Well, I don’t agree with the tax part, but I think pretty much everyone agrees that sugar is unhealthy and should be discouraged, and is in fact more harmful than most people realize. The real reason this thread is pathetic is that more than 40 posts in, no one has insulted anyone else yet! 
Poopyhead!
(That’s all I’ve got, sorry. 
)
If most people thought Diet Coke tasted the same as regular Coke I don’t think many would pick the one with all the calories. I’m not sure what is going on in your mouth but to me any diet soda tastes horrific. I don’t care if it costs $.50 less I would never drink it. I don’t think your conclusion that the chemical mixture of diet soda is better for you. It’s less fattening certainly.
I love the fact that most New York City restaurants are required to post the calorie counts of pretty much everything.
I am almost 60, exercise frequently and make an attempt to eat as healthy as I can. I am not prone to weight problems or cloesteral or blood pressure issues. I work long hours and I eat lots of convenience foods, fast foods and takeout meals.
I have always been mindful of what I eat and since my twenties I have tried to estimate calorie counts in my head. Once restaurants started posting this information I learned how wrong my estimates often were. But for every unpleasant surprise there were two or three pleasant ones. I really like knowing that half a tuna salad sandwich and a cup of broccoli-cheddar soup at Panera Bread is under 500 calories while half a chicken salad sandwich and a cup of clam chowder is over 700. And that those little mac and cheese lunches that always tempted me at the shop on the corner aren’t that decadent - the veggie one is only 400 calories (portion sizes) and not off limits at all.
It helps me make better choices.
I don’t like the idea of mandating portion sizes of anything, though … Not even sugary sodas. Yes, it is true that most people eat more than they need and the average person only needs 2000 calories or less a day. But there are people, you can call them lucky if you want, that need substantially more than that…my niece and nephew routinely put away more at a single meal than I eat in a day ( or two, in the case of my nephew ) and they are both healthy and active and remain relatively slender.
It’s a matter of knowing yourself.
And while sugary sodas should possibly be discouraged I don’t think we should be encouraging anyone to drink chemically laden diet sodas, I don’t think trying to trick your body into thinking it’s going to get a sugar rush that never comes is healthy in the long run.
Sodas are the devils piss.
And adults who drink them everyday are stupid shit-for-tastebuds babies.
Have a glass of water. Or a coffee. Or a beer.
Fizzy pop is for kiddies.
The funny thing is that that’s exactly what I used to think about diet soda, including Diet Coke, and specifically that it had a really awful bitter aftertaste. But that was years ago, and when I had some last spring it tasted just fine, and I’ve since switched to Coke Zero which is a slightly different formulation and I’m not sure I could tell the difference between that and regular Coke – maybe one could, but I think most people would find the difference, if any, to be pretty subtle.
YMMV, I suppose, but that’s certainly the case for me, so the question is, what happened? One thing is that although Diet Coke was always sweetened with aspartame, the company initially used a mixture of aspartame and saccharin, because saccharin was cheaper, and it’s notorious for having a bitter aftertaste. They eventually dropped the saccharin, not sure exactly when. I don’t know exactly what’s in Diet Coke now but the Coke Zero I’m drinking right now is primarily sweetened with aspartame, plus a small amount of acesulfame potassium. This is a good combo because aspartame has a sweetness profile a lot like sugar except it lasts longer, whereas acesulfame-K has something of the bitter aftertaste of saccharin, and the right combination of the two is said to balance each other out and produce a taste very much like natural sugar. My taste buds certainly believe it.
YMMV, and also note that the formulation I’m describing is in Canada. The US may have a different formula though it’s unlikely, and both aspartame and acesulfame-K are FDA approved. In fact, in reference to your comment about “the chemical mixture of diet soda”, according to Wikipedia aspartame is “one of the most thoroughly tested and studied food additives the agency has ever approved” and it describes its safety as “clear cut”. I don’t know what the scoop is on acesulfame-K but it’s internationally approved and is only used in Coke in very tiny quantities.
Ironically, it’s the assertion that diet soda is definitely less fattening that is potentially subject to question, despite containing almost no calories. Some studies have suggested that it may paradoxically lead to weight gain through various hypothetical mechanisms that are not well understood. This article about aspartame references the same hypothesis. Personally I’m not going to get too excited about such tenuous theories – I like me my zero calories because I’m at the age where metabolism is slower and weight gain tends to creep up on you, and besides, sugar has a lot of known hazards besides just empty calories.
Exactly. Besides, we need to fatten them up while they’re still young.
All but a small number of responses have missed the entire point of my original pitting. Contrary to what Robert163 has gathered from my post, my love for sugar is in fact, not romantic. I am not pitting Jamie Oliver for insulting the dignity of my girlfriend, Big Sugar, I am pitting him for being a verbal weasel.
