enraged_camel posted:

It's not that a six-year-old is running their lives. It's a combination of two things:

a) Most parents want their kids to be happy
b) Most parents want their kids to stop whining and shut the hell up

Feeding the kid fast-food accomplishes both of these goals, and it doesn't cause any immediate short-term harm (and unfortunately, the long-term harm is still contradicted by many marketing campaigns and even research).


Both cigarettes and liquor are illegal and much more obviously harmful than fast-food. Giving them to a child is child-abuse.

PT6A posted:

Cigarettes, yes. Liquor, no (at least not in Canada). Minors are unable to purchase alcohol or consume it in a licensed establishment, but parents/guardians may provide it in a private home legally.

I think marketing to tweens and teens, and making sure that school food is more nutritious (and banning junk food in schools), is more important than restricting happy meals or whatever. A 12-year-old probably has a bit of money and some degree of agency, yet very limited rationality -- ergo, it's much more important to protect them from predatory marketing than to protect a 6-year-old, because the 6-year-old ultimately can't make their own choice about loving anything.

quote:

Research has shown that young children—younger than 8 years—are cognitively and psychologically defenseless against advertising.6–9 They do not understand the notion of intent to sell and frequently accept advertising claims at face value.10 In fact, in the late 1970s, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) held hearings, reviewed the existing research, and came to the conclusion that it was unfair and deceptive to advertise to children younger than 6 years.11 What kept the FTC from banning such ads was that it was thought to be impractical to implement such a ban.11 However, some Western countries have done exactly that: Sweden and Norway forbid all advertising directed at children younger than 12 years, Greece bans toy advertising until after 10 PM, and Denmark and Belgium severely restrict advertising aimed at children.12

quote:

Advertisers have traditionally used techniques to which children and adolescents are more susceptible, such as product placements in movies and TV shows,26 tie-ins between movies and fast food restaurants,18 tie-ins between TV shows and toy action figures or other products,7 kids' clubs that are linked to popular shows, and celebrity endorsements.27 Cellular phones are currently being marketed to 6- to 12-year-olds, with the potential for directing specific advertisers to children and preteens. Coca-Cola reportedly paid Warner Bros. Studios $150 million for the global marketing rights to the movie “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone,”28 and nearly 20% of fast food restaurant ads now mention a toy premium in their ads.29 Certain tie-in products may be inappropriate for children (eg, action figures from the World Wrestling Federation or an action doll that mutters profanities from an R-rated Austin Powers movie).

Children's advertising protections will need to be updated for digital TV, which will be in place before 2010. In the near future, children watching a TV program will be able to click an on-screen link and go to a Web site during the program.30 Interactive games and promotions on digital TV will have the ability to lure children away from regular programming, encouraging them to spend a long time in an environment that lacks clear separation between content and advertising. Interactive technology may also allow advertisers to collect vast amounts of information about children's viewing habits and preferences and target them on the basis of that information.31

quote:

Advertisers spend more than $2.5 billion/year to promote restaurants and another $2 billion to promote food products.56 On TV, of the estimated 40 000 ads per year that young people see, half are for food, especially sugared cereals and high-calorie snacks.29,57 Healthy foods are advertised less than 3% of the time; children rarely see a food advertisement for broccoli.58 Increasingly, fast food conglomerates are using toy tie-ins with major children's motion pictures to try to attract young people.59 Nearly 20% of fast food ads now mention a toy premium in their commercials.29 Several studies document that young children request more junk food (defined as foods with high-caloric density but very low nutrient density) after viewing commercials.60–63 In 1 study, the amount of TV viewed per week correlated with requests for specific foods and with caloric intake.61 At the same time, advertising healthy foods has been shown to increase wholesome eating in children as young as 3 to 6 years of age.64

quote:

Clearly, advertising represents “big business” in the United States and can have a significant effect on young people. Unlike free speech, commercial speech does not enjoy the same protections under the First Amendment of the Constitution.90 Advertisements can be restricted or even banned if there is a significant public health risk. Cigarette advertising and alcohol advertising would seem to fall squarely into this category, and ads for junk food could easily be restricted.91

SlipUp posted:

I've had time think of some ideas since this thread began, so in addition to the others I've mentioned:

PT6A posted:

Minors are unable to purchase alcohol or consume it in a licensed establishment, but parents/guardians may provide it in a private home legally.

