Kiwiblog

Martin Johnston at NZ Herald reports:

Obesity experts in New Zealand are dismayed at the legal clamp slapped on New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s law to ban super-sized sugary soft drinks in restaurants.

They should have a large soda to drown their sorrows.

His law would have limited cups of sugary soft drinks sold at restaurants, cinemas and other food service establishments to 453ml.

That is approaching close to two standard measuring cups (500ml) and is well short of the large and super-sized sugar drinks sold in New Zealand fast-food shops.

McDonald’s “large” soft drinks contain 651ml and the biggest offering at Wendy’s is around 1200ml, although Wendy’s says it doesn’t sell many of these mega-drinks.

How evil. They must be banned, along with large easter eggs.

Fight the Obesity Epidemic spokeswoman Dr Robyn Toomath said it was a great shame the mayor’s bid to help halt the growth of New Yorkers’ waistlines had been thwarted.

Yes it is a great shame that human beings have been allowed to choose for themselves what size drink they want. We must protect them from themselves.

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.

Joe Bennett writes in the Dom Post:

Boffins at the University of Otago have tested the blood of 3000 randomly chosen people over the age of 15.

Seven per cent of them had diabetes. That’s over 200 people. A further 18 per cent had early signs of diabetes. That’s over 500 people. Together, they’re more than a quarter of the people tested. That’s an epidemic.

Meanwhile, across the ocean at the University of California, more boffins have been bent over the test tubes and the stats. As you’d expect, their study dwarfed the local one.

They analysed the incidence of diabetes in 175 countries. Effectively that means everywhere. And they found that if the amount of sugar in a national food supply goes up, so does the incidence of diabetes. …

As for education, every youth in the country has been bombarded with dietary advice from here to my Aunt Fanny. They’ve been told about five-plus-a-day, the evils of burgers, the wonder of veges, the joys of exercise and the way to radiant health. The result: the chubbiest generation in the history of our species.

So, if people cannot be taught to do themselves good, they will have to be forced. We need to set a date by which New Zealand shall be sugar-free: 2025 feels about right. Then we need to work towards it.

Bennett is being satirical, but I suspect there lobby groups will soon be pushing for this!

Money’s always a good place to start. There needs to be a tax on sugar, a tax that rises automatically and drastically at the start of every year. That’ll get them yelping.

Next comes plain packaging. We all know the sophistication of the marketing buggers, how they hook kids on to brands by association. Well, brands will be dead.

In the fizzy-drinks business, for example, there’ll be no more Pepsi or Coke or Fanta or Mountain Bloody Dew, with their pretty colours and their brand insignia. No, they’ll all just come in plain metal tubes labelled “Flavoured Sugar-laden Poison”.

Schools will become sugar-free zones. In the period before abolition, lollies will be hidden from view in dairies and sold only to over-18s. Anyone supplying sugar to minors will be liable to a fine or a term of imprisonment.

Parents eating icecream in front of their kids won’t just get a finger-wagging. They’ll have their kids taken into care. And it will all be enforced by us, the sugar cops.

Joe shouldn’t write the Green Party manifesto for them!

The New York Post reports:

Nanny Bloomberg unleashes his ban on large sodas on March 12 — and there are some nasty surprises lurking for hardworking families.

Say goodbye to that 2-liter bottle of Coke with your pizza delivery, pitchers of soft drinks at your kid’s birthday party and some bottle-service mixers at your favorite nightclub.

They’d violate Mayor Bloomberg’s new rules, which prohibit eateries from serving or selling sugary drinks in containers larger than 16 ounces.

Absolute fucking madness.

This is what some taxpayer funded lobby groups push for in New Zealand. It isn’t the thin end of the wedge – it is the thick end.

Typically, a pizzeria charges $3 for a 2-liter bottle of Coke. But under the ban, customers would have to buy six 12-ounce cans at a total cost of $7.50 to get an equivalent amount of soda.

Imagine how many cans you will need to drink 10 litres a day!

The Herald reported:

Obese most likely to die early but those classed as overweight have better survival rate.

For older people, body weight could be a positive sign of being well-nourished. Photo / Getty Images

Overweight people have surprisingly beaten out your normal Joe Average on the mortality scale, a statistical survey of medical studies has shown – despite a well-established link between weight and sickness.

When talking of health, “death is a rather crude tool”, said Auckland District Health Board clinical director Robyn Toomath, who is sceptical of the paper.

Death may be a crude tool, but it is a pretty important one. It is one that public health advocates use all the time in campaigns about the dangers of smoking for example (which I agree with them on).

The best way to reduce public health costs for the country was still to help people eat healthy and stay slim, by restricting the marketing and value of junk foods or promoting nutritious foods, she said.

