The article seems to be shittily written in my opinion but I figure if you watch the video (about a minute) it will get the point across.
My question lies in, do you think this will benefit the health of the people moving forward, or do you fear it being weaponized to endorse or threaten companies to comply with the mention of Kennedy being tied to its future as mentioned in the end of the article
This is a good try, but no I don’t see it helping. Those of us who can afford healthier choices already do so.
My simplification is that most people fall into one of these scenarios
- just need the cheapest, possibly emphasize comfort food - doesn’t matter what’s healthy if it’s not in your budget
- proportions and quantity. This won’t help
- prepared food, whether frozen or restaurant, is a disaster.
I fall in to the second camp. I generally know what’s healthy and try to get it, but I don’t succeed with portion control or proportions. If the wrong things still dominate your plate, and your plate is too full, it doesn’t matter if some things have a healthy symbol.
I have no idea how to fix people like me, but for the first scenario I really believe we need a financial incentive. Back in the old days you ate a lot of vegetables because what came out of your garden was the cheapest food. Now thanks partly to government subsidies, corn syrup is both the cheapest food, and appeals to our evolutionary desire for sweetness. Let’s start by redirecting those subsidies to support a healthier food supply, but yeah I think we’re going to need a vice tax
I agree with most of your post except the the first 2 sentences.
We don’t know what we don’t know. You assume we already know what the healthy options are. But with 50 years of education propping up a food pyramid that was developed as a marketing tool by kellogs we don’t actually know what’s best for us.
We think grains & cereals are the best. These along with sugars have the highest caloric value. It makes absolute sense to eat these if food is scarce and difficult to get as they provide the best bang for buck.
But in modern society where food is easy to get grains and carbs aren’t good.
So reeducating everyone using the understanding science has developed oner the last 50 yrs is hugely important. We’ve been feeding ourselves based on misinformation.
So are my cheerios healthy? They not only make that claim on the box but I was raised with that knowledge all my life, as were my parents. And it is oats, and does have what used to be a decent amount of fiber. And I eat it with yogurt and fruit. Yet it’s another carb, and has much less fiber, vitamins, protein than many modern breakfast cereal.
Are my eggs healthy? Or do they raise cholesterol? Or am I likely to cook them with less healthy choices? Is my toast more carbs than cereal or less? More fiber or less? Is butter bad or good this week? What if I pair with sausage or bacon?
And it will get reversed in a month…already heard Trumpicans calling it “woke”.
Sorry, trail mix isn’t healthy.
And saturated fats can be. The whole thing against sat fats is wrong, and was proven so by 1994.
The FDA is full of shit on this.
Saturated fats are not good actually. That’s a lie funded by dairy industry.
And trail mix (with nuts and whole grains and fruit) is in fact healthy.
The overwhelming majority of Americans eat nowhere close to the bare minimum recommended amount of fiber. Guess which one has lots of fiber? And is also full of minerals not found in many other foods
Yet there is evidence to suggest dairy fat has a different effect than other animal derived fats, and there is certainly plausible deniability.
This this may be big dairy propaganda, the overriding fact is that every time we’ve been wrong with the health impact of fats, it’s been treating them as if they were one thing with one effect. Fats are a huge family of chemicals that are both necessary for life and have both positive and negative effects in quantity. It’s always more complex than we think, and studies of eating habits in humans over long periods are next to impossible.
First they were calorie dense and I was fat …. But fats are a basic building block for my entire body and help me feel full. Then they raised cholesterol, but some lowered cholesterol ….
From what I could find, the whole “saturated fats are healthy actually” and the whole “seed oils are bad” and “polyunsaturated fats are not good actually” are things originating from meat and animal products lobbying, and recently popularized by the Joe Rogan podcast when he had a self-identified carnivore on? Or something?
Basically, it seems to be yet another manufactured culture war shit by the right filled with misinformation and disinformation that goes against the science. At this point I feel like anything that gets championed by the right needs to be very heavily examined for truthfulness.
Also, expect a lot lot more of this after the Trump administration takes over. Be skeptical of people skeptical of seed oils and polyunsaturated fats. Be skeptical of people glorifying meat and butter and saturated fats.
They’ve always been behind the times. If you’re old enough you’ll remember the cholesterol scare. They apparently hadn’t learned the different types of cholesterol yet. This is from my youth.
First, they came for frogs and made them gay, and I didn’t speak up for I’m not a frog.
Then they came for my fats and made them trans.
