Obesity tops tobacco as biggest health threat

[Master of Ossus]

Except Wong methods is aimed at getting them to CHANGE their ways. Yours is just a penalty imposed for being fat.
The manipulation of cigeratte prices, along with smoking cessation programmes, advertising and health education has been responsible for driving down smoking rates in many countries.

So one method that picks one method of addressing a problem with many causes and mandates that people use that one is better than one that invites people to pick a solution which works for them? My proposal is a penalty on being fat that's intended to both recompense society for the additional costs it bears when people are fat and to encourage them to get fit.

So what foods, if any, are not taxed under your system? Virtually any food is bad for you if consumed in supra-rational quantities. Do you simply impose a calorie tax?

Simple. Tax the ingredients directly.

Increase the basic tax on simple sugar and fat. Sure, we increase the cost of other foods too, but this would actually make nonprocessed food even MORE attractive.

It would work on EVERYTHING. You want to apply more lard on your barbecued meats, the costs of doing so is now higher because of the tax on lard. Manufacturers can no longer simply add "value" by increasing sugar content. Inflationary pressures would be placed on processed foods and restaurants.

You obviously haven't thought at all about my proposal. I'm sure it has its problems, but none of your criticisms seem to apply, and claiming that this is a problem only with fat and sugar and that those ingredients should be taxed doesn't address the scale or scope of the proposed food tax. How do you tax an avocado? It has no added sugar and no added fat. Do you tax its fat content? That's plausible, and seems to be what Darth Wong would advocate, but that's essentially the same as a calorie tax, which makes little sense for a whole bunch of reasons to me. People have different metabolisms and those with high metabolisms or who are highly active are penalized completely unfairly under a calorie tax system, for example. A tax on obesity, by comparison, gets to the root of the problem directly and offers choices in how individuals wish to address their own situations (I can eat less junk food, I can exercise, I can change my lifestyle to be more active, etc.). Moreover, because it's applied to people instead of as an excise tax, it can be tied ot the individuals' marginal rates, if we so desire.

[Bakustra]

What proportion of the public is physically active as a part of their jobs?

I have no idea, nor does my argument rely upon any fixed proportion of the populace to be active.

How would they, or society in general, be harmed, if the physically active eat better?

Because you're forcing their lifestyle to change compared to the demonstrable ex ante state. Of course they're going to be worse off.

Why is this necessarily so? I can think of a number of situations where forcing lifestyle changes benefits the person involved, such as smoking, alcoholism, and other drug abuse.

Further, you are assuming that reducing obesity is the only benefit that should be considered in this, ignoring any of the nutritional benefits from people getting less salt, sugar, oil, and fat in their diets, which include the physically active, like construction workers.

Well, my argument doesn't really rely upon that. But enlighten me: the health effects of salt that I've seen have almost invariably been limited to things like hypertension (which has no symptoms). As for reducing sugar, oil and fat out of their diets, those are just buzz words for calories, and if the person's fit then they're obviously not having a problem with calories.

Your argument relies on the idea that it's a better idea to tax the obese directly. Therefore, it presumes that there are no benefits to a general tax on unhealthy/junk foods that potentially outweigh direct action.

What exactly does the lack of symptoms for hypertension have to do with its dangers? As for sugar, oil and fats, they are not actually just buzzwords for calories. Oils and fats are digested and stored directly in fat cells. They are not immediately used by the body like proteins and carbohydrates. Sugar, meanwhile, rots your teeth. There are fairly good reasons to decrease the proportions of each of these, along with cholesterol, within people's diets, apart from the matter of reducing obesity. Of course, I am operating on the presumption that a function of government is to aid in the general well-being, and therefore health, of its citizens.

With regards to portion sizes, buffets might be a little impractical to solve with direct action, save taxing them into oblivion. Potentially, restricting the number of times a customer could pass through the line (say, two times) might work, save for the problem of competitors offering unlimited times through (after all, they can afford it now). Cultural change might be better. Taxing large portions is a good idea, especially since better and more expensive restaurants tend to serve smaller portions already. Convincing cheaper restaurants to do so would help. Another idea might be to encourage the addition of roughage or vegetables to portions but not taxing those as heavily/at all.

So in other words you want to tax junk food and tax salad bars (which people in junk food restaurants often go to in order to avoid eating junk food) into oblivion? And this makes sense?

No. That was not actually in response to you. My point was that the ability of government to directly affect buffets is practically limited to "tax them into oblivion", and other solutions are unlikely to work because of little things like the free market. I don't know why you decided I was arguing for this. When it comes to your point about salad bars and dressing, my preference would be to place the tax on the sale of the item, so that buying the dressing from the wholesaler costs more to the restaurant. Of course, this does not apply to restaurant-made dressings, but the point is ideally, to raise the cost of dressing such that restaurants will have to charge for it, and thus make it no longer the default option. Of course, this is practically impossible to ensure in reality, since the restaurant will presumably just raise the cost of salads to match, and by no means charge you less for a dry salad.

Also, it's easy to say "cultural change might be better," but cultural change is not something that can be relied upon when considering government action.

Okay, but my point is that government is less able to interfere with buffets than with table-service restaurants. Promoting cultural change is something, however, that the government has done somewhat successfully with smoking. Educating people about the importance of moderation and the dangers of overeating would probably help any taxes and deal with the matter of buffets.

[Darth Wong]

Taxing people for being obese is directly discriminatory. Taxing junk food isn't. It is indirectly discriminatory, ie- people who overindulge on those foods get taxed, but it's not as bad. We want to try to do something about obesity, but we don't hate obese people; we just want to create an economic incentive system that will make it more likely for them to get healthy.