Solenna posted:

I hate the idea of any marketing towards kids, and honestly 12-13 would be about the youngest I could consider even vaguely acceptable. Marketing things towards young kids is seriously hosed up because they're not at the point where they can even properly distinguish advertising from non-advertising, and marketing is trying to get at them and form positive associations with various brands before they form critical thinking skills. They can't make their own choices, but they influence their parent's choices to some degree or another. 12 year olds are pretty naive, but at least they realize things aren't always true and you can talk to them about how and why advertising is bullshit, while kids under 8 are still iffy about understanding that advertising lies to them. I totally agree on the school lunch foods and really dislike the idea of fast food companies being allowed anywhere in schools.

http://mediasmarts.ca/marketing-consumerism/marketing-consumerism-special-issues-young-children

Discendo Vox posted:

PT6A posted:

Sorry for being obtuse, but what point are you making here? I agree it's a horrible idea, but it's equally legal to ply your children with booze as it is to feed them fast food, provided you do it in your own home.

enraged_camel posted:

The funny thing is that banning such marketing should be easy to do. Whichever liberal group takes on the lobbying and campaigning for that task has it easy. All they have to do is use the same "think of the children!" logic that conservative groups use when they want to pass various legislation. Except this time the argument would actually be valid.

PT6A posted:

How do you determine, objectively speaking, whether something is being marketed to minors, though? Like the point I made about alcohol advertising, you can't simply exclude minors from being influenced by your advertisements, even if you do your very best to focus them at adults. The only way it can be done, as it's done for tobacco advertising in Canada, is limit any advertising to minors-prohibited venues. That's why we have cigarette ads in bars, but nowhere else.

enraged_camel posted:

If there's a commercial break in-between two cartoons on a Saturday morning, who else would be watching at that time?

enraged_camel posted:

Certain advertisements are exclusively targeted at minors, which is obvious from their program slots. If there's a commercial break in-between two cartoons on a Saturday morning, who else would be watching at that time?

enraged_camel posted:

The difference, again, is that if someone discovered that you plied your children with booze on a regular basis, CPS (or its Canadian equivalent, whatever that is) could take them away from you and possibly charge you with child abuse.

Discendo Vox posted:

^^^^^ That's a taskforce report, not a study. At root it's a political document and should be cited and read with caution.


I think some of these are more viable than others. My responses are limited to the US.

-Personal fitness tax credits: Try and improve overall healthiness and alleviate some poverty, strongly suspected to one of the leading causes.

Historically personal tax credits have mostly been a route to systemic fraud. I'm not sure how you thin that they would alleviate poverty, or what you think the causal intersection of poverty and obesity is. You'd need to address that causal mechanism to unwind it, not give the poor money.

-Public gyms: We have public libraries to improve creativity and knowledge, why not a public institution for fitness and health? Provides a safe place to exercise at low cost and also improves public hygiene.

This is tricky because these are funded at the state or municipal level, and not generally funded very well. They'd require a massive budget restructuring pretty much nationwide. Generally these exist in some urban areas as "community centers", but the key word there is "urban" - you're not going to be able to support these easily in settings with low population density. If federal, it's not clear who would manage these- while HHS seems like a good choice, the reality is that building and running fitness centers is orthogonal to the activities of HHS; they'd be unlikely to be any good at it.

-Public Health Campaign focusing on the positive benefits of a healthy lifestyle but hitting all the hard advertising markers. ("Have great sex!")

HHS does this through many different offices already. One of my possible career goals is to generally improve these efforts.

