Posted on 03/09/2017 10:56:34 AM PST by nickcarraway
Sugar is the new tobacco. It may take a dozen years for that to sink in the way nicotine and cancer did but the outcome will be sugar and diabetes. A steady drumbeat of news stories now is focusing attention on sugar’s public cost.
Santa Fe Mayor Javier Gonzales’s proposal to put a 2-cent tax on sugary sodas is the latest event. It would be a wholesale tax so the buyer would not see it at the counter and because the mayor proposes the tax to fund pre-school education, it has a worthy cause. But if he really wanted a compelling health reason he could say: “sugar slowly kills”
It’s taken more than half a century, with a nation now suffering from an epidemic of diabetes, for Americans to wake up. That’s because the sugar industry cover up was right out of the tobacco playbook. Rather than allow sugar’s harm, it shifted the blame to fat, just as the tobacco industry said there was no compelling evidence for nicotine causing lung cancer, when they had the exact proof in their labs.
On Sept. 12, 2016, the publication JAMA Internal Medicine revealed that in 1967, two Harvard nutritionists published research in the New England Journal of Medicine that exonerated sugar as a cause of heart disease and identified fat as the culprit. Ever since, Americans have been fat phobic. The Harvard scientists, now dead, collected payments equivalent of $50,000 today from a sugar industry front. Government health officials and the medical industry went on to denounce fat and leave sugar untouched.
Now public disclosure on the role of sugar as a serious health hazard is coming to the public arena. In The Case Against Sugar, author Gary Taubes argues that if sugar had caused an infectious rather than degenerate disease, meaning diabetes, it would have triggered a medical emergency. But the power of the sugar industry deflected intense criticism. In The Big Fat Surprise, investigative food reporter Nina Teicholz offers a blow-by-blow account about how from the 1960s on, government nutritionists set up a recommended diet regime that urged low-fat consumption but exonerated sugar — even though she argues there was no evidence that fat cased harm anywhere like that of sugar.
The sugar industry’s response to mounting attacks? The Big Smear. After New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg banned large sugar drinks, the industry named him Mr. Slurpee. The night he endorsed Hillary Clinton at the Democratic Convention, a Fox News commentator called the endorsement a Mr. Slurpee speech. When a New York State court overturned Bloomberg’s prohibition, the sugar industry celebrated.
With a soda tax, Santa Fe would join other progressive cities, including Berkeley and Albany Calif., Philadelphia, San Francisco, Oakland, Boulder, Colo., and Cook County, Ill. It’s a modest start but a movement that surely will advance because the damage from excess sugar is so overwhelming. The sugar craving, and sugar does instill a craving, starts with fat kids who grow into obese kids and young adults. In New Mexico, 34 percent of kids are overweight or obese and the rate is half or more for American Indian youths. Some 10 percent of all New Mexicans have diabetes, slightly above the national average but for Native Americans in the state it is 18 percent with some 12 percent of Hispanics are afflicted. The poor and minorities pay the highest price.
Nationwide, one third of Americans are obese. About 80 percent of those get Type 2 Diabetes, which is the diabetes self-inflicted by a bad diet. The other surprise is Type 2’s staggering cost: Taxpayers spend much more on diabetes than cancer, $190 billion annually to $157 billion, and just under the $200 billion cost of heart disease. Add in treating pre-diabetics, and the total tab is a staggering $322 billion. Lung cancer by contrast costs $13 billion annually. It’s a terrible affliction for smokers but a pittance compared to the diseases associated with sugar. The City Council is considering setting a public hearing on a special election for a sugary tax on March 8.
Arguments for the tax will be about helping fund pre-school education. Wonderful. But if you really want to make a case, tell ‘em you’re sick of sugar poisoning our kids.
If someone drinks a 16 ounce soda upwind from me, am I in danger of exposure to second hand sugar? (What if they fart?)
I’m particularly chagrined at second hand sugar.
Sugar is the new tobacco.
Just as I smoke a cigar every six months or so, I can have a donut or pie every six months or so. And, truth be told, it’s actually WORSE than cigarettes.
The standard answer to any problem is raise the taxes.
If they would arrest the bad guys and make the streets safe again the kids could play outside and burn off some calories.
Oh, no! We used the same joke!
As long as they leave bacon alone, I’m good.
Taxing sugar is borderline but banning it is out of the question. It’s not a drug, and doesn’t need to be controlled. It’s up to individuals to stay healthy, not the government.
...no compelling evidence for nicotine causing lung cancer, when they had the exact proof in their labs.
Seriously.
Sugar and homogenized milk can’t be good for your pancreas
If they fart and you light it on fire, you can have cotton candy ...
How many soft drinks today use real sugar.
The true outcome would be HFCS and diabetes.
Plus, we are healthier — while everyone is sick with the flu, neither of us have caught it this year (by this time, we would have been sick at least twice, each plus my wife's bout with pneumonia). Other health issues have improved for me too. MANY! Wonder how that might affect our chances with cancer if, God forbid, we had it?
This also applies to processed carbs.
The evidence is pretty conclusive for us.
People can make fun of the research all they want but sugar is a killer
I always wondered how that worked.
As most FReepers, but few Americans in general, know, GovMedCare is one of the main goals of leftists/authoritarians because they want control of our lives.
We can't allow anyone to NOT have access to health care, so you have to have government programs to ensure that they do. Because “free” health care breaks the bank, you have to have accountability (i.e., individual accountability for poor lifestyle choices). Therefore, people who smoke, don't exercise, eat lots of Big Macs, or eat lots of sugary foods will have to be penalized because their treatment “costs the government” more to cover them. And because those penalties will not stop all the great unwashed from living their lives as they please, health care will have to be rationed. Perhaps if you're found to be fat, eat doughnuts, smoke, don't exercise, and drink Mountain Dew by the two liter bottle, you'll be found to be expendable for the “public good.”
/Rant off.
(Hope I haven't hijacked your thread, Nick. I couldn't help myself. Blame it on the Krispy Kreme.)
If sugar is so bad, why does he want the state to profit from it? The state doesn’t profit from gun running, prostitution, selling cocaine, etc. The state of California makes more money off tobacco than any tobacco company.
Taxing sugar is borderline but banning it is out of the question. It’s not a drug, and doesn’t need to be controlled. It’s up to individuals to stay healthy, not the government.
But this actually folds into the Obamacare debate. I mean, if we’re all paying collectively for our health care insurance, then it stands to reason that we should, eventually, be able to tell people how to live their lives since, after all, their decisions cost all of us, right?
Dang, this is annoying.
If sugar is so bad, why does he want the state to profit from it?
The health threat is real, but processed foods/sugars shouldn’t be regulated.
The greedy bureaucrats are far behind the information curve. Hell, they’re likely the suppressors of the facts.
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