But obesity directly is the source of the problems; not the food.

That's like saying pollution is the source of environmental problems, not the activities which produce that pollution.

As for being "directly discriminatory," who gives a fuck? The problem is that obese people are obese, which causes them all manner of health problems which causes society all manner of problems. My system directly targets the problem whereas yours does so only indirectly.

We disagree about the root problems. I believe that unhealthy diets are the root problem, and they cause obesity. You are saying that obesity itself is the problem, not the activities which cause it.

It's reasonable to discriminate against obesity when you're trying to deal with obesity as a social problem. Moreover, taxing people for being obese isn't stating that we hate them--it states that we're taxing their obesity.

Not to quote an overused Christian apologist line, but my solution "hates the sin, not the sinner" while yours is targeted at the sinner.

Moreover, your mechanism leaves people who are in excellent shape because they are physically active but eat bad food (e.g., a construction worker) in an awkward position in which they would almost certainly change their behavior, even though they create none of the problems that you're trying to target. Your system, in short, only envisions sedentary office workers even though you seek to apply it across all of society.

Is there some particular reason why a construction worker needs to eat bad food? The fact is that these foods are bad for everyone. Some people can compensate for that for various reasons, but that doesn't mean they are any less unhealthy. In fact, your prototypical example of a hard-working manual labourer with a terrible diet is a perfect example of a person who will become obese when he retires or suffers an injury, because he has spent so many years eating badly and building an unhealthy habit.

You tax the whole salad, because the net product has high fat. You would also tax high-fat dressings in general, of course.

That just seems unworkable--how can you evaluate what goes into a salad from the salad bar, for instance, or would you insist on weighing out different components of peoples' salads? Note that if you tax the restaurant serving it and leave it up to them, then the tax would likely be spread to all people who order salads because a restaurant is unable, ex ante, to determine the level of dressing on each person's salad, which just increases the cost of salad bars in general.

The junk food tax would simply be directly applied to buffet dining in general, which is also a significant cause of obesity. You're making it sound as if you're identifying glaring problems which cannot be solved, when in fact they're quite easy to solve. The reason you think these are glaring problems is the fact that you (obviously) think any solution should be carefully tailored so that it has no effect whatsoever on people who are not already obese, even if they are engaging in the same unhealthy behaviours.

By the way, salads are the most overrated obesity solution on Earth.

If they're consumed in rational quantities, then the tax won't hurt you too much.

So what foods, if any, are not taxed under your system? Virtually any food is bad for you if consumed in supra-rational quantities. Do you simply impose a calorie tax?

Don't be ridiculous; it is not difficult to identify foods which contain an unusually high ratio of bad ingredients to size and/or cost.

[Master of Ossus]

Why is this necessarily so? I can think of a number of situations where forcing lifestyle changes benefits the person involved, such as smoking, alcoholism, and other drug abuse.

Again, they've already declared their lowest-cost lifestyle. If you force them to change, you're making them migrate to a "less chepa" lifestyle. "You can say that they have fewer hidden costs, but in this case it's tough to identify any because these people by premise have no problem with the obesity epidemic that we're trying to target.

Your argument relies on the idea that it's a better idea to tax the obese directly. Therefore, it presumes that there are no benefits to a general tax on unhealthy/junk foods that potentially outweigh direct action.

The argument is that it's better to tax the obese directly when the goal is to stamp out obesity. It doesn't "rely" on that.

What exactly does the lack of symptoms for hypertension have to do with its dangers?

It means that it's not dangerous. That's what "no symptoms" means.

As for sugar, oil and fats, they are not actually just buzzwords for calories. Oils and fats are digested and stored directly in fat cells.

So in other words they're bad for you because they... make people obese. Oh, yeah.

They are not immediately used by the body like proteins and carbohydrates.

Okay, it's total bullshit that proteins and carboydrates are used immediately by the body. Someone who's eating 4,000 calories/day of carbohydrates is in the same place, for obesity purposes, as someone who eats 4,000 calories/day in fat. They might have other problems associated with their diet, like lack of vital nutrients, but replacing fat with carbohydrates is not a good way to lose weight and keep it off.

Sugar, meanwhile, rots your teeth. There are fairly good reasons to decrease the proportions of each of these, along with cholesterol, within people's diets, apart from the matter of reducing obesity. Of course, I am operating on the presumption that a function of government is to aid in the general well-being, and therefore health, of its citizens.

Okay, the cost of sugar "rot[ing] your teeth" is totally trivial next to the general health costs of obesity in America, and this is coming from someone whose grandfather was an orthodontist. Cholesterol has some problems associated with it, but again they're ancillary to obesity.

No. That was not actually in response to you. My point was that the ability of government to directly affect buffets is practically limited to "tax them into oblivion", and other solutions are unlikely to work because of little things like the free market. I don't know why you decided I was arguing for this. When it comes to your point about salad bars and dressing, my preference would be to place the tax on the sale of the item, so that buying the dressing from the wholesaler costs more to the restaurant. Of course, this does not apply to restaurant-made dressings, but the point is ideally, to raise the cost of dressing such that restaurants will have to charge for it, and thus make it no longer the default option. Of course, this is practically impossible to ensure in reality, since the restaurant will presumably just raise the cost of salads to match, and by no means charge you less for a dry salad.

I said that exact thing about six posts ago as a specific problem with the taxation system for foodstuffs, and in explaining one of the reasons why it's better to tax obesity directly.

Also, it's easy to say "cultural change might be better," but cultural change is not something that can be relied upon when considering government action.

Okay, but my point is that government is less able to interfere with buffets than with table-service restaurants.[/quote]

Which is a key flaw with the "tax the food" argument.