Societal scale there are some changes I would like to see that would also positively affect obesity rates:

-Federally mandated 30 hour work week. Higher employment, less wageslave burnout.

Politically, legally, and practically, not going to happen. The list of valid exceptions alone would be massive, and the economic harm similarly so. There's a reason this isn't regulated fully at the federal level aside from federal employees. Its efficacy re: obesity is also questionable.

-Universal Preventative Health Care. Allows access to mental and physical preventative care. Psychologists and nutritionists for everyone!

General preventative care coverage already exists. Part of ACA. Nutritionists won't help- the term is unregulated. In the US, "dietitians" are licensed professionals, but the reality is that the field is deeply corrupt and subject to a variety of forms of industrial capture. A colleague once compared the national dietetics conference to the temple of Mammon. Psychologists aren't clinicians- you're thinking of psychiatrists. Due to the (partly deserved) poor reputation of the field of psychiatry, which is much better than dietetics but worse than most other clinical fields from a corruption and scientifically supported practice standpoint, there wouldn't be sufficient political will to make this happen. There also wouldn't be anywhere near enough clinicians to support either effort.

-Check Urban Sprawl, promote alternate means of transportation. Reduce dependency on cars, make them inconvenient compared to biking or transit in urban centres.

That's not actually feasible without funding the demolition and reconstruction of the entire US. efforts in places like California tend to be laughably inconsequential. The funding of new large scale mass transit systems is underway, but the overarching change in US transportation systems would take at least 50 years even if it were fully federally controlled and funded.

-Ban food marketing to children. How many kids diets have been wrecked for a lifetime at the age of six because of a red headed clown? They are not capable of making informed choices and are very susceptible to advertising techniques.

I agree with this, but it's difficult to draw lines in many cases. The primary difficulty, though, would be that FTC regulates this area (it's outside the normal FDA mandate), and is massively underfunded.

quote:

I'm not sure how you thin that they would alleviate poverty, or what you think the causal intersection of poverty and obesity is. You'd need to address that causal mechanism to unwind it, not give the poor money.

quote:

Politically, legally, and practically, not going to happen. The list of valid exceptions alone would be massive, and the economic harm similarly so. There's a reason this isn't regulated fully at the federal level aside from federal employees. Its efficacy re: obesity is also questionable.

Trent posted:

We're straying back into fast food = bad food territory I see.

Is someone arguing that a happy meal is really a larger portion of food and/or categorically less healthy than a home cooked meal?

Forming habits of moderation and occasional indulgence seems more healthy to me, long term, than a McAbstinence program.

Trent posted:

We're straying back into fast food = bad food territory I see.

Is someone arguing that a happy meal is really a larger portion of food and/or categorically less healthy than a home cooked meal?

Forming habits of moderation and occasional indulgence seems more healthy to me, long term, than a McAbstinence program.

SlipUp posted:

The extra money could be used to offset higher food prices in food desert area or to buy food more often so that people eat fresh vegetables on a regular basis rather than bulk dried starches.

quote:

By cutting back sugar for your kids, you can see dramatic improvements in just 10 days. That is pretty remarkable, if you think about it.

We typically think diets take months, or even longer, to make a positive dent. For 43 children, however, Dr. Robert Lustig and his team at University of California, San Francisco, decreased triglyceride levels by 33 points on average. The LDL -- bad -- cholesterol dropped 5 points, as did diastolic blood pressure, the lower number.

All of the children dramatically reduced their risk of diabetes, as their blood sugar and insulin levels normalized. Again, just 10 days. And while the study was done in children, there's no reason to believe the benefits wouldn't extend to adults, as well.

It speaks to what was once an unspeakable idea -- in fact, all calories are not created equal.

As much as we love the simple accounting principles of calorie counting, there are some calories that are simply worse than others, and for most people, sugar is at the top of the list. The table sugar most people know is sucrose, made up of equal parts glucose and fructose. But it is the fructose that is such a bad actor, Lustig told me. The reason why is really fascinating.