No, the best way for people to stay slim is for them to eat less and exercise more. Nanny state policies to “restrict” the marketing of certain foods should be resisted at every stage.

Marika Hill at Stuff reports:

University of Auckland associate professor Cliona Ni Mhurchu said consumers were often left baffled by food labelling and struggled to make informed health choices.

Relying on people to exercise self control was not working, she added.

“We’ve failed because our focus is on the individual to make healthy choices.”

Yeah if people make bad choices, we must do something about it. Or not.

She called for a large-scale trial of either traffic lights or a star-rating food system, which would rate food based on health factors.

Star-rating labels in parts of the United State saw a significant increase in people buying healthy food, she said.

As a general rule transparency is a good thing. When I purchase food now, I religiously read the nutritional information box.

However things are not always simple. For example alcohol does not have these boxes. The reason, as I understand it, is because on most of the measures listed such as fats it comes up really well, so people may think alcohol is healthier than it really is.

There may be a halfway measure where the calorie count only is included on alcohol. I noticed in Australia that shops serving  fresh food tend to include the calorie count with the food. Not sure if this is required or voluntary, but I for one found it useful being able to compare the calorie counts of say different pastas as the airport.

The controversial fat-tax was also debated at the obesity conference.

Professor Wayne Cutfield, director of the Liggins Institute in Auckland, said the world’s first fat and sugar tax failed to make its mark in Denmark.

In January, the Danish Government introduced higher taxes on beer, wine, chocolate, candy, sodas and cream.

However, the Government was now reviewing the fat-tax following an outcry over manufacturing job losses and shoppers buying bad food across the country’s borders.

I’m not surprised. Just as banning school tuckshops from selling certain foods just drove kids across the street. Them the health police want to ban certain foods from 500 metres of a school. Eventually they’ll propose a Government set menu for the entire country.

Food and Grocery Council chief executive Katherine Rich said the obesity epidemic was a complex issue that could not be solved by over-simplified food labels or slapping a tax on unhealthy food.

“There has to be common sense about these issues.

“You can’t pass laws to make people eat healthy.”

And unhealthy food often costs more than healthy food. It is about education and responsible parenting and self-control.

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.

Travelmole reports:

A former Qantas group chief economist says people who weigh more should pay more to fly on planes.

Writing for Business Day in Fairfax newspapers, Tony Webber, now managing director of Webber Quantitative Consulting and Associate Professor at the University of Sydney Business School, claims fuel burnt by planes depends on many things “but the most important is the weight of the aircraft. The more a plane weighs, the more fuel it must burn”.

Webber said if passengers on the aircraft weigh more, the aircraft consumes more fuel and the airline’s costs go up.

In turn, the airline would need to lift airfares to recover the additional costs. And when they did, the burden of the higher fees should not be lumbered “on those who are shedding a few kilos or keeping their weight stable”.

Webber said airline fuel costs have increased since 2000 not just because of higher oil and jet fuel prices…”but also because the average adult passenger is carrying a bit more heft”.

Between 1926 and 2008, the average weight of an Aussie female adult increased from 59 kilograms to 71 kilos and the average weight of an Aussie male adult increased from 72 to 85 kilos, according to Webber.

I agree. If you pay more for extra weight in your baggage, you should pay more for extra weight on your person. It will also provide a good extra incentive to lose weight.

There would be some practicalities, but if you just get people to select a weight group upon booking most would do so honestly. I don’t think you need to weigh people upon check in.

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.

Liberty Scott notes this release from Ruth Dyson:

“The Government apparently thinks people will simply be able to change their diet and exercise without any assistance or form of nutrition education”

He comments:

I’m astonished. Changing your diet is impossible without the government. The carefully hidden knowledge that eating mostly vegetables, fruit, lean meat, fish and cereals, and avoiding high fat and high sugar foods helps you lose weight is something that almost nobody knows surely. In addition, without the government how COULD people go to the gym, or go for a walk or swim?

Indeed. It is all the Government’s fault.

Does anything more clearly show the patronising and condescending attitude the Labour Party, and indeed many statists have for the general public than that? The idea that without the government, people can’t look after themselves, don’t know any better and wont change.

Ms. Dyson might wonder if one of the reasons Labour became far less popular is that people are sick of being treated as imbeciles, and sick of being forced to pay for bureaucrats to hand hold people.

I am sure it was one of the reasons.

Paul Walker blogs another example of unintended consequences:

Results suggest that [child care] subsidy receipt is associated with increases in BMI and a greater likelihood of being overweight and obese.

I await the Obesity Action Coalition to call for reduced child care subsidies to fight obesity!