Promoting cultural change is something, however, that the government has done somewhat successfully with smoking. Educating people about the importance of moderation and the dangers of overeating would probably help any taxes and deal with the matter of buffets.

I'll grant you that the government can encourage cultural change, but since neither of us relies on cultural change in isolation of a system of taxation it's just a sideshow to the question of where the tax should fall.

[Broomstick]

Can I say something about construction workers/people who perform manual labor? (as I actually AM such a person!)

Construction workers/laborers function better on healthy food, too. While they may, due to their activity level, require substantially more calories than someone sedentary they are far healthier if they get those calories from a properly balanced diet utilizing fresh, healthy foods. Even with a very active lifestyle you can STILL get a gut or obese from consuming too many calories in a day. Multiple cheeseburgers for lunch every day is bad for anyone.

[Master of Ossus]

That's like saying pollution is the source of environmental problems, not the activities which produce that pollution.

So your solution to pollution is not to tax pollution emissions but to tax whatever people are doing that causes pollution? That is exceptionally poor policy both because it's much harder to identify and tax all activities that cause pollution than it is to identify polluters and net amounts of pollution and because it discourages polluters from coming up with activities that reduce pollution output while continuing their activities by developing more pollution-efficient ways of engaging in those activities.

Your calorie-tax has precisely analogous problems: it ignores the possibility that people can engage in non-diet methods of reducing obesity-related health problems (for instance, by exercise or active lifestyle) and in fact discourages them from engaging in these behaviors, and encourages healthy eating to the exclusion of activity.

We disagree about the root problems. I believe that unhealthy diets are the root problem, and they cause obesity. You are saying that obesity itself is the problem, not the activities which cause it.

I'm saying that obesity itself is the problem, but that there are a range of possible activities that could be promoted to reduce it. I think we both agree that obesity is the issue that we are trying to reduce, but I don't understand your exclusive focus on unhealthy diet.

Not to quote an overused Christian apologist line, but my solution "hates the sin, not the sinner" while yours is targeted at the sinner.

True, as a proxy to discourage the sins.

Is there some particular reason why a construction worker needs to eat bad food? The fact is that these foods are bad for everyone. Some people can compensate for that for various reasons, but that doesn't mean they are any less unhealthy. In fact, your prototypical example of a hard-working manual labourer with a terrible diet is a perfect example of a person who will become obese when he retires or suffers an injury, because he has spent so many years eating badly and building an unhealthy habit.

At which point he'll be taxed, under my system, if he doesn't change anything. He's not taxed when he's perfectly healthy and isn't subjecting society to any tax.

The junk food tax would simply be directly applied to buffet dining in general, which is also a significant cause of obesity. You're making it sound as if you're identifying glaring problems which cannot be solved, when in fact they're quite easy to solve. The reason you think these are glaring problems is the fact that you (obviously) think any solution should be carefully tailored so that it has no effect whatsoever on people who are not already obese, even if they are engaging in the same unhealthy behaviours.

I do think that a solution to obesity should be targetted as narrowly as possible to avoid harming people who are not obese.

By the way, salads are the most overrated obesity solution on Earth.

True, but if someone's going to Carl's Junior it's better that they use the salad bar than have a quarter pounder, all else equal.

Don't be ridiculous; it is not difficult to identify foods which contain an unusually high ratio of bad ingredients to size and/or cost.

But why are you taxing those foods in the first place? What of things like nuts that are actually healthy, when eaten in moderation, but obviously extremely unhealthy when eaten in large quantities? That just discourages people from eating nuts (if you imposed a tax on them, as I assume), when the goal should be to get them to eat nuts in moderation--perhaps by taxing people for being fat, as opposed to for eating nuts at all.

[Master of Ossus]

Can I say something about construction workers/people who perform manual labor? (as I actually AM such a person!)

Construction workers/laborers function better on healthy food, too. While they may, due to their activity level, require substantially more calories than someone sedentary they are far healthier if they get those calories from a properly balanced diet utilizing fresh, healthy foods. Even with a very active lifestyle you can STILL get a gut or obese from consuming too many calories in a day. Multiple cheeseburgers for lunch every day is bad for anyone.

So Darth Wong basically taxes you for eating more calories, but my plan taxes you only when you get fat. I actually think it's actively unfair to tax construction workers more for eating more calories, and targets the wrong people. If we envision two people who each get 20% of their calories from junk food, Darth Wong's scheme actually discourages the person who's more active from eating junk food more than it discourages the sedentary person from eating junk food, since the active person is presumably eating more total calories. It's true that both people could be doing better, but to the extent that we have a choice, it's better to have the active person eating more junk food than the sedentary person because they have a built-in mechanism to cope with the ultimate problem.

[Darth Wong]

That's like saying pollution is the source of environmental problems, not the activities which produce that pollution.

So your solution to pollution is not to tax pollution emissions but to tax whatever people are doing that cause pollution?

Yes, just like the gasoline taxes which are far simpler and more effective ways to reduce fuel consumption than all of these idiotic "targeted" solutions aimed at certain kinds of cars. That has been demonstrated in Europe.

That is exceptionally poor policy both because it's much harder to identify and tax all activities that cause pollution than it is to identify polluters and net amounts of pollution and because it discourages polluters from coming up with activities that reduce pollution output while continuing their activities by developing more efficient ways of engaging in those activities.

Funny- the gas tax in Europe works fine. You just don't like it because it doesn't divide up society into guilty and not guilty parties: everyone is affected but in varying degrees. But that's actually a more accurate way of targeting the problem, since everyone is also guilty in varying degrees.

