How Mayor Bloomberg’s Health Department decides how far to go in its food-scare advertising. [New York Times] I’ve got much more in a new post at Cato at Liberty.
P.S. Gothamist: “in the end, it was decided that going viral was more important than going accurate.”
3 Comments
The silliness of just about every campaign about obesity seems so obvious… This week, it was blamed on using credit/debit cards to pay for food!
OK, drinking a can of soda sweetened with sugar or fructose means that over a year you have consumed enoigh to put on about 15 pounds. I suppose eating three ounces per day of peas/apples/wheat would not be about the same calorie count? Ah, but soda is bad while peas are good! (I refer to peas a lot, as I am mildly allergic to them – so much for being healthy…)
We are getting heavier than we used to be, and perhaps to excess rather than to healthier levels. It is a world-wide problem, not just the US. Somehow I doubt that Gobi Desert dwellers are slurping down a 12oz can of soda per diem.
Not to drift too far off on a tangent, but food–including those healthy vegetables–has gotten markedly sweeter in my lifetime. Parsnips, for instance, used to be quite bitter; now, they barely differ from carrots. Fresh corn has become inedibly sweet and that sweetness is a goal of the growers, based on the names of the seed varieties. Try to find a processed food that does not have corn sweeteners up in the top ten ingredients.
I’ll accept that many people like sweet foods even if I’d prefer something else. Meeting customer demand is absolutely elemental to a market economy. Legislating diet is likely to be as successful as legislating morality–war on drugs, what a success! sex confined to marriage, oh, wait!
Maybe, if we really want to protect people against their own behaviors, we should outlaw people as they seem to be the ones creating the most harm.
Your betters know better than you dumb hicks. You should be THANKING them for doing your thinking for you!