardest battle yet. We won against tobacco and alcohol primarily because these products can be separated into a restricted box, and people ultimately do not need to smoke and drink. Regulation of food would be difficult, Broomberg’s attemp is a good example of the type of problems that can be encountered.
I’ve already mentioned some of the things that can be done, someone mentioned these are no brainers, but the problem is the food lobby kills these attempts at every corner by placing 100% responsibility at the consumer level. If you understand the parallel wih crack, tobacco, and alcohol, you can see the responsibility is more 50/50.
These are just few things
–end corn and grain subsidies, that’s 20 billion righ there. But republicans will fight it hard.
–eliminate advertisement to children. The food lobby will say it is the job of parents to regulate their children.
–mandatory calories info next to every food/drink related advertisement, in addition to calorie info adjacent to prices on menus. Remember the right also fought hard against this when CA introduced a variation of this.
–increased nutrition education in school in regard to addictive potential of overly processed food.
–change the type of food served in schools.
–surcharge on extra calories. An entree that exceeds 600 calories will start incurring a surcharge. This may lead to restaurants pushing buy 1 get 2. But if it’s on another plate, more likely for people to box it up for the next meal than consuming it right there.