Your calorie-tax has precisely analogous problems: it ignores the possibility that people can engage in non-diet methods of reducing obesity-related health problems (for instance, by exercise or active lifestyle) and in fact discourages them from engaging in these behaviors, and encourages healthy eating to the exclusion of activity.

Yes, my calorie-tax idea has precisely the same "problems" as the European gas taxes which have been proven to be far more effective at reducing automotive fuel consumption than the "targeted" solutions preferred in America.

I'm saying that obesity itself is the problem, but that there are a range of possible activities that could be promoted to reduce it. I think we both agree that obesity is the issue that we are trying to reduce, but I don't understand your exclusive focus on unhealthy diet.

My focus is because obesity is actually a symptom of the problem, albeit the most obvious symptom. After all, it's possible to have a normal BMI and yet have an extremely unhealthy diet and resulting cardiovascular problems.

Not to quote an overused Christian apologist line, but my solution "hates the sin, not the sinner" while yours is targeted at the sinner.

True, as a proxy to discourage the sins.

If it's possible to discourage the sin directly, as it is in this case, why attack the sinner as a proxy to discourage the sin?

Is there some particular reason why a construction worker needs to eat bad food? The fact is that these foods are bad for everyone. Some people can compensate for that for various reasons, but that doesn't mean they are any less unhealthy. In fact, your prototypical example of a hard-working manual labourer with a terrible diet is a perfect example of a person who will become obese when he retires or suffers an injury, because he has spent so many years eating badly and building an unhealthy habit.

At which point he'll be taxed, under my system, if he doesn't change anything. He's not taxed when he's perfectly healthy and isn't subjecting society to any tax.

Are you seriously saying that he's "perfectly healthy" just because he hasn't gained the weight commensurate with his terrible diet yet? There are plenty of ways someone can be horribly unhealthy due to bad diet even if his BMI hasn't gone sky high.

I do think that a solution to obesity should be targetted as narrowly as possible to avoid harming people who are not obese.

It would not "harm" them. It would help them. Bad food is unhealthy for everyone, not just obese people. I am perfectly willing to pay more for bad food even though I'm not in the obese BMI range. It would only make it easier for me to avoid the crap anyway. No one was ever "harmed" by not being able to eat enough Doritos.

By the way, salads are the most overrated obesity solution on Earth.

True, but if someone's going to Carl's Junior it's better that they use the salad bar than have a quarter pounder, all else equal.

That's not necessarily true. In fact, it's quite possible to eat a salad which contains as many calories as a big fat greasy burger.

Don't be ridiculous; it is not difficult to identify foods which contain an unusually high ratio of bad ingredients to size and/or cost.

But why are you taxing those foods in the first place? What of things like nuts that are actually healthy, when eaten in moderation, but obviously extremely unhealthy when eaten in large quantities? That just discourages people from eating nuts (if you imposed a tax on them, as I assume), when the goal should be to get them to eat nuts in moderation--perhaps by taxing people for being fat, as opposed to for eating nuts at all.

Nonsense; it only discourages people from eating huge quantities of nuts. Taxes targeted at an unusually high ratio of bad ingredients to bulk or cost would do that.

Even today, I can go into a grocery store and buy a tiny little bag of cashews for $5.00, or I can go to the Bulk Barn and buy three times more cashews for the same amount of money. The fact is that exploding portion sizes are one of the major health problems in our society, and if taxes targeted at unusually cheap calories help curb that problem, then so be it.

[Bakustra]

Why is this necessarily so? I can think of a number of situations where forcing lifestyle changes benefits the person involved, such as smoking, alcoholism, and other drug abuse.

Again, they've already declared their lowest-cost lifestyle. If you force them to change, you're making them migrate to a "less chepa" lifestyle. "You can say that they have fewer hidden costs, but in this case it's tough to identify any because these people by premise have no problem with the obesity epidemic that we're trying to target.

What if their lowest-cost lifestyle involves never bathing? If I taxed people who don't bathe, hypothetically, I would be improving their hygiene and thus their quality of life, while still forcing them to spend more money.

Your argument relies on the idea that it's a better idea to tax the obese directly. Therefore, it presumes that there are no benefits to a general tax on unhealthy/junk foods that potentially outweigh direct action.

The argument is that it's better to tax the obese directly when the goal is to stamp out obesity. It doesn't "rely" on that.[/quote]
My mistake.

What exactly does the lack of symptoms for hypertension have to do with its dangers?

It means that it's not dangerous. That's what "no symptoms" means.

That is not what a lack of symptoms means. Tumors may show no symptoms until such a time as they become cancerous and malignant. I suppose that they are not dangerous either.

As for sugar, oil and fats, they are not actually just buzzwords for calories. Oils and fats are digested and stored directly in fat cells.

So in other words they're bad for you because they... make people obese. Oh, yeah.

You're still wrong, sir, still wrong.

They are not immediately used by the body like proteins and carbohydrates.

Okay, it's total bullshit that proteins and carboydrates are used immediately by the body. Someone who's eating 4,000 calories/day of carbohydrates is in the same place, for obesity purposes, as someone who eats 4,000 calories/day in fat. They might have other problems associated with their diet, like lack of vital nutrients, but replacing fat with carbohydrates is not a good way to lose weight and keep it off.

I used shorthand for "fat is immediately stored, carbohydrates and proteins are burned and then the excess stored". Of course, somebody eating 4000 calories a day will not have a massive difference from fat vis a vis carbohydrates, but someone subsisting entirely on fat will be less energetic than someone subsisting on carbohydrates, before they die of scurvy.