Because our bodies use glucose as the preferred energy source, it is easily metabolized and used just about everywhere and the extra is stored in our muscles or liver as glycogen.

Unfortunately, this is not the case with fructose, which is metabolized in only one place -- the liver. And, because the liver can only handle so much fructose at a time, the extra gets converted into fat. Your liver starts to accumulate fat, which is wildly unhealthy. Even worse, the excess fat spills out into your blood stream, increasing your risk of heart disease and strokes.

In ancient times, before sugar and high fructose corn syrup (which are basically the same) became so cheap to refine and produce, we only got our fructose in small amounts, when fruit fell from the trees. Heck, even honey was protected by the bees.

Nowadays, however, we consume 130 pounds a year -- or roughly 1/3 of a pound every day. Our livers, however, have not evolved to keep pace with the staggering increase. As a result, a sugary drink hits your liver like a tsunami wave, according to Lustig.

There is something else peculiar about fructose: Unlike other sources of calories, it doesn't suppress the hunger hormone, known as ghrelin. So, despite eating lots of it, you don't really feel full.

The result: you keep eating. In addition, fructose targets my favorite area of the brain, the nucleus accumbens, also known as the reward center. Turns out fructose gives the nucleus accumbens a little nudge, resulting in someone feeling rewarded, good, even euphoric, and -- you guessed it -- wanting to eat even more.

Lustig and his team wanted to make something very clear in this study.

While many diet studies derive most of their benefit from people simply eating less, it wasn't the case here. While study participants reduced their dietary sugar from 28% to 10%, it was replaced with other complex carbohydrates. Think bagels instead of pastries. The goal was not to lose weight but to isolate the impact of sugar on the body.

Full Battle Rattle posted:

What happens when you go without sugar for 10 days?

Discendo Vox posted:

I hate Lustig so drat much. I hate Gupta just as much. Every part of that is bull. HATE HATE HATE I need a minute.

enraged_camel posted:

Yep, exactly. Marketing to kids is how companies circumvent the rational decision-making process of parents. It's actually a pretty vile tactic if you think about it.

-Blackadder- posted:

"Mom! Buy me Bonestorm McDonalds or go to hell!"

PT6A posted:

I honestly have no idea. That's one of the reasons I don't think cycling is a good commuting option for a lot of people. I guess some people don't sweat much, but when I exert myself to any degree (even a brisk walk) I sweat. When I do anything that could actually be termed "exercise," I rain. Without being able to shower and change at work, bicycle commuting would simply be impossible.

Kajeesus posted:

This may shock you, but biking to work is not a strenuous activity. I live in an actual bike-friendly city, and literally everyone is capable of riding a bike as part of their daily routine without working up the athlete's funk.

A big part of the whole health issue is that people will happily declare something impossible or unfeasible with absolute conviction when they actually don't have the faintest idea of what they're talking about. Not to slam on you specifically, but that post is a perfect example.

Kajeesus posted:

This may shock you, but biking to work is not a strenuous activity. I live in an actual bike-friendly city, and literally everyone is capable of riding a bike as part of their daily routine without working up the athlete's funk.

A big part of the whole health issue is that people will happily declare something impossible or unfeasible with absolute conviction when they actually don't have the faintest idea of what they're talking about. Not to slam on you specifically, but that post is a perfect example.

MaxxBot posted:

Some people just sweat a lot regardless of whether or not their activity is particularly strenuous. The dumb thing would be to use that as an excuse to avoid physical activity.

PT6A posted:

I work out daily, including cycling 2-3 times per week. I know how much effort is involved and how much I sweat. Unless I bike very slowly indeed, I will sweat enough that bathing is necessary. It's not that it's even slightly difficult or strenuous, I just sweat like a motherfucker. Maybe it's actually a disorder or something. I get disgustingly sweaty well before I feel even the least bit tired or exerted.

