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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30232 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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You can't ban "unhealthy food" because in the case of obesity, the dose makes the poison.

This just seems flatly untrue. Surely any quantity of e.g. fizzy drinks is net-negative for nutritional content.

Certainly not. It's not clear what "net-negative for nutritional content" would mean.

I mean that a fizzy drink is like tobacco or cocaine, in that there is no amount of it which is actually net-beneficial for the human body. It's not "the dose makes the poison": no quantity of it is good for you.

Ah, in that case it is not true. Nutritionally, assuming you mean sodas rather than champagne or something, a fizzy drink is basically just simple carbohydrates. They also usually contain salt which is not strictly speaking a nutrient. There's nothing inherently wrong with these things.

I eat literal packets of gelatinized sugar while running long distances. I would be irritated if I wasn't allowed to do so because other people lack self-control.

Not that this solves the many problems of bans, but I (vague guess) don't think people would get fat off of sugar packets, for the same reason they don't just pour sugar into water and drink the sugar-water.

But they do do this in the form of soft drinks. Watch sweet tea being made some time and you will see the unlikely volume of sugar required. Then there's lemonade, whatever Kool Aid exists now, and of course most all fruit juices. There are other flavors besides sugar, of course, but basically yes you have sugar water being consumed with regularity by great numbers of people who then continue to be fat. Does no one else remember the con where people warned off of fat by the FDA would count the fat grams and ignore the massive sugar content (see SnackWells) and remain as unhealthy as ever?

While I don't think the FDA is as wild and woolly as some claim it is, it has enough problems that I would be very hesitant to blindly accept a sudden mandate with penalties if I didn't adhere to it. And if I would be hesitant, you can bet many of my friends actually living in the US would go berserk and have their guns out if someone threatened to take their fat kids to Child Protective Services because of too many breakfast burritos or whatever.

Politico article rather critical of the FDA

Not that this solves the many problems of bans, but I (vague guess) don't think people would get fat off of sugar packets, for the same reason they don't just pour sugar into water and drink the sugar-water.

They do, they just claim it's iced tea.

lol, thats's sort of what I meant - people seem to only like the sugar/fat/carbs in combination with other flavors. But maybe they'd just combine the raw materials and flavors themselves when they got hungry

Right; you wouldn't be banning unsweetened tea (since there's no reasonable way to claim that's unhealthy), so unless you banned the sugar itself people would still add enough sugar to the unsweetened tea to make the spoon stand up.

I don't think so? Certainly seltzers or non-nutritive sweetened sodas are basically neutral.

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