Sugar, meanwhile, rots your teeth. There are fairly good reasons to decrease the proportions of each of these, along with cholesterol, within people's diets, apart from the matter of reducing obesity. Of course, I am operating on the presumption that a function of government is to aid in the general well-being, and therefore health, of its citizens.

Okay, the cost of sugar "rot[ing] your teeth" is totally trivial next to the general health costs of obesity in America, and this is coming from someone whose grandfather was an orthodontist. Cholesterol has some problems associated with it, but again they're ancillary to obesity.

So it's not important at all, apparently, because you're going on about how the effects are trivial. Have you never heard of the maxim "kill two birds with one stone"? If you can address a wide variety of health issues at once, would that not be an advantage over simply focusing on one at a time?

No. That was not actually in response to you. My point was that the ability of government to directly affect buffets is practically limited to "tax them into oblivion", and other solutions are unlikely to work because of little things like the free market. I don't know why you decided I was arguing for this. When it comes to your point about salad bars and dressing, my preference would be to place the tax on the sale of the item, so that buying the dressing from the wholesaler costs more to the restaurant. Of course, this does not apply to restaurant-made dressings, but the point is ideally, to raise the cost of dressing such that restaurants will have to charge for it, and thus make it no longer the default option. Of course, this is practically impossible to ensure in reality, since the restaurant will presumably just raise the cost of salads to match, and by no means charge you less for a dry salad.

I said that exact thing about six posts ago as a specific problem with the taxation system for foodstuffs, and in explaining one of the reasons why it's better to tax obesity directly.

Ah, but while taxing restaurants may be difficult, that still does not change the benefits of taxing the food that people buy from grocery stores. Furthermore, the majority of food is eaten at fast-food, which can be affected by taxes far more than table-service restaurants, mainly because the goal is to reduce the amount of food people eat there period. Do not presume that someone agreeing that taxing restaurants is a risky business necessarily agrees with you when it comes to groceries or fast-food.

Also, it's easy to say "cultural change might be better," but cultural change is not something that can be relied upon when considering government action.

Okay, but my point is that government is less able to interfere with buffets than with table-service restaurants.

Which is a key flaw with the "tax the food" argument.

See above. Not everyone eats out (especially at table-service restaurants) more than they cook meals at home.

Promoting cultural change is something, however, that the government has done somewhat successfully with smoking. Educating people about the importance of moderation and the dangers of overeating would probably help any taxes and deal with the matter of buffets.

I'll grant you that the government can encourage cultural change, but since neither of us relies on cultural change in isolation of a system of taxation it's just a sideshow to the question of where the tax should fall.

Okay, but my point is that taxation, regardless of your plan or not, will fail without other efforts. Yours, however, relies on the fatal assumption of libertarianism: you presume a perfectly educated consumer. In short, someone who will know the best way to reduce their weight and get off the obesity tax. This seems a bit flawed in light of all the fad diets that come out every year. However, the advantage of taxing unhealthy food is that healthy food becomes the cheap option.

[ThomasP]

A lot of the arguments here are cropping up because of poor definitions of "good healthy" food and "bad junk" food.

The avocado was brought up and it's a prime example of this - it's fatty as fruits go, but it's considered a "healthy" fat. Why why you penalize someone for eating that merely based on fat content, or even calorie content for that matter, when avocados are a "healthy" food?

Of course if someone's eating 10 of them a day, and critically, taking in more calories than s/he is using up as a result, then that person is going to gain weight. "Bad" in that regard is contextual, and if you overeat on anything, be it carb, fat, or even protein, you will get fat as a result. Protein is very hard to overeat on because of how it's metabolized and the fact that it's the most satiating of the macronutrients, but it could be done by a dedicated eater. Carbs tend to digest very quickly, making them not very filling and more likely to increase appetite as a result. Fats are somewhere in between.

A lot of the memes floating around about "unhealthy" bad foods don't hold up to scrutiny if you actually look at the research into obesity and metabolic syndrome. A healthy, lean, and active person (say our hypothetical construction worker) is going go be a lot less affected by "bad" diet simply because he is active and using up the calories. The point about bad habits being reinforced is very valid, however, because as soon as that guy stops being active he's going to balloon up.

About the only thing in our food that is acutely harmful (that is, directly causing harm vs. indirectly causing harm by making us fat) is trans-fatty acids. Salts, sugars, omega-3 and omega-6 fats, and just about anything else you care to name are only contextually harmful, and the negative effects only tend to arise when someone's already overweight or obese to begin with. There's a rationale for banning trans-fats, since they do directly cause cardiac problems. Most everything else is lacking that direct connection, and instead is only a problem due to overconsumption (and the ease of overconsumption that they allow).

[Simon_Jester]

Ordering salads is generally a good way to reduce calories, for example, but not when your salad consists of 85% Caesar dressing, by volume. Do you tax the dressing?

You tax the whole salad, because the net product has high fat. You would also tax high-fat dressings in general, of course.

Better, I think, to tax the salad and not the dressing. If the salad is being given the customer without dressing and the Caesar dressing is added later, then taxing the whole salad would be an unfair penalty on people who use no dressing, or only a little dressing.

Also, taxing the dressing directly gives the restaurant a reason to stop putting dressing on the tables and make it available only on request, or substitute a low-fat dressing. Taxing any salad that happens to have the dressing put on top of it doesn't really help much at that point.

The junk food tax would simply be directly applied to buffet dining in general, which is also a significant cause of obesity...

Does this include salad bars which do not make high-fat foods freely available in large amounts? I can easily imagine a restaurant with a reasonable salad bar in that respect.

