Exclusive: Co-author of analysis for WHO calls on government to control the food industry rather than being subservient to it
Archived version: https://archive.ph/56yF6
Let’s not. They’ll just fill them with sweeteners instead and everything will taste like ass. Personally, whenever I have the odd fizzy drink I buy the stuff with sugar and pay the extra. The rest of the crap can get into the sea.
Eh… we need to stop consuming so much sugar. I want to actually have something taste good and not because it’s Cocaine’s milder cousin.
Fair point. I get that this isn’t aimed at me. I’m not a sugar fiend. But the big food manufacturers will just replace it with artificial sweeteners, which to me at least taste awful. I used to enjoy the odd Fentimans Ginger Beer, but now it tastes like hand soap and all I can thing about is that Godfather meme… “look how they massacred my boy” 😥
Same here. I don’t consume a lot of sugar, but I hate the taste of sweetners. My personal viewpoint is that the law just made a bunch of thing I used to like inedible but didn’t change my sugar intake at all.
Overall the law just made everyone consume more sweetners and the companies making the products increase their products. All this back patting is all about profits, not public health.
Blame the companies who don’t want to do anything that impacts their growth
if you asked me what we as a species messed up in, I would immediately point out how we should never have incentivized greed and lack of morals that Capitalism encourages.
And I don’t think the government should be deciding it for us, punishing people who dare to eat or drink sugar with higher prices, nor have yet another avenue of tax to funnel into their pockets.
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That’s not what this is, this is just taking more money from poor people. People aren’t going to change their entire lifestyle and get healthier because one of the cheapest things gets more expensive. They’ll either pay more and continue to get fat or switch to something else that’s cheap but equally unhealthy and continue to get fat.
Cheap sugar isn’t the problem, expensive healthier food is. Changing things so the sugar is also expensive is fucking stupid if the aim is to make people get healthier, even ignoring the fact that “making” people do anything is shitty anyway.
As someone who used to enjoy a soft beverage from time to time, however is sensitive to the taste of chemical sweeteners, fuck off.
Let people have normal sugar. Chemicals taste like ass.
sugar is a chemical…
I mean you’re not wrong, but it’s an oddly pedantic point to make. I think it’s quite clear in that sentence that I’m referring to artificial sweeteners.
Like if I made two batches of yoghurt, one with actual strawberries, and another one with strawberry flavouring agents, would you be telling me that actually they’re both flavoured with chemicals because strawberries are themselves composed of various organic compounds?
to me “pedantic” means that a difference doesn’t matter, and in this case I think it matters a lot.
“chemical” / “non chemical” (and “natural” / “artificial”) are marketing terms with no agreed-upon meaning and I think the world would be better if we stopped using them - because they overshadow terms which have clearer meanings like “safe” and “healthy”.
in your strawberry example I’d say the useful metrics are the usual nutrient contents, and if any of the ingredients are known to cause health problems. “% strawberries” would be an objective metric that personally seems kinda meaningless to me personally but at least wouldn’t be misleading.
NO!
Everything always has to make things worse for people, why do no experts ever urge anything but screwing over the poor?
What about subsidies on healthier options? What about reworking rules to help create pathways for low cost healthy snacks and sustaining foods? How about a program that enables people to have affordable or free access to locally grown produce? Fund development of platforms and technologies to improve awareness and access to healthy food?
Nope. The affluent experts decide to push something that won’t affect them but will make life harder for everyone already struggling.
