Kiwiblog

A terrifying op ed in the NY Daily News by a Marion Nestle:

Barring any late legal surprises, Mayor Bloomberg’s 16-ounce cap on sugary sodas goes into effect on Tuesday, March 12. After that, restaurants, movie theaters, sports venues and food carts will not be permitted to sell extra-large portions of sugar-packed drinks.

Stay calm. This does not signal the end of democracy in America. This is not the nanny state gone out of control.

Actually is is the precise definition of nanny state out of control.

If we want Americans to be healthy, we are going to have to take actions like this – and many more – and do so soon. It’s long past time to tax sugar soda, crack down further on what gets sold in our schools, tackle abusive marketing practices, demand a redesign of labels – and extend the soda cap, no matter how controversial it may seem. This must be the beginning, not the end, of efforts toward a healthier America.

Be scared, be very scared

I’m amazed she doesn’t just advocate making soda drinks illegal.

The soda size cap is a nudge in that direction. You will still be able to drink all the soda, and down all the sugar, that you want. The cap on soda size makes it just a tiny bit harder for you to do so.

That “tiny bit harder” is its point. If you have to order two sodas instead of one, maybe you won’t. If you have to add sugar to your coffee drink yourself, maybe you will only add one or two teaspoons instead of the 10 or more someone else put in there for you.

Oh, so she also wants it to be illegal to sell coffee with sugar in it?

So-called “nanny-state” measures – like bans on driving while drunk, smoking in public places and, now, selling absurdly large sugary drinks – help to level the playing field. Such measures are about giving everyone an equal opportunity to live a safer and healthier life.

Again, she can’t see any difference between measures about preventing harm to others (killing people while drink driving, passive smoking effects) and measures to control how people live their own lives.

Fix the price differential. A 7.5-ounce can of soda costs twice as much per ounce as a two-liter bottle, and you can’t buy just one; it comes in an 8-pack. Price determines sales. If a 16-ounce soda costs a dollar, a 32-ounce soda should cost two dollars.

They should also abolish large chocolate bars being not the same price per kg as small chocolate bars. In fact let’s just regulate all food pricing. No volume discounts for any food except broccoli.

Actions like these will evoke ferocious opposition from the soda industry, and it will spare no expense to make sure such things never happen. We would surely hear more and more howls of “nanny-state” from those who insist Bloomberg has led us to the brink of a public health police state. Polls say that many New Yorkers oppose the 16-ounce cap and would oppose measures like this, too.

But I can’t tell whether the opposition comes from genuine concern about limits on personal choice or because soda companies have spent millions of dollars to protect their interests and gin up histrionic, misinformed opposition.

That’s easy. Its is genuine concern about personal choice – something that the author seems to regard as having no weight at all.

Hat Tip: Eric Crampton

UPDATE: Great news. A Judge has invalidated the ban on large soda drinks. The NY Post reports:

“[The city] is enjoined and permanently restrained from implementing or enforcing the new regulations,” New York Supreme Court Judge Milton Tingling ruled.

The judge said Bloomberg and the Board of Health overstepped their bounds, to enforce rules that should be established by the legislative bodies.

“The rule would not only violate the separation of powers doctrine, it would eviscerate it,” Tingling wrote. “Such an evisceration has the potential to be more troubling than sugar sweetened drinks.”

“It is arbitrary and capricious because it applies to some but not all food establishments in the city, it excludes other beverages that have significantly higher concentrations of sugar sweeteners and/or calories on suspect grounds, and the loopholes inherent in the rule, including but not limited to no limitations on refills, defeat and/or serve to gut the purpose of the rule,” Tingling wrote.

The regulations are “fraught with arbitrary and capricious consequences,” the judge wrote.

A defeat for the nanny statists. But they will try again and again.

Martin Johnston at NZ Herald reports:

The liquor industry must be shut out of alcohol policy-making and implementation, to prevent manufacturers from undermining efforts to reduce the harms of alcohol, says an international grouping of public health specialists.

I’ve observed there tend to be two types of public health lobbyists. The zealots tend to regard their work as a holy crusade and the industry they specialise in as the enemy. They get focused more on attacking the industry rather than the merits of specific initiatives.

Do not engage commercial or vested interest groups, or their representatives, in discussion on the development of alcohol policy.

yes the zealots think Governments should not even talk to or engage with businesses that will be impacted by Government decisions. They are saying the only people the Government should listen to are themselves. And you know what – I guarantee you they are all being funded by taxpayers so they can lobby Governments with their own money!

The authors of the statement of concern say voluntary codes were often violated and a complete ban on alcohol promotion was preferable.

Nice to have the agenda out there. This means no happy hours, no Tui billboards, no online Wine retailers, no sports sponsorships, no advertising etc.

David Fisher reports:

Health officials worried about an obesity epidemic want fast-food advertising dropped from public property, including bus shelters, and are questioning fast-food and soft-drink sponsorship of public events.

They have also raised concerns over the lack of political power to stop fast-food restaurants being built near schools and in poor areas.

The moves by the Auckland Regional Public Health Service are a return to the healthy-eating principles which drove the national ban on pies in school tuck shops.

I’m sorry but fuck off and leave us alone. Jesus Christ I am sick of these people trying to control our lives, and what we can see or do.