So I still think it makes more sense to tax fattening foods directly. That attacks the main problem of buffet dining, too. If buffet eaters are mostly taking a lot of fattening foods and fattening foods are expensive, the buffets will have to crank up their prices a lot to compensate... to the point where buffet eating is no longer competitive. The trick is to make food expensive enough that food is a large chunk of the place's operating costs relative to things like labor, which shifts the balance in favor of more labor-intensive but less food-intensive places. When food is cheaper than labor, self-serve food can outcompete served food more easily.

Or is that something you've already said, that I missed in the quote spaghetti? If so, I apologize.

How the fuck does someone get to the point where they need to eat that much food? I'll readily admit that I am far from fit, and that I need to loose about twenty pounds, but even I couldn't possibly eat that much in a day, let alone a single meal.

This guy must be a real anomaly; even the 300-pounder types I've known couldn't put away that much. And yes, I mean putting away one sixth of that guy's order. I can't imagine any one person eating the whole thing in less than a week, either; that's got to be something like a cubic foot of food.

Because a 375mm coke has 40grams of sugar whereas a coke zero has none. TURNS OUT ordering diet coke will make your meal half as unhealthy.

...Assuming your original portion was sane. Which this giant monster's wasn't. Also, you meant 375 mL, right?

For restaurants, it might make more sense to tax large portions - anything over a certain number of calories, or with more than 6 ounces of meat, or some other defining characteristic to be taxed, to encourage smaller portions. Buffets, at which it is enormously easy to overeat, might need a little attention, too.

This. Many restaurant portions are gigantic, and training yourself to deliberately stop eating before you are seriously full is nontrivial. Possible, yes; nontrivial.

And yes, there should be some social pressure to encourage people to lose weight and get in shape. This needs to be humane - for someone morbidly obese simply walking a block or two can be overwhelming. Nonetheless, they should be encouraged to do that, because it's only by doing such things that they will become more capable of exercise. Obese people are people with a serious problem. Overcoming it will be hard. They should be encouraged to improve, but brow-beating them, humiliating them, or otherwise telling them to shape the fuck up will only work with a minority of them - in most cases it will probably only make things worse.

Broad agreement. I have actually teetered on the edge of "morbid obesity" territory, though not to the "walking a block is overwhelming" point. Nowhere near that bad, thank God.

I've fought my way part of the way back down from there to normal weight, and I want to make it really clear that I know from experience that it is NOT easy, especially if you've been that way since you were a child. Your entire sense of "normal" eating and activity levels gets so completely warped that the only way to escape is to consciously override your reflexes on an hour-by-hour basis. Your subconscious will keep kicking in with all sorts of dodgy justifications and half-measures. People being hard on you will not only fail to help, they will actively harm, by contributing to the same sort of general depression, humiliation, and shut-in behavior that leads back to comfort eating.

It is a really nasty pit to have to scramble out of. Slip and you end up right back where you started. To make matters worse, it doesn't do a damn bit of good to modify your behavior slightly and lose, say, ten pounds; that may make you less miserable on the scale but it won't change your appearance or overall fitness much. You've got to go much farther than that, and at weight loss rates consistent with health you won't be back to normal without many months of sustained conscious effort.

[LaCroix]

Uh, are you sure? I was under the impression that tobacco tax did indeed influence people to quite smoking; anecdotally many people I know have cited this as a reason to stop. Turns out a lot of people want to quit but need to be pushed into it because nicotine is ludicrously addictive.

As a proud legalized drug dealer (tobacco vendor) I can tell you that this is pure humbug! You could triple prices and people would moan but continue. Over the last years, prices rose 50% , we don't see any downswing in consumption. (Sadly, our span didn't rise, so only the state profits.)

It's only social pressure that can help, as long as smoking is ok and cool, it will continue.

[LaCroix]

Yay double post due to stupidity!

The most important thing is to ban all you can eat buffets. Basically, they are an incentive to stuff your gills as much as you can. Most of them are cheaper than a real meal of reasonable size, and contain the worst of worst of foods. This practice has to be rooted out, instead of just taxed.

[Edi]

In other news, the calorie numbers on packaging in the US tend to be off by 10 to 20 percent. As in, 10 to 20 percent less than what the real number is. This is certainly not helping the obesity problem.

[Broomstick]

Can I say something about construction workers/people who perform manual labor? (as I actually AM such a person!)

Construction workers/laborers function better on healthy food, too. While they may, due to their activity level, require substantially more calories than someone sedentary they are far healthier if they get those calories from a properly balanced diet utilizing fresh, healthy foods. Even with a very active lifestyle you can STILL get a gut or obese from consuming too many calories in a day. Multiple cheeseburgers for lunch every day is bad for anyone.

So Darth Wong basically taxes you for eating more calories, but my plan taxes you only when you get fat. I actually think it's actively unfair to tax construction workers more for eating more calories, and targets the wrong people. If we envision two people who each get 20% of their calories from junk food, Darth Wong's scheme actually discourages the person who's more active from eating junk food more than it discourages the sedentary person from eating junk food, since the active person is presumably eating more total calories.

It's not OK for anyone to be getting 20% of their total intake in "junk food". If you need more calories due to a lot of activity that doesn't suddenly make it OK to eat an entire stick of butter as a snack.

I know it defies stereotypes, but there are big, burly construction workers busting their ass all day with actual manual labor who eat low-calorie salads and watch their portion size (one strategy at McDonald's is to order off the dollar menu) and eat fresh fruit. Maybe that blows your mind, that these big brawny guys are actually watching their weight and trying to make good food choices, but a lot of them are. Their bodies work better when they keep the junk food to a minimum, and since they depend on their bodies for a living they actually give a fuck what they fuel them with. That's not a universal sentiment, but it's a lot more common than you might think. It's funny - the big, active construction apes drink regular coffee, they aren't the ones sucking down Starbucks "coffee" that contains more calories in one drink than anyone should suck down in an entire day.

