The Government Should Treat Fast Food Like Cigarettes

Politics & News
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Late to the thread so this has probably already been discussed, but very poor choice of wording because…Define fast food? If you’re talking about cheap meals it seems like this would mostly be a burden on poor people

I suppose you could slap an extra tax on sodas, sweet teas, caramel lattes, and other sugary drinks in an effort to get people to be more healthy. Personally, I don’t ingest any of that crap nor do I eat at fast food chains, but I don’t think poor people should be punished if they want a cheap burger or chicken sandwich when in a hurry

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There are some other dimensions of the cigarette treatment, e.g., restrictions on advertising and promotion. Very specific rules for displaying the brand mark, sponsoring events, free samples, warning statements, etc. Are we for that?

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First the government would have to acknowledge that there is a problem which would mean getting in a fight with big-burger and big-sugar, who have lots of money. Unlikely in our current climate…

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Sure but tobacco was no different. Long time horizon for that process and you need overwhelming scientific research that it’s a public health problem. My question is more about the ideological support for it. That is, if we can show unhealthy* food marketing is strongly associated and very likely causative (through a mediation chain) of adverse public health outcomes, would anyone actually be for regulation there. Obviously I would but I’m an American-hating, let-black-people-vote communist.

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I’m for that for a lot of things. I’ve gradually grown to resent our entire advertising culture. I don’t see why people should be able to tempt me with addictive stuff everywhere I go exponentially increasing the difficulty of staying healthy. I say this as someone who has suffered real tangible harm from things like Fast Food.

What are the odds that my wife could have quit smoking and stayed quit with cigarette ads everywhere? She couldn’t stay quit while she worked at a nursing home because the culture there was that all social interaction happened on smoke breaks and everybody smoked.

We don’t even consider what rights a person might have to not be advertised to. There’s a reason why I arrange to pickup my groceries without going inside the store. I don’t need to walk past thousands of sku’s worth of delicious sugar in ingenious packaging designed to trigger my lizard brain. Fucking ridiculous is what it is.

I don’t really watch ads on TV either. A lot of you have conned yourselves into believing that advertising doesn’t work on you. That’s straight up bullshit and if you’re honest with yourselves you’ll realize that I’m right. If I didn’t explicitly consent to being advertised to by actually asking about a product I genuinely do not want to hear about it. This is extra extra true for consumables of any sort.

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Unfortunately, if we are using cigarettes as a yardstick we’re still listening to studies payed for by the food industries. Societally, fat-shaming is just starting to get scrutiny, because according to those studies by the food industry, over-eating is the only reason for obesity is this country…

On the plus side, it is easier to get good information due to the internets, but how many people are able to separate the good information from the bro-science and the “just get the low fat ice cream” mindset?

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Fat shaming is a red herring planted by the food industries imo. The real question that has to be asked, and answered is why are so many more people fat now than used to be? Like statistically why are there so many many more fat people than have ever existed in the history of humanity?

The answer is simply that food got cheap, and the food industry is competing for our food spend. There are a couple of ways to win this competition but one of them is very much figuring out how to cram more calories into every bite of food. This works because our lizard brain largely grades the food we eat on calorie density. This in turn is a relic of our only recent past where people generally couldn’t get enough calories to be fully nourished.

Now of course that’s resulted in all of us eating meals that previously in human history would have been a high point for the year in terms of caloric density 3 times a day. And obviously obesity is up.

One of the biggest ways that we’ve seen calories get added to food is by the insertion of sugar virtually everywhere. Sugar is calories with a drug attached. That drug is addictive as fuck and activates the same part of your brain as love. It works this way because it’s super rare in nature, and is probably a plant adaptation designed to get animals to eat fruit that wouldn’t be worth the trouble of getting without the sugar.

At least that’s my present theory. You also see them put cheese and mayo on basically everything savory.