The Herald on Sunday quotes Professor John Birkbeck, an expert in human nutrition who has caused outrage:

The 76-year-old, who moved into semi-retirement this week after 50 years in his field, rejected the notion that some people will get fat regardless of their efforts to keep weight down.

While acknowledging that some may have a genetic propensity to obesity, he said: “You can’t get over-fat without eating more calories than you expend.

He is right, even though some of his examples are over the top:

Birkbeck caused further outrage by saying methods used to reduce obesity rates had failed.

“In a dictatorship, you say ‘everybody that comes back in a year’s time with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 30 will be shot’ – and you’ll find hardly anyone has a BMI over 30.

“But you can’t do that in society, so what we have to do is find a way to cajole and coerce. And I don’t think they’ve done enough of that.”

But what interested me so much, wasn’t Birkbeck’s views, but that of the taxpayer funded Obesity Action Coalition:

Obesity Action Coalition director Leigh Sturgiss said the condition should be blamed on environment rather than the individual.

“While there is some aspect of people making choices for themselves, we do live in an environment that doesn’t promote healthy eating,” she said.

Thank God we have stopped taxpayer funding to this group. As someone overweight myself, I find it outrageous to have Leigh Sturgess saying it is society’s fault – rather than my own. Bullshit – it is nothing to do with society or the environment – and everything to do with personal choices.

Danyl cracks up and talks to himself:

Left Wing Danyl: Corporations that sell high-fat and high sugar products are getting rich by selling people slow acting poisons. And they’re deliberately marketing these toxic food substitutes at children! Shouldn’t we at least pass laws to protect minors from these products? After all, we don’t let them buy cigerettes or alcohol.

Libertarian Danyl: Well that’s your answer to everything isn’t it? Just pass another law, take away a little bit more of our freedom, expand the power of the state. Charge people more taxes so you can furthur limit their choices. People should be free to eat whatever kind of food they want. We have enough problems with the nanny state in this country without politicians telling us what we can and can’t eat for dinner.

Economist Danyl: Hang on a minute there – I agree that people should be allowed to choose what foods to eat – but you have to admit that products like soft drinks and potato chips have massive negative externalities. They contribute to chronic illness like diabetes and heart disease and those have a cost to the public health system that other people end up paying for through their taxes.

Libertarian Danyl: Tax is theft!

Left Wing Danyl: Tax is the price you pay for living in a civilised society.

Libertarian Danyl: Civilised? Ha! To quote Ron Paul . . .

Moderate Danyl: Oh shut up, idiot. So Economist Danyl, are you saying there should be an excise on junk food?

Economist Danyl: Why not? That’s what we do with other products that have negative externalities, like tobacco and alcohol.

Left Wing Danyl: The problem there is that obesity is closely correlated with poverty. A tax on junk food would be a highly regressive tax.

Economist Danyl: Then poor people will act like rational maximisers and respond to the changing conditions of the market by switching to cheaper, healthier options.

Sarcastic Danyl: Right, the way they have with tobacco?

A really good post.

Whenever you think regulation has gone mad in New Zealand, it is reassuring Canada is usually worse.

The Canadian Supreme Court has rejected an appeal against a ruling that airlines must provide extra seats free of charge to morbidly obese flyers.

Canadian airlines should be able to charge what they want. Hell if an airline wanted to charge passengers based on their weight, I would support that. You pay for luggage over a certain weight, so why not people?

But this isn’t even that. This is telling airlines that if a passenger is so obese that they can’t possibly fit in one seat, then they must get that second seat for free.

How idiotic.

This is what you get when you take a good principle such as non discrimination, and apply it to extreme ends.

Interestingly in NZ, Air NZ has started charging for empty seats. How? If there are empty seats on a flight, then you can ask to be next to one for $75 on a flight to the US. Now that’s a smart idea. In Canada no doubt it would be illegal.

A column from John Roughan I can only agree with:

One of the blessings of a change of government is that it changes the prevailing ethic. Should National win this year we might not see another headline like this week’s: “Rugby cards promo breaks anti-fat rules”. …

Freedom in fact was the default principle after 1984; if it was to be compromised the reason had to be watertight.

No regulator would have dared argue, as the Health Ministry has, that a child might buy 50 packets of chips and consume more than a kilogram of fat to get a complete collection of All Black cards.

Even five years ago somebody would have pointed out that children don’t collect things alone. They trade. Those who don’t want a collectable item give it to one who does, usually for something in return. …

The darkest hour in a phase of unbalanced ethics comes just before the dawn. Right now the promoters of health above all else seem blithely unaware that a change of government will probably soon restore some weight for individual rights and personal responsibility.