Here's the difference between an avocado and HCFS - an avocado is a fruit. In addition to oils/fats it contains some fiber and other stuff. It grows on trees. HCFS is a highly processed and refined single component of a foodstuff produced in a factory. For that matter, table sugar is the same. It's not JUST a matter of how sweet or how fattening a food is, it's also how refined and processed it is. Tax HCFS and either the price of a lot of stuff goes up, which will encourage reduced consumption, or producers who don't want a price rise will reduce the amount of that shit in food, leading to fewer calories in the same portion. People don't realize how much of that shit is in their foods, it's fucking everywhere and it's in a lot of places it doesn't need to be. Ditto for "refined grape juice concentrate" which is just another highly refined garbage sugar (AND expensive to make!) that allows drinks to say "all fruit juice" which they couldn't if they used HCFS, but really just dumps more empty calories into fruit juice.

So... don't tax avocados, at least not in the produce aisle, but do tax butter in baked, ready-to-eat deserts. Don't tax the fresh fruit that naturally has sugar, tax the HCFS and its cousins. Don't tax a lean cut of meat, but do tax the bacon. There, is that too hard a fix? 'Cause it's better the construction guys chow down on fresh avocado than greasy fries even if both are relatively high fat. You get more good stuff with the avocado in addition to the fats.

[aieeegrunt]

Can I say something about construction workers/people who perform manual labor? (as I actually AM such a person!)

Construction workers/laborers function better on healthy food, too. While they may, due to their activity level, require substantially more calories than someone sedentary they are far healthier if they get those calories from a properly balanced diet utilizing fresh, healthy foods. Even with a very active lifestyle you can STILL get a gut or obese from consuming too many calories in a day. Multiple cheeseburgers for lunch every day is bad for anyone.

I work in a factory making ride control products such as shocks and strut rods. You're typical production for an 8 hour shift is 3500 units. Once you account for lunch and break time, you are lifting parts on average say 500 an hour. That is 8 times a minute you're lifting a part weighing several pounds into and then out of a machine. This sounds like a lot of physical activity, and it is.

And I have many overweight co workers, and I've found myself that I can still put on weight if I don't watch what I eat.

[bobalot]

As a proud legalized drug dealer (tobacco vendor) I can tell you that this is pure humbug! You could triple prices and people would moan but continue. Over the last years, prices rose 50% , we don't see any downswing in consumption. (Sadly, our span didn't rise, so only the state profits.)

It's only social pressure that can help, as long as smoking is ok and cool, it will continue.

Wow, a worthless personal anecdote to support your assertion. How convincing.

Actual studies have shown increasing prices does have an effect on consumption.

Response to Increases in Cigarette Prices by Race/Ethnicity, Income, and Age Groups -- United States, 1976-1993

[LaCroix]

As a proud legalized drug dealer (tobacco vendor) I can tell you that this is pure humbug! You could triple prices and people would moan but continue. Over the last years, prices rose 50% , we don't see any downswing in consumption. (Sadly, our span didn't rise, so only the state profits.)

It's only social pressure that can help, as long as smoking is ok and cool, it will continue.

Wow, a worthless personal anecdote to support your assertion. How convincing.

Actual studies have shown increasing prices does have an effect on consumption.

Response to Increases in Cigarette Prices by Race/Ethnicity, Income, and Age Groups -- United States, 1976-1993

Wow, a single study starting from the premise that only price increase has changed the consumption. How convincing.

Where is the social change against smoking factored in? Where is the economical pressure due to wage loss factored in?
Even the link explains that it is only a factor with low-income and minority(read low income) groups, and most surprising strongest among the young, who probably aren't able to find well-paid jobs.

I would say this is more a study about how being poor enough to nearly starve has an effect on tobacco consumption.

In this study, smokers with family incomes equal to or below the study sample median were more likely to respond to price increases by quitting than smokers with family incomes above the median (e.g., 10% quitting compared with 3% quitting in response to a 50% price increase).

Wow, so in a middle-class society (like over here where we don't have the poverty problem like in the us - double jobbers and such) if you increase 50%, 3% would be quitting. that means that roughly 9% (actually less) would quit if we triple the price.
Thank you for proving my statement -> You could triple prices and people would moan but continue.

[Darth Wong]

Wow, a single study starting from the premise that only price increase has changed the consumption. How convincing.

Compared to your unverifiable, non-quantified, undocumented personal anecdote? Yes, it is.

[bobalot]

Wow, a single study starting from the premise that only price increase has changed the consumption. How convincing.

1. I provided evidence for my claim and you haven't. You had a shitty personal anecdote. So yes, my claim is far more convincing than yours. Even if my claim is found to have not sufficient evidence to conclusively prove that price has an effect on consumption, your claim is even less supported.

2. I provided the link above as an example. It is not the only study on this subject.

3. As for your claim that the articles initial premise was that only price effects consumption, you simply made that up. The article never claimed that. It simply study of the effect of price on consumption. The article even stresses that there are limitations to the study such as other factors effecting smoking.

Where is the social change against smoking factored in? Where is the economical pressure due to wage loss factored in?

Read above.

Even the link explains that it is only a factor with low-income and minority(read low income) groups, and most surprising strongest among the young, who probably aren't able to find well-paid jobs.

1. The article does not state it is only a factor with low-income and minority groups but has the greatest effect on them, you illiterate twat. If you actually read the table, nearly all groups show a reduction in consumption elasticity.

