Posts by Russell Brown
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Danielle,
I’m also advocating for less emotive doomsaying and more sensible, encouraging, logical things that might actually work.
Jonathan Coleman got official advice on the Mexican soda tax late last year – the gist of which was "too soon to tell".
But I don't think it's doomsaying to perceive a significant public heath problem developing. We don't have the problem the US is facing (40% of people likely to develop Type 2 diabetes!), nor the quantity of hidden sugar in our diets, but child obesity is increasing significantly here, mostly as a consequence of excess calories, and the implications of that are bad.
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Christ. An Australian consumer group has reported that some toddler snacks (including those "certified organic") are composed of as much as 60% sugar.
60%!!
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My young-adult ASD son still has a very limited diet, and a staple of that diet is Nutrigrain. While Nutrigrain does contain useful nutrients he might not get elsewhere, it does my head in how much sugar it contains. But it contains less than it used to, since the manufacturer cut the sugar content a bit last year so it could display a four-star “health rating”.
The “health rating” is ropey in itself, but Kellogg’s move did underline the fact that the food and drink companies actually control the amount of sugar in their products. And they do: the sugar content of popular fizzy drinks varies from country to country – sometimes very sharply. (A single can of Coke still contains about four times as much sugar as a serving of Nutrigrain, btw.)
So if trying to influence consumer choices with a sugar tax isn’t acceptable, are there ways to directly influence manufacturers? Or apply a tax in a way that doesn’t take money out of people’s pockets? Or are there environments where it’s acceptable for the state to act directly? (We lost one of those when National cynically campaigned on returning junk food to school tuck shops.)
I don’t think it’s tenable to deny the research. Yes, sugar is a nutrient. But carbon is a condition of life on earth – and too much of that in the atmosphere could make earth uninhabitable. It’s about an excess our bodies are not equipped to deal with.
The people we should care most about are children who have very high-sugar diets before they even get to make that choice. The consequences of childhood obesity are really, really awful. It’s a sentence to a blighted, impaired life. Child obesity is five times higher in the most deprived areas in New Zealand than in the least deprived. And it’s getting worse.
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Speaker: Talking past each other:…, in reply to Don Christie,
Finally, my understanding of the “sugar” problem is that it is more of a “sugar + salt” problem and our fizzy drink and fast food providers have been cynically upping the amounts of both, knowing full well they are killing us, to make us want to eat and drink more of their produce. Just like the tobacco companies.
I'll post something longer later (been running around all day) but I think this is true, and appalling. There's a reason 40% of Americans will develop Type 2 diabetes in their lifetimes. (The evidence on salt doesn't seem as strong.)
Meantime, I'd ask everyone to be wary of fulfilling the scenario outlined in the original post :-)
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Hard News: A weekend in a mad, lovely place, in reply to simon g,
ust people out doing a variety of things, many of them free or cheap, a simple do-it-yourself festival.
Yes! People sorted themselves out, which was nice.
It was packed, and “diversity” wasn’t just a corporate slogan, it was real.
I was in a Twitter discussion about the level of diversity, and it's true the area itself is pretty white. But there was a real range of people there.
Unlike Sky City, which promotes fun but sucks it away, this was the central Auckland I want to live in.
And Sky City has been allowed to literally bolt down tables and chairs in the public roadway, while K Road hospo has had major obstacles to even using the footpath. I really hope the council is getting the message that it needs to work with the little people.
Well done to everyone who made it happen. More please.
Preach that!
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Another one.
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Hard News: A weekend in a mad, lovely place, in reply to nzlemming,
And the last shot with the greyhound in it near broke my heart. It’s the spitting image of my hound who died (of old age) last year. Wonderful, wonderful pets.
Aw.
I'd heard this about greyhounds, and a few weeks ago I went to a barbecue where there were a couple of pet greyhounds and it was all true. They were a lovely presence.
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Mo’ wheelie action.
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Hard News: The place where things happen…, in reply to Ross Bell,
I’m now claiming that this was the best thing to come out of last week’s UN drug summit:
It felt that way, didn't it? Just the fact that there had been quite a lot of bullshit and then this man stood up and spoke clearly, passionately and directly.
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Speaker: Confessions of an Uber driver, in reply to BenWilson,
Got your eye in spotting P endorsements yet?
It was very prominently displayed :-)
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