Oliver could be campaigning to get my dick sucked for all I care, I would still take him to task for not being able to complete a single sentence or addressing any points directly with any clarity (a most ironically painfully term he likes to toss in his word salads).
Oliver is a chef and a television personality. His enthusiasm and best intentions aside, he is neither a nutritionist, nor a public policy expert. His cold-reading, word salad methodology might work in a live crowd situation to rile them up and garner applause, but in a 1-on-1 studio setting where he is sitting face to face with the host, it just sounds like drowning. Again, only when I watched the video was this made even more apparent to me since I could actually see Oliver’s body language and inability to look Shad (the host of Q) in the eye when he is deep in Nick Fehn mode. He comes across as someone more focused on being the savior than the integrity of his cause.
You did see the post above when his views on sugar are supported by the British Medical Council?
So one bad interview and he’s a shirt spewing blowhard? I’m going to repeat myself, but I am probably the only one on this thread that has had a personal converation with Jamie regarding his mission. Not specifically about sugar, but general kids’s nutrition. He believes he’s doing the right thing, his staff that I met and spent the day with believe it, the nutritionists agree with it, and I agree with it. Less procesed food, more vegetables, less sugar all make for a more sustainable and healthier population. I really don’t understand the vitriol you are spewing here.
Still an incredibly lame pitting. Big Sugar spends 100’s of millions each year on marketing including marketing directly to children. If Jamie exaggerates a bit to get the point across I’m completely fine with that.
Of all the assholes in the world, you choose to pit Jamie Oliver for saying people eat too much crap that is too crappy? And he is the shit-spewing blowhard?
I’d also like to add all the doctors who support such a tax. What the fuck are those shit spewers thinking of, trying to take steps to stop the ongoing increase in obesity and diabetes. Fuckers the lot of them. And government advisors on healthcare. Absolute shit spewers to a man.
No-one’s trying to stop people having sweet things. They’re just trying to make it a slightly less attractive option to food manufacturers to just dump sugar into everything to make them taste better. There’s other, healthier ways to do that, but while sugar is such a cheap option companies won’t look at them.
Jamie Oliver should be easy to hate, I certainly should have no problem with doing so but…he means what he says and he means well. I get not the slightest hint from him that he does this for publicity reasons. I honestly believe he does what he does for the best of intentions and there is more than a grain (ha!) of truth in his campaigns.
Still, if you’re going to be the face of a campaign, the spokesperson selling a new view, sheesh at least practise language skills that include speaking in full sentences. Crikey!
I like the guy, think he’s well motivated, but can’t listen to him beyond a couple of minutes. It hurts my freaking brain, he’s not even making an effort!
Yup, I absolutely agree. This is a worthy pitting of a guy who drives me crazy.
Thirded. I think all these people saying it’s a “lame pitting” have misinterpreted the OP. He’s not pitting clearer labelling or a tax on sugar.
But FWIW I’m in favour of the former and against the latter.
More informative labelling does help (and note that the US is behind the curve on this: putting everything in terms of an arbitrary serving size and additionally not having colour codes or other simplifying features).
But I’m against a tax on sugar. I think it crosses an important ethical line when you’re taxing something that’s nutritious in moderation. I eat very healthy but will sometimes grab a sugary drink prior to doing a workout. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay more for that because some people consume excessive amounts.
No, they didn’t. For the most part, most of us just became interested in discussing the substance of what Oliver was saying instead of the way he was saying it. Which may be a digression from your intended pitting, but if you’re going to accuse someone of being “a shit spewing blowhard” it’s really not a hijack to point out that what he’s saying is valid and important.
I really don’t understand this reasoning. You do realize that you are paying for a product that is artificially cheap, thanks to the government. You’re already getting a significant discount on that sugary drink. A tax would just pare that discount down a bit so that it’s more in line with other beverages. Like water.
I think the best thing the government can do is get rid of those damn subsidies. They are seriously inflating Americans’ sense of entitlement (as well as their waistlines).
ETA: I just realized you aren’t living in the US. Apologies!
That first part is actually not true – or to be more specific, it’s even worse than you think. The same screwed-up priorities that provide the US sugar industry with subsidies also provide it with tariff protections on sugar imports, so you end with sugar in the US costing significantly more than it does in Canada. It’s a really special kind of stupid when unwarranted subsidies actually make a commodity cost more!
It’s still very cheap, however, and I do agree with you about eliminating the subsidies. But as I already showed, any tax on sugar would have to be jacked up to astronomical percentages for it to make any difference in consumption.