Yes, I’m not American, but was recently in US for a couple weeks and it did strike me just how much sugar was in every product and how hard that is to calculate thanks to poor labelling.
And I agree with you on that point: that rather than tax + subsidy, just eliminate the subsidies makes more sense.
I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong on this, but wasn’t the push to put sugar in everything largely a response to wanting to reduce fat due to general public perception of the dangers of fat in foods?
If so, why do we think that getting them to reduce sugar will suddenly result in healthier foods as opposed to just moving to something that ends up being worse? Anal leakage could just be the tip of the icebeg!
You guys add sugar to your bread. I’m pretty sure that wasn’t an attempt to reduce the fat content.
But it’s a fair point. The holy trinity of flavor is Sugar+Salt+Fat. If public opinion turns away from one, as when “cutting fat” became a thing, manufacturers increase the other two to keep their sales up.
I think we have very different cookbooks.
The real threat to the affordability of universal health care is people getting old, which is what the government should really be preparing for. The cost of obesity is substantially overstated to the point of idiocy.
People always die. Obese people die younger, on average, but they will eventually get sick and die. My father died in part because he was fat, at age 70. That cost money. But if he’d been thin he simply would have died later, probably from prostate cancer, which also would have cost money. My grandmother died at 93 and she cost the government way more than my Dad did, despite never being overweight. That’s an anecdote but it’s a perfect microcosm of the overall phenomenon. People who aren’t fat do not simply hit a due date and heave themselves into their coffins; they get Alzheimer’s and cancer and kidney failure and so on and so forth. There isn’t any way around the expense of caring for sick old people, and making them thinner probably isn’t going to reduce the bill by a penny. If anything it’ll mean you spend more money on old-people-welfare programs BEFORE they get sick and those bills come due.
If you want to help people avoid obesity, help them out of First World poverty. A sugar tax is inherently regressive; the people hit hardest will be the lower class. Rich people generally aren’t fat. Gwyneth Paltrow can afford a dietician.
[QUOTE=Gary Kumquat]
I’d also like to add all the doctors who support such a tax.
[/QUOTE]
You should take tax policy advice from doctors with all the same seriousness you would take health advice from an economist.
I bet we don’t. I cook in fat, I season with salt, and while I almost never add sugar on the stovetop I use cooking techniques that emphasize the sugar in my ingredients (and, naturally, bread without sugar is generally awful). We’re nutritionally hardwired to crave those three things, and using them all but guarantees sales.
We must be eating very different breads. Most bread I like has no sugar or very little (as in a tablespoon or so per loaf).
Real French bread contains no sugar at all. Flour, salt, water, yeast. It’s magic. Sourdough and rye breads – no to little added sugar. Really, we see a lot of sugar when we move into buying packaged American soft breads at the supermarket.
And I LOVE sugar, but I’d rather a) eat bread that tastes like something, and b) decide to add a bit of honey or jam to my toast, rather than have sugar baked into the bread.
Actually highly obese people tend to cost UHC systems less over the years, through dying early. See also heavy smokers. There’s a good article on the economics of it here. It’s thin, fit people who tend to cost the states more, by living on well past their retirement age. That’s ignoring the social cost that they impose through being smug irritating bastards, which really should be factored in somehow.
Economists can do perfectly reasonable analysis of healthcare, such as the above or articles like this:
When you get into the macro of health, they’re better placed to spot trends and even causality than doctors are. Ain’t maths grand!
I completely agree. I include in this pit the 90% of thread responders here for, by the failure of basic reading comprehension, have totally missed your point. Regardless of valid cause, Jaime’s spontaneous diction in interviews is Trump-level terrible.
If reading comprehension difficulties bother you then you should pit yourself for not comprehending post #58.
Well, thisis an interesting development.
(Note: I have not looked at the source data, so you know. I just thought it was interesting given the subject.)
There’s pretty much nothing that your average Thai won’t add sugar to. Including fresh fruit!
Man, I had just about ceded this thread over to the hijackers figuring I’ve said my piece and clarified that I was attacking the messenger, not his message, and if people still insisted on rabidly defending his message, then so be it, because in the sage words of Jamie Oliver, “we like going off piste, right? But at least we know when we’re doing what, so,…”
But dude, when you counter-accuse a guy (who actually got my point) of poor reading comprehension because he didn’t acknowledge your straw man justification for hijacking this thread, I can’t let that slide.
So, you acknowledged that the discussion had derailed to focus on what Oliver was saying instead of how he was saying it, then claimed that’s not hijacking because despite my clarification, you insist that when I called Jamie Oliver a “shit spewing blowhard”, I was attacking his cause.
Well, let me elucidate my meaning with a more culinary metaphor: Given all the raw information available to support a cause, a good spokesperson is able to select the most applicable ingredients to form well balanced and informative arguements that addresses nuanced complexities while still being easy to digest. Jamie Oliver mashes that info into a puree, stuffs it into a mockney sack, and instead of extruding neat little swirls, he ejaculates it in sloppy eruptions that leave a condescending aftertaste. Hence, shit spewing blowhard.
Now onto the other reason why I’m back in this thread: Given how the topic of taxing big sugar seems to be a debate that people are obviously raging to participate in, perhaps someone can start a thread either in IMHO or Great Debates where the issue can be addressed directly? As it stands, I would hate for what has all the potential to be a fruitful discussion to take place in the BBQ Pit based off a straw man arguement against a position I never took.
I don’t think that Jamie Oliver is a “shit-spewing blowhard”, but I do think he’s a tedious little man.
Yeah, about that source data. Here’s the method they used:
“We restrict our sample to adults, defined as age 18 years or older, who completed two 24-h dietary recall surveys.”
They even acknowledge in their findings that:
“Given the common problem of dietary under-reporting (15), additional work may be needed to confirm that such bias has not obscured some underlying relationship between BMI and consumption of fast foods, soft drinks and candy.”
And sure, feel free to ignore the self admitted issues with the survery, because what the actually suggests (Don’t focus just on snacks, look at whole calorie intake including meals at home) is exactly why you want to focus on processed foods where people may not be aware extra sugar is being added. For example, by making sugar less attractive to manufacturers.
Thanks for looking at that source data, Gary Kumquat. I didn’t really have time to scroll back into it.
I still think we are overstating sugar and fat, and understating other variables.
That said, we definitely need to label better for sugar in the US. It really is in a ridiculous amount of food, even stuff you don’t think it’s in. Cracker comparison:
Wasa crispbread, multigrain – Whole grain rye flour, Sourdough, Oat Flakes, Whole grain wheat flour, Whole grain oat flour, Whole grain barley flour, Yeast, Barley malt extract * (Sunflower Lecithin), Salt.
Ritz crackers: Flour Enriched(Wheat Flour, Niacin Vitamin B3, Iron Reduced, Thiamine Mononitrate Vitamin B1, Riboflavin Vitamin B2, Folic Acid Vitamin B9), Soybeans Oil, Sugar, Cottonseed Oil Partially Hydrogenated, Salt, Leavening(Baking Soda, and/or, Calcium Phosphate), Corn Syrup High Fructose, Soy Lecithin(Emulsifiers), Flavors Natural, Corn Starch
Jamie is 5’ 10". That’s not too shabby.
I granted myself an error tolerance, so that one falls into the 10% allowance. Never put fixed bounds on ad hominems is my motto.
That’s midget territory to me.