When John Key declared the other day that National would tackle obesity mainly with sport and recreation programmes to get children more active, he was quickly rubbished on National Radio by a woman who wants to ban unhealthy advertisements.

What’s the point, she said, of her putting out healthy eating messages when children saw contradictory enticements on television.

Food nazis is not a term I want to use but there is something very chilling in the attitude that the expression of conflicting interests is not permissible.

Helen Clark, who tackled tobacco advertising when Health Minister in the late 1980s, has resisted most of the excesses suggested during her premiership but at times it has seemed a close call.

Deliberately or not, she brought a wowser culture to power which prefers to address problems like obesity and binge drinking by restrictions on liberties that her outlook doesn’t value as high as health and safety.

A change of government will not put an end to public health campaigns and nor should it. We are better off for being aware of the fat in fast food, for ridicule of uncivilised drinking and the expulsion of smokers from confined places.

But it is time to for some balance. Credit us with the intelligence to make choices, especially children, before we create a community of fools.

It is about balance, and most of all not punishing all New Zealanders for the weaknesses of a few.

The kids at Wellington High School are showing some good sense in responding to their first brush with Nanny State and the tuck shop. Effects have been:

• The school’s cafe operator has thrown in the towel, saying she could not turn a profit under the Education Ministry’s new healthy eating regime
• a group fundraising for a Japanese trip has seized on the opportunity by setting up a daily sausage sizzle and baking stall
• The Dominion Post watched yesterday as a stream of pupils headed to the nearby Wallace St shop for mince pies, chippies and fizzy drinks.

One also has to praise the principal’s attitude:

Principal Prue Kelly was relaxed about the week-long sausage sizzle, saying she hoped pupils would support the fundraising effort. Asked if the new culinary option met the ministry’s healthy eating guidelines, she said: “Who knows? It’s how we’re coping with the problem today.

“I think they’re using brown bread instead of white.

“They look like pretty good sausages to me. In fact I might get one.”

Good on her.

The Government is as usual missing the point. The problem isn’t kids having a sausage occasionally, but if they are having that for lunch everyday. But rather than concentrate on having a varied diet, instead they are purging tuck shops of any food they do not approve of. It will get worse if the Public Health Bill is passed into law.

As far as I can tell the Government is spending tens of millions of dollars through eight different campaigns to encourage kids to play more sport.

National is saying we’ll take that money and spend it directly on funding and facilities for kid’s sports.

I know which one appeals more to me.

A useful comparison:

One big cost for example is the Sparc website. This year Sparc will spend $5.5 million on its website.  And between 2006 and 2010, Sparc will spend $11.5 million on its website.  That’s enough to give almost $6,000 worth of sporting equipment to every primary school in New Zealand.  Or to buy a decent cricket set for every family in Waitakere City.

That is a hell of a lot of money for a website!

The HoS has come out in support of the Public Health Bill, and says people should not refer to it as nanny state.

I disagree.

Health authorities already have widespread powers – including the power to detain people and require them to take medication – to contain the spread of communicable disease. The cheap argument against extending it to non-communicable disease is that it is not the business of the state to protect people from themselves.

I despair at such an attitude. An inability to see a significance difference between a communicable disease and something which isn’t even a disease at all. Communicable disease management requires regulation and management because it can travel from person to person. That is massively different to issues such as obesity which is caused as much by lack of exercise as by food.

The Government says relax, no codes will be binding – well until three years are up. After that you may have a legion of inspectors going from dairy to dairy. Oh sorry Madam,  you are within 500 metres of a school so you can’t sell that. Sorry Sir, but you need to hide those items and put your healthier items up the front.

You think it won’t happen? Look at the explosion in health bureaucrats in the last few years?

Rather than try to regulate unhealthy foods out of existence, why not have an extra hours PE every day at school, or have DHBs provide free or subsidised gym memberships.  Because if they really think making shop keepers move certain foods to the back of the store will have any effect, they are dreaming.

Bill Ralston writes on the same issue:

The Public Health Bill is the latest example. … considering giving the Government power to control where and how supermarkets display unhealthy food.

It is a small clause in the bill and the Greens’ healthy food campaigner Sue Kedgley is adamant it would be unlikely to be used. Much.

In my experience, however, if you give Governments an inch they tend to take a mile.

Absolutely, and all our experience of Government backs this up.

People know the ugly truth of what unhealthy foods can do but some choose to gobble that Moro bar anyway. They have made a reasonably informed choice. It may not be the right choice or one that Matron Kedgley would advocate, but it is their choice.

The Government can try to control the sale of foods it dislikes but people will go on eating it. All this bill will do is create still more bureaucrats to administer it.

Yep, watch for a massive increase in public health officials.