I still walk most places, even with the sweating involved, but it's something that definitely makes me very self-conscious. I remember making jokes about the kid in junior high who looked like he stepped out of the shower 5 minutes into gym class, but I ended up turning into that guy.

Edit: it's literally so bad that I have to be careful about what clothes I wear, because even if I drive/ride in an air-conditioned car on a hot day, I can get a visible sweat-mark where the seatbelt touches me. Walking with a backpack on a hot day? Two giant marks where the straps rest on my shoulders and chest. It sucks.

Kajeesus posted:

I can't speak for how much people sweat, but I've never met anyone who smells after doing their daily commute.


What you're describing does not sound normal to me. I'm a very profuse sweater myself, and I'm all too familiar with the backpack sweats, but it's never been a big issue because it evaporates pretty shortly after I take it off. Do you live in a particularly humid area, maybe?

Discendo Vox posted:

I hate Lustig so drat much. I hate Gupta just as much. Every part of that is bull. HATE HATE HATE I need a minute.

vvvv I'm in a PhD program focusing on bioethics and the miscommunication of science. My long term goal is to work for one of the federal granting agencies and see to it that people like Lustig stop getting money.

enraged_camel posted:

What is "bull" about it exactly? Maybe you can take the time to actually explain it, rather than raging.

Trent posted:

And I suppose you're personally going to drive to everyone's house and tell them this? The point of a media campaign is to make sure everyone has easy access to the information and that it comes in an easy to understand format from a source that seems trustworthy. Your approach includes none of those things.


I should have realized ahead of time that you were going to fishmech the hell out of everything and written out everything in absurd detail, possibly in crayon, so even you couldn't pretend to misunderstand.
Some food is healthier than others, in the sense of providing more important nutrients, or more conducive to weight loss/maintenance, in the sense of having fewer calories, ON A PER VOLUME BASIS. This is important for several reasons. First, we humans expect a certain volume of food, both socially and biologicaly. If we could somehow eat 3000 calories (and all vital nutrients) in a single capsule, one per day, we would be miserable and hungry and feel awful. Since we are not bleep bloop robots, this is an intolerable situation for the vast majority of the population. There are foods that can keep us satiated without providing too many calories for our weight goals, but what they are, and even that they exist, is non-obvious. Furthermore, such micronutrient dense, macronutrient light foods do tend, as a rule, to be more expensive than their higher caloric density counterparts. Examples might be dark greens vs iceberg lettuce or lean cuts of meat vs cheaper, fattier meats. Similarly seafood is generally more expensive, yet POUND FOR POUND healthier than many other meats in terms of both nutrient content and caloric density. Chicken breasts are many times the price of chicken thighs. Therefore to be equally satiated, one must spend more money on breasts or consume more calories of thighs. This shouldn't be a revelation.

There is also a social factor at play. Many people don't have to work as hard to stay fit, and others simply have fewer responsibilities and find exercising easier to fit into their lives. Some are simply morr active because their hobby just happens to be an active one, and they gain a beneficial but unintended weight benefit. Many of these people unknowingly put peer pressure on friends, family and coworkers to drink more, eat more, try some of this appetizer, or just choose restaurants where eating filling but lower calorie meals is all but impossible. They aren't researching fitness and calories and weight loss BECAUSE THEY DON'T NEED TO. Smokers and nonsmokers alike know about second hand smoke, lung cancer, and the fact that there are programs to help you quit, because they were advertised (fairly heavily) to everyone, not a self-selected group. People who don't have, or don't think they have, a weight problem are often discouraging out actively harming the attempts of others AND THEY MOSTLY DON'T REALIZE IT. It is a social problem and requires a non individualistic solution.

Your nutritional libertarianism is, like all libertarianism, only functional in ideal conditions using soulless automatons in a frictionless supermarket and does not obtain in the actual world. Helps you be smug, though, I guess.

Glangurn posted:

Can grocery delivery services reach most cities in the USA? Is that sustainable say 500 years from now?

