We went to a ball game last night, the A’s and White Sox at Phoenix Memorial Stadium. I didn’t think tickets would be a problem, but the place was packed. We ended out far down the right field line in a section with many young people. I could not help but notice as I watched them moving about that they were carrying in mountains of bad food – chips and soda – and that most of them were overweight, many morbidly so. And so young. As I looked at the food I thought the hot dogs were the least of the problem – it is those massive sodas. They serve that stuff in buckets, and it makes them fat.
New York Mayor Bloomberg has taken a lot of heat for his soda proposal but it is the right thing to do. Fuck so-called “freedom of choice.” We need information before we can make a smart choice, and some powerful force does not want us to have that information. They just want us to choose Coke or Pepsi and call it freedom. Just like our elections, it’s not choice. It’s just an illusion of choice.
People need to know that those sodas are not free, that they carry a huge cost in terms of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and so many other chronic problems on display at ball games. Food manufacturers are not the people to rely on for public policy. They can’t help themselves. People like sugar, especially kids. Food corporations are not about to tell kids not to drink so much soda. It’s not in their interest.
Science journalist Gary Taubes makes an interesting point based on something doctors don’t study and nutritionists don’t know anything about: basic nutrition. He says that it is like so much else in life, counterintuitive. People don’t get fat because of lack of exercise. Rather, people don’t exercise because they are fat. If they could lose weight, they would exercise more because exercise is fun and feels good. But it does not cause weight loss. Mere exercise is not our solution. Eating less is not our solution.
Getting away from 1) sugar, and 2) sugar, is the answer. Refined flour seems to be a problem as well, but sugar, or simple carbs, and especially those in the form of high-fructose corn syrup, is the devil in disguise.
This is all well-known but hidden from view, as public policy in our country is left to for-profit corporations that suffer from perverse incentives. Three examples come to mind, and no links. You’re on your own.
One was a BBC TV show I was watching about a curmudgeon British doctor who leaves the city and moves to a rural area. It’s not about him or the show, which is cute, but rather the backdrop, or what is just known to be true and so not even questioned. A regular patient, a recurring character, comes to him with an embarrassing problem, and assuming it is his weight, the doctor offers that if he needs to lose weight, he should cut back on the carbs and eat more meat. The doctor says it matter-of-factly. No pills or diets, no gym. Just eat more protein and fat, fewer carbohydrates. Whoever wrote that line in the script was not being subversive. It is just something well known outside our country.
Another example: The movie Descendents, about George Clooney playing George Clooney in Hawaii: George Clooney’s wife is on her death bed and a visitor is a very bitchy full-of-herself kid who is obnoxious and annoying. She visits George Clooney and George Clooney’s death-bedded wife and George Clooney’s kids and makes it a point to say she is on a low-carb diet. She is a really contemptible and disgusting kid.
And one more: A movie (made for TV?) about the 2008 campaign and Sarah Palin, as if it is unusual to have a stupid person run for (and be elected to) high office. They are grilling Sarah for the debate and she has checked out. She’s overwhelmed, and has become almost catatonic. Finally Woody Harrelson’s character says to Julianne Moore’s Sarah, in complete frustration, “Miss Palin, you’ve got to get off that low-carb diet!”
Those are not accidental lines, any more than it is an accident that a bottle of Tylenol PM sits prominently at Charley Harper’s bedside, where most of the plot of Two and A-Half Men takes place. Scripts for TV shows and movies are primarily advertising vehicles sandwiched in between advertising, and some group with heavy influence is threatened by simple good nutrition and trying to make it very uncool to avoid sugars, using Sarah Palin and a prima donna bitchy teenager as examples of what happens to a sugar-deprived brain.
That is where public policy about nutrition comes from in this looney-bin of a country – food corporations.
Go to a ball game some time, and sit in the cheap seats. Tell me we don’t have a problem, and that those 32 ounce sodas being lugged in by 250 pound kids are not a large part of it. Try to have an intelligent discussion about it, as Bloomberg did. See where it gets you.
Piece of Mindful 
A few more flights down the stairwell leads to a door with a sign that says neurotrasmitters. On that floor, all the messages are controlled. How you feel has a lot to do with what you do, and habits that form in that uninturrupted dance of life. If we know nothing about how our brain functions, left to alter undesirable behavior by accident. Marketers know how brains work. To level the playing field we all need that same basic knowledge. It’s a place to start.
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A couple questions.
Did you take your hat off when they played the national anthem?
I traded some beef on the hoof for Bitcoins. Wouldn’t that be an ultimate free trade transaction?
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No, do not take hat off. My hat, my head, my business.
Sounds like you’re dodging taxes, not that I care. Grown-ups don’t do that.
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Mark, your Catholic upbringing is showing. First you have a strong hard hitting opinion that’s pro Bloomberg social engineering on soda sizing, and then you backdoor reprimand Swede for his suspected tax avoidance transaction. And you can leave your hat on like all of the great rebel Catholics.
Me, I could care less about a stupid soda law in NYC. Better to fight sugar abuse and hidden sugar pushing though science education and anti-meth style or anti-cigarette style campaigns.
I have no problem having the government determine scientifically whether and how much sugar is healthful. If science shows sugar is killing us then the government has an obligation to act. Especially on the added sugar/corn syrup in lots of prepared foods. While just banning extra-large soda is useful from an educational stand point, from a legal stand point it’s shitty law (which is why it was tossed) and it’s annoying. But lots of laws are annoying. I wouldn’t go to jail to defend my right to drink sugar water in as big of containers as i damn well please. I don’t drink much soda.
The great street singer Steve Clark used to play a song “I’d Like to Be a Tax Resister (but i just can’t make enough.)”
“I can’t make enough to not pay taxes and to do my civil crime
I’d refuse to sign up for the draft but they don’t want me this time
Let me tell you brothers, times are getting tough
I’d like to be a tax resistor, but I just can’t make enough.”
I’m not a very good outlaw. I find it far easier to just pay what I owe and be done with it. I had a friend who bought a car with turquoise. Would you sell cattle for turquoise, Swede, and wouldn’t that be an even freer market transaction?
I usually take my hat off for the SSB, but would defend any ones decision to leave their hat on or take it off. To each there own. I’m lucky I don’t live in the ghetto and have to not wear red or blue or whatever.
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Swede’s concept of economics are juvenile notions implanted in him by Rand and encouraged by suggestion via his authority figures. As I said, I don’t care about his goofy maneuvers, but paying taxes is part of the deal with us grown-ups. I sure don’t like it, especially that goddamned out-of-control war spending. Not taking off my hat is my own small form of protest, and I have been accosted by Rednecks when I don’t oblige their fantasies about our fake reality and bow before the naked emperor.
The science is well understood and documented, has been for over a