This has to stop though. We’re literally poisoning ourselves. The last thing fat people (and I’m a fat person) need is to be told that ‘everyone is beautiful’ while they are literally eating themselves to death. Making it socially acceptable will raise obesity rates not lower them.

If it were up to me there would probably be a calorie density tax on food. This wouldn’t put the restaurants at any price level out of business, it would just change the kind of food they served.

1 Like
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Right but we know what the battle looks like and how it gets won, by tipping the scales with an avalanche of real science. We aren’t even close to that point yet in terms of academic literature, so that should be the goal. I mean there’s still a huge bias against the obese even within medicine, and notice how the solution is always about PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY and BOOTSTRAPS as opposed to public policy shit. It’s like if the current take on tobacco was “Hey you dummies–it’s simple–just stop smoking!” That’s where we are on food.

2 Likes
81

Sorry but this is a pretty bad take.

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Please elaborate. It’s just a take. I am not particularly attached to it.

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Yes there are tons of genetic and environmental variables that have nothing to do with personal responsibility and bootstraps. I literally proposed public policy shit at the bottom of my post for exactly that reason.

We’ve got our food suppliers fighting over who can market us the most unhealthy stuff possible. Obviously this is the very definition of a tragedy of the commons type of situation where government intervention in the free market is not only acceptable but necessary.

What’s wrong with a tax on caloric density? And isn’t limitations on advertising unhealthy food almost the bare minimum we can do in the middle of something rightfully called the obesity epidemic? Speaking as someone who is in the process of losing weight it’s like the whole world is designed to try to trigger me to binge eat.

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Being familiar with (some of) the scientific literature, it’s almost surely not something “simple” causing obesity. It’s a complex, multifaceted problem, and even though I too am a sugar hater, implicating it directly as the addictive caloric poison drug isn’t even close to a complete answer. I am probably simplifying this too much, but the added sugar phenomenon seems to have spawned from removal of fats, which itself proliferated from some bad science originating in the 1950s.

I’m doing this from memory and taking liberties here, but in other words it was this plausible-sounding “fat makes you fat” theory that was being pushed by the medical community and scientists with lots of scary info about heart disease (based on spurious correlations). The government eventually endorsed this in the late 70’s with the dietary guidelines and then other dumb shit like the food pyramid, and, well, people take note of this and adjust their diets accordingly. It’s why my mom still thinks fat makes you fat despite me explaining the calorie model to her repeatedly. Like, if you start with a really flawed and entrenched understanding of how something works, it’s confusing when you attempt to rectify statements that don’t fit that model. Example:

Belief: Dietary fat is the main driver of obesity.

Mechanism: Fat is a molecule and when you eat it, it goes directly into your arteries and fat cells where it’s stored until you burn it off by presumably doing a bunch of cardiovascular exercise.

Claim: “You are all complete fucking boors for putting sugar-loaded fake butter on your filet mignon instead of real butter.”

It’s really tough for someone to make sense of this claim if their model of the nutrition universe revolves around the dietary fat == fat identity and god knows how many other ridiculous misconceptions like magical properties of ill-defined “healthy” foods. You have to know stuff about calorie balance, satiety, insulin response, etc. for it to really make sense. I think you’d be surprised at how many people I know doing FOOD RESEARCH don’t know this shit.

And the reason a calorie density tax isn’t great is because it ignores things like satiety. I just had ice cream from a local place that I can manage about one scoop of before tapping out. It’s incredibly rich, sweet, and filling. Like, however many calories it was in that tiny cup, my body said stop now. The same isn’t true for, say, pizza, which I seem to be able to binge until full stomach capacity and may still find myself wanting more even if stuffed.

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Fair enough on satiety. Gotta figure out how to include that.

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Lemme know when you get off that diet because this ice cream we have locally is absolutely amazing lol. Make a short drive over here to the Horse Cap sometime and I’ll hook you up.

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Yeah for sure lol. I’ll fall of the wagon sooner or later. Just got back on this time so it’ll probably be a couple months lol