Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s got one thing right: Americans eat way too much sugar and that excess sugar consumption contributes directly to our obesity problem. But sugar-sweetened beverages and the way they are marketed are only part of a much bigger problem of too much sugar in the American diet.
While the mayor has the right social goal in mind, he and other policy leaders should consider a broader, yet individually less intrusive, approach than limiting the size of “big gulp” soda drinks. They should tell supermarkets and restaurants that they must, in the aggregate, slowly reduce the added sugar contained in the products that pass through their cash registers – say, by 5 percent a year for five years. This would bring about a sharp decline in sugar consumption.
Individual shoppers could still buy whatever they wanted. But retailers would have to engage in a wide variety of behind-the-scenes tactics – just as they do now – to influence the overall basket of goods their customers buy. They would have to figure out the best way to sell products with less added sugar, while still satisfying consumer taste and maximizing profits.
Character disorder. It’s someone else’s fault, not mine, that I weigh 250 pounds.
Get off your fat arse and do some physical exercise, and consume less calories. Works everytime. Do you know why there are so few fat Chinese? The walk most places we would drive to. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is meddling busybody and a moron.
Because most Chinese cannot afford as much food. Per capita GDP is 11 times higher in the US (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=china+usa+gdp+per+capita).
I’m not Mark’s brother, but I agree with him entirely. We’d be better off making PE mandatory for all schools…..again. Sugarman just wants to nibble at free choice from a different angle.
The solution is simple. Make the obese pay for their decisions. Higher insurance rates, banned from airplanes as they are a dangerous projectile, double prices on mass transportation, ….
“The solution is simple.”
To have a solution, you first need a problem.
Obesity is like smoking or drug use. If you have the problem and want to solve it badly enough then you can. If you don’t want to then you can’t. And neither can government — any level of government. The only likely thing to happen from lowering sugar content is that people stop drinking the stuff and start consuming something else instead, like more food. Where is the solution to anything in that?
If individual behavior causes a problem for the individual then only an individual decision to change behavior is going to solve it. Government action just screws things up even more than they already are. When was the last time you saw a government scheme actually solve a problem?