Bad nutrition both in the comments and the FDA. :-\
Not subsidizing corn would be a good start. Why is HFCS shit cheaper than vegetables? Rhetorical question.
You know what would be way better than a symbol for “healthy” food would be requiring manufacturers to label food that fails to meet standards as “unhealthy.” Bonus points if you tax it to death so it’s no longer economically viable to sell garbage and label it “food”
Like, shit, the public perception is that I can’t afford healthy food anyway. But at least if the unhealthy food was also labelled it’d be easier to avoid
I don’t want more sin taxes. Sin taxes are anti choice. Subsidizing products that’s meet the healthy label I could agree with though
Edit: aka subsidizing the crops that are used to produce and possibly writing laws to ban the taxation on foods labeled healthy. Thus making such food in states like I live cost 10% less just by banning the state taxes on them before even getting to the subsidization on the crops. Shit, forcing us to move off corn to things like sugar cane would be great. Dense, the crop cycles are better, water usage is less and overall would be easier to manage. As in if we are going to kill ourselves with gas powered cars using 10% ethanol from corn… Why not use 10% from sugarcane which is easier to acquire and better for the population long term
It’s amazing to me how many people respond to everything with “tax it” or “ban it”. WTF happened to liberty as a national ethos?
Yes the founding fathers fought for our freedom to checks notes eat as much junk food as we can
I think sin taxes are absolutely acceptable if the government is also fully paying for the healthcare of all citizens (which we should totally be doing).
The combination of the two would make America a much healthier place overall.
The government is not the arbiter of morality, only legality, and I definitely don’t want a government of whatever the fuck the GOP has become deciding what’s affordable and what’s not.
I’m in the UK, we have the NHS, and several “sin taxes”, and they still pretty much exclusively penalise the poor (as does the NHS which has been defunded to oblivion in favour of rampant privatisation, so those who can’t afford to go private are left with the ruins), while those selling the “sinful” products (and private health insurance) continue to rake it in.
There is no taxing or legislating or regulating our way our of capitalism, which is exclusively responsible for those in power exchanging the health and well being of the population and the planet for profit, and they will never allow any tax or legislation or regulation to pass that would put them at any kind of disadvantage. The fact that some people still think they would, is frankly quite terrifying.
Denmark instituted a sugar tax and that seemed to have very positive effects (manufacturers reduced the sugar content in various products, better health outcomes). It makes sense in countries with socialised health care systems that you’d make the people that end up costing more due to behaviours pay more into it.
Sin taxes are an incredibly effective way to reflect externalities of actions… sin taxes on offensive goods with no healthy malady are dumb as fuck - but we should be making sure that consumers are seeing a more accurate cost for expensive consumption habits. In an ideal world those revenues would be earmarked for programs to counter the societal harm (i.e. buying a pack of cigarettes would come with essentially a payroll style tax that’d fund smoking cessation programs) but America is currently deeply dysfunctional.
Half of them are only cheap because of heavily subsidized corn being heavily processed into an inordinately cheap sugar substitute.
Taxes aren’t really raising prices so much as undoing the subsidies distorting the market.
Then remove the fucking subsidies! What you’re proposing is that taxpayer money in the form of subsidies goes into the pockets of wealthy agricultural corporations, and then more tax payer money in the form of sin taxes goes to the government to purchase those products, which the government turns around and gives right back to the same corporations. Sheesh! Should we tip them too while we’re at it?
So your saying the sales taxes are like tariffs, as they are being used to spread the cost to all purchasers without reguard to income making them harm lower and middle class people more, without ever having to raise taxes back to reasonable levels for the high income members of society. (3 million a year+)
Why is a Payday candy bar 1/3rd the price of a bag of peanuts with fewer peanuts than the Payday has?
Because peanuts on their own have to be visibly pleasing as peanuts or people won’t buy them. When you put them in a candy bar, you can use the crap looking ones.
Also, buying in bulk drastically decreases the price. If you had the purchasing power of Hershey, you could get your peanuts really cheap too. Join a food co-op as a starting point.
We at Payday Corporation hear your voices.
We have to give a few peanuts to the cocoa slaves, to prevent an uprising. In exchange we had to replace the peanuts with chocolate. They do not respect wealth in the dark heart of Asia.
We appreciate your lifelong commitment to Payday.
Sincerely,
The Payday Corporation
19 E. Chocolate Avenue
Hershey, Pennsylvania, US