No food is entirely bad, it is all about moderation.  It sounds like they want to ban chinese takeaways in some areas. Will sushi bars be allowed though? FFS.

I know the Auckland Regional Public Health Service is not under the direct control of the Minister of Health, but could he please cut their funding or something.

Auckland health board clinical director Robyn Toomath said the over-turning of the tuck shop rules marked the beginning of a struggle to change behaviour through Parliament.

“I’ve spent a lot of time trying to persuade central government to take responsibility for these things. At the moment, that’s not happening. So either we give up and say nothing can be done, or do you say, ‘Hang on, is there another level where we can influence the environment?’, and that’s the tier we’re talking about now.”

The translation is “Oh never mind the people voted for a different Government that doesn’t believe in banning pies from tuckshops, we’ll just carry on regardless and use our taxpaayer funded jobs to ignore the Government”.

“Obesity is a genetically, biologic-ally based state. If you inherit genes that make you a food seeker, and you put that person in an environment where food is being promoted and it’s 24/7 and it’s cheap and palatable, that person will respond to that stimulus.”

God forbid, free choice be recognised as a factor. Why doesn’t Dr Toomath just call for all food outlets to be closed down and replaced by government cafetarias that will serve appropriate meals only?

Dr Toomath: “I don’t have a bone to pick with the fast-food industry. They’re a business, they have shareholders … and they’re clever at what they do. The people I do have a bone to pick with are the regulators who’ve just taken their hand off and said ‘Go for it, do what you like’.”

The bone I have is with taxpayer funded lobbyists.

Jessica Tasman-Jones reports at Stuff:

Health authorities are calling on the council to stop the spread of fast food outlets in some of Auckland’s poorest suburbs in an effort to fight obesity.

According to the Auckland Regional Public Heath Service (ARPHS), there are more fast food outlets and less grocers and supermarkets in poor neighbourhoods.

The opposite is true for Auckland’s more affluent suburbs.

According to the ARPHS submission to the draft Auckland Plan, around 70 per cent of the city’s homes are within 1km of a takeaway shop.

That climbs to at least 90 per cent in wards like Otara-Papatoetoe and Mangere-Otahuhu.

ARPHS says it wants to see council restrict new fast food outlets across Auckland while seeking ways to increase food outlets with healthy food like supermarkets and grocers.

Those evil fish and chip shops, chinese takeaways, subways, hell pizza outlets etc must be stopped. We must not allow people to choose for themselves what food to eat, and suffer the consequences of bad choices.

Rebecca Todd in The Press reports:

Kiwi children are running the gauntlet of fast-food restaurants every day – with outlets five times more likely to be clustered around schools, research shows.

Who would have thought – fast food outlets are situated near customers. Shock horror. This must be stopped. Who would have thought that a shop would locate near 1,000 customers, rather than on remote rural roads.

The high number of burger joints and chip shops close to schools is thought to be a factor in the childhood-obesity epidemic sweeping the Western world.

Or a lack of exercise, plus a failure of parents to provide school lunches. I was provided with a healthy lunch by my Mum almost every day, and was skinny as a rake at school (things changed alas later on). We did have a fish and chips shop opposite the school, and maybe every few weeks would buy from it – very useful on freezing cold days.

The problem has prompted the Secondary Principals Association to call for restrictions on what dairies near schools can sell during certain hours.

Oh yes. And let us have a legion of inspectors to swoop on dairy owners and arrest them for selling some wine gums at 11 am.

Mr Day studied the clustering of fast-food and convenience stores around schools in Lower Hutt, Wellington, Christchurch, North Shore and Waitakere. In poor areas, there were 24.5 fast-food and convenience stores per 1000 pupils within 800 metres of a school, compared with 9.7 in richer areas.

Now this is interesting. You would expect there to be more stores in richer areas, because there is more money available to be spent. You would think terribly expensive fast food would do badly in poorer areas, as families would be saving money by making their lunches at home.

If this is not the case, then target the real problem – bad parenting.

Secondary Principals Association president Patrick Walsh said many principals were concerned about the prevalence of fatty-food outlets near their schools.

“They work very hard to ensure that their canteens sell healthy food, but they know the dairy down the road is prepared to sell a can of Coke and pie for $2,” he said.

More like $4 I would say. And again, the cheapest lunch is one prepared at home.

The Herald reports:

Despite the island’s clean, green image, one person in four lights up each day, compared with a national average of 17 per cent.

Those smokers are becoming increasingly marginalised: the state capital, Hobart, banned cigarettes from the city centre four months ago, and the second-biggest city, Launceston, recently decided to do the same.

Other councils are considering following suit, and there are also calls for smoking to be prohibited on the island’s beaches. But if Burnie City Council gets its way, the sale, possession and consumption of tobacco would be outlawed state-wide. Even back gardens would be smoke-free.

Smokers would be forced to go cold turkey – or perhaps emigrate to the mainland.

Forced emigration is so 1930s. I am sure the Burnie City Council could be far more efficient and just proscribe anyone caught smoking – making it legal for them to be killed by vigilantes.

Or they could do the Iranian way. Chop their hands off. Damn hard to smoke without hands.