There has already been so much written about Mayor Bloomberg’s latest bewildering attempt to protect us from our fat selves by banning “large” sodas that I don’t even want to go there. Nanny state, overreaching government, blah blah blah.
Suffice it to say that New York is looking mighty stupid right now, and if the TV comedians are lining up to make fun of us, it is deserved.
Rather, I thought it might be interesting to examine the “logic” of the proposed law, and suggest a few additional measures that could be instituted.
If the mayor gets his way, you won’t be able to buy cups of soda larger than 16 ounces. This is about 180 calories. But a 20 ounce from a supermarket bottle is OK. Without doing the math, I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that the bottle will have more calories. Perhaps the effort required to unscrew the cap offsets the extra calories.
Sixteen ounces of whole milk (300 calories) is fine.
But given the mayor’s obsession with reducing obesity, it is clearly better to drink soda than milk since it has about half the calories per ounce. Any argument tossed in here about the nutritional value of milk is irrelevant and obfuscates the point. Calories are calories. When speaking of obesity, the term “empty” calories is empty of meaning.
And as long as we’re going to have dumb laws, why not make some more that are even dumber? The possibilities for job creation are endless, and we are always in need of new revenue.