I would say this is more a study about how being poor enough to nearly starve has an effect on tobacco consumption.

1. Since was being below the median wage become "poor enough to starve"?
2. How does this invalidate my point? Increases in prices effects consumption. In this case, in particular the consumption of people living below the median wage.

In this study, smokers with family incomes equal to or below the study sample median were more likely to respond to price increases by quitting than smokers with family incomes above the median (e.g., 10% quitting compared with 3% quitting in response to a 50% price increase).

Wow, so in a middle-class society (like over here where we don't have the poverty problem like in the us - double jobbers and such) if you increase 50%, 3% would be quitting. that means that roughly 9% (actually less) would quit if we triple the price.

Thank you for proving my statement -> You could triple prices and people would moan but continue.

So the fact that increasing prices decreases consumption (By your own admission, above in yellow) proves that there will be no decrease in consumption? Are you fucking retarded?

Let me remind you, this is the whole statement you are trying to defend (Strangely, you conveniently left out the retarded bits in your last post).

As a proud legalized drug dealer (tobacco vendor) I can tell you that this is pure humbug! You could triple prices and people would moan but continue. Over the last years, prices rose 50% , we don't see any downswing in consumption (Sadly, our span didn't rise, so only the state profits.)

It's only social pressure that can help, as long as smoking is ok and cool, it will continue..

Other than the fact that you have provided absolutely no evidence (other than a worthless personal anecdote) for your claim that only social pressure can reduce the rates of smoking, you have managed to somehow assume that a study indicating the opposite of what you claim actually somehow supports your claim.

If cigarette taxation had such little impact on consumption, why do cigarette companies lobby so hard against them?

[bobalot]

Double Post - Please Delete.

[RedImperator]

Allow me to weigh in (ha!) here as a person who eats too much fucking food and too much shitty food on top of it: a tax on junk food would be far more effective in getting me to cut back on what I eat and to eat better food. The thought process goes like this:

"Fuck, I'm hungry. Maybe I'll dash down to the Wawa and pick up a meatball hoagie."

JUNK FOOD TAX: "What? Holy shit, twenty bucks for a fucking sandwich? I don't want it that much. I'll go back home and reheat the vegetable soup."

OBESITY TAX: "Well, fuck, one sandwich won't hurt my BMI that much. This will be the last one. And I'll start jogging. I have months before the bill is due anyway."

The thing about being overweight, you know it's bad for you, you don't want to be that way, but making a lifestyle change involves making the right decisions dozens or hundreds of times a week, and it's easy to rationalize a bad decision while promising yourself that next time, you'll do better. That's how you can ignore the long-term disincentives to eating unhealthfully--you just tell yourself you'll start fixing it tomorrow. For that reason, I can't imagine a "fatass tax" would work even if it's absolutely ruinous. If hypertension, strokes, diabetes, joint damage, heart disease and a lifetime of being embarrassed by your own body aren't enough disincentive to skip the meatball hoagie, I can't imagine how losing a chunk of your tax return is going to be any more effective.

[ThomasP]

The thing about being overweight, you know it's bad for you, you don't want to be that way, but making a lifestyle change involves making the right decisions dozens or hundreds of times a week, and it's easy to rationalize a bad decision while promising yourself that next time, you'll do better. That's how you can ignore the long-term disincentives to eating unhealthfully--you just tell yourself you'll start fixing it tomorrow. For that reason, I can't imagine a "fatass tax" would work even if it's absolutely ruinous. If hypertension, strokes, diabetes, joint damage, heart disease and a lifetime of being embarrassed by your own body aren't enough disincentive to skip the meatball hoagie, I can't imagine how losing a chunk of your tax return is going to be any more effective.

This is exactly it. There's too much dissociation from the consequences of the immediate actions (and too much irrationality involved in that decision-making process anyway), so much that the actual "punishments" aren't sufficient motivations to change behaviors.

I'd be fine with taxing fast food chains and even the snack-foods kind of junk - stuff that's both high in fat and in low-quality carbs (potato chips, twinkies, etc.), because it's pretty clear that those things are both calorie-dense and encourage overconsumption in some form or another (by pricing, packaging, availability, effect on satiety, etc.).

Where I start having doubts is when we start penalizing things like avocado or even salad dressings. High-fat doesn't automatically translate to "bad". A good starting point here would be to leave "whole foods" alone. The trend you'll notice towards things labeled as unhealthy is the amount of processing they undergo - HFCS, trans-fats, white bread, and so on, all that stuff has been processed by food industries. It's rare to find a food item in a near-natural state that's qualified as "bad".

[His Divine Shadow]

I kinda stumbled onto this and figured it belongs here:
http://www.canada.com/health/intake+lit ... story.html

Seems to say fats importance is overestimated and to reduce sugars, carbs and overall caloric intake rather than focusing on fat. And I think sugar might be the worst offender of them all when it comes to making people fat. So maybe a sugar tax and ways to reduce sugar content, and HFC content as well, in foods would be an effective way to strike obesity.

[Grandmaster Jogurt]

Where I start having doubts is when we start penalizing things like avocado or even salad dressings. High-fat doesn't automatically translate to "bad". A good starting point here would be to leave "whole foods" alone. The trend you'll notice towards things labeled as unhealthy is the amount of processing they undergo - HFCS, trans-fats, white bread, and so on, all that stuff has been processed by food industries. It's rare to find a food item in a near-natural state that's qualified as "bad".

If the issue with foods like avocados is that they're good for you in moderation and bad for you if you overindulge, wouldn't a tax on them work out well? Double the price or whatever and you can still have one occasionally with little difference to your budget but it makes it less preferable to buy them in large enough amounts that it's unhealthy.