SlipUp posted:

The child's desire has overwhelming effect on the parents purchasing decisions.

Fast food is way more prevalent than in your small town. Many parents are single and/or work multiple jobs and/or in poverty and don't have the time or the energy to fight a battle with the entire fast food industry over what their picky child will eat Tuesday night and Wednesday lunch when the fast food place is offering a fee toy and all you can eat ranch.

MaxxBot posted:

It's not inherently unhealthy but it's often very calorie dense which makes it easy to inadvertently consume a ton of calories, although there are certainly really calorie dense home cooked meals you can make as well.

Discendo Vox posted:

Lustig is basically ignored in nutrition circles because he's been caught manipulating or lying about his datasets multiple times. He's built his career on claiming that sugar, especially "processed" sugar, is addictive/toxic/a conspiracy. The statements in the article are designed to frame it so that it's implied sugar has different effects on weight than other caloric sources, then doesn't discuss weight change because it had no effect. The fructose/glucose etc material has been litigated a thousand times, and is part of the ongoing conflict between corn and cane lobbies. People assume HFCS has more fructose (it doesn't), and has different health effects (it doesn't as compared with other caloric sweeteners). The other effects described are either a) the product of manipulating conditions in the study to produce an effect outside of ecological systems, or b) they sound bad but are in fact trivial and well-documented. The "calories are equal" claim is and has always been about weight. Lustig is trying to leverage it to both sides at once by implying that his "establishment" opponents have been applying it to everything. The hunger hormone element hasn't been established or demonstrated in humans-Lustig loves running a mouse model study and jumping from there to "big food is poisoning our children with the toxic addictive sweetener They don't want you to know about".

Gupta will use his credentials to support any trade group or business interest that he thinks is going to win in the medium term in a particular public opinion fight. He's probably also co-invested in or accepting side payments from an interested party.

fishmech posted:

Would it be accurate to say that Lustig is to sugar and nutrition in general, as the Seralini "study" was to GMOs?

quote:

For 10 weeks, Mark Haub, a professor of human nutrition at Kansas State University, ate one of these sugary cakelets every three hours, instead of meals. To add variety in his steady stream of Hostess and Little Debbie snacks, Haub munched on Doritos chips, sugary cereals and Oreos, too.

His premise: That in weight loss, pure calorie counting is what matters most -- not the nutritional value of the food.

The premise held up: On his "convenience store diet," he shed 27 pounds in two months.

For a class project, Haub limited himself to less than 1,800 calories a day. A man of Haub's pre-dieting size usually consumes about 2,600 calories daily. So he followed a basic principle of weight loss: He consumed significantly fewer calories than he burned.

His body mass index went from 28.8, considered overweight, to 24.9, which is normal. He now weighs 174 pounds.

But you might expect other indicators of health would have suffered. Not so.

Haub's "bad" cholesterol, or LDL, dropped 20 percent and his "good" cholesterol, or HDL, increased by 20 percent. He reduced the level of triglycerides, which are a form of fat, by 39 percent.

"That's where the head scratching comes," Haub said. "What does that mean? Does that mean I'm healthier? Or does it mean how we define health from a biology standpoint, that we're missing something?"

[...]

"I wish I could say the outcomes are unhealthy. I wish I could say it's healthy. I'm not confident enough in doing that. That frustrates a lot of people. One side says it's irresponsible. It is unhealthy, but the data doesn't say that."

Cole posted:

Buffalo Wild Wings is introducing a Mountain Dew flavored wing in honor of the Citrus Bowl.

I think if you want to help curb the problem, stop introducing poo poo like Mountain Dew flavored wings.

Old Kentucky Shark posted:

There's literally nothing in mountain dew that's worse than what we normally put on wings. Buffalo Wild Wings signature sauce is 50 calories an oz. Teriyaki sauce is 32. Mountain dew is 14. Also, buffalo wings are relatively mild as far as greasy food goes, because of their small size and expense; a 10 count will set you back about 650 calories.