Diane Glass, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Diane Glass, a left-leaning columnist, writes the commentary this week and Shaunti Feldhahn, a right-leaning columnist, responds.
Commentary from Diane:
Warning: Reading this column may make you smarter.
Consider Darwin’s natural law before passing man-made ones: Weeding out the weak makes us that much stronger. Although, regrettably, it would rob us of the random news story about the Billy Bobs of this world who hold onto the bottom of a car in search of a mysteroius rattle while their friend drives it down the road.
Sure, requiring warning labels on sugar water may influence someone to consume less. But if warning labels worked, we wouldn’t have smokers.
A recent petition to the FDA demands soft drink companies shoulder responsibility for the all-out obesity epidemic rampant across the U.S. If they don’t comply lawsuits will surely follow. But before we go off on a litigious wingding, consider the obvious: the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings. That is, unless we want to enforce labels on all products – from fruit consumption to hair dryer use. Do we really need a warning to not swallow a lemon whole?
This doesn’t mean soda companies shouldn’t comply with these silly demands. Not because they’d be doing some good but because we live in a litigious society, always ready to place blame on somebody else. Soft drink companies should do everything legally possible to protect themselves from idiots who can’t take responsibility for their poor decisions.
I don’t have to be a scientist to know a carbonated, sugar-rich beverage with no vitamin content is bad for my health. And I’m smart enough to know obesity isn’t caused by drinking a Coke or Pepsi. Sustaining a healthy weight means exercising and portion control; it means resisting the temptation of ‘super-sizing’ my happy meal; and, it means being skeptical about processed food products like soft drink’s close kin: the diet soda.
Diet sodas don’t cause obesity but a recent controversial study in lab rats suggests diet sodas containing aspartame are tied to cancer. So again: can we really put a label on common sense? Sugar water is bad for you, even when you use fake sugar. And eating a lemon whole will make you choke.
But before I go — and to avoid any lawsuits — here’s another warning: Shaunti may argue against me.
Shaunti's rebuttal
Yes, one reason for the obesity epidemic is those who choose to ignore the unwelcome reality that Super-Sizing value meals will Super-Size waistlines. But there is another reason: lack of information. You must have good information to use “common sense” about it, and once I researched this issue I realized just how much information the average person is lacking.
Several recent peer-reviewed studies have claimed that increased consumption of sugary soft drinks isn’t just one reason for the obesity epidemic; it’s the main reason. And here’s where the average person lacks information: the problem is that U.S. soft drinks don’t use regular table sugar. They use high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which the body processes totally differently. Forgive the technical jargon, but consider this clip from a 2004 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition article: “The digestion, absorption, and metabolism of fructose differ from those of glucose….unlike glucose, fructose does not stimulate insulin secretion or enhance leptin production.”
Translation: high fructose corn syrup is much worse than other sugars because it doesn’t spur our bodies to process its calories properly or to generate any sense that our appetite has been sated. As a result, high fructose corn syrup contributes far more to making us fat than “normal” sugar.
Because most people simply don’t know how unusually fattening HFCS soft drinks are, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is trying to get warning labels that explain this. They also want soda vending machines banned from schools, noting that most teens get 15 percent of their total calories from soft drinks! And that means that both obesity and other elements of still-developing bone and body health are at stake.
The CSPI says that education is reducing soda consumption slightly. But when I asked CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson, if common sense and market forces should just be allowed to work on their own, even this conservative had to agree with his common sense answer: “At a time of an obesity epidemic, we shouldn’t wait 25 years to see if a laissez-faire approach will work. Especially since the soft-drink industry spends about $600 million in advertising to ensure that [it doesn’t].”
Article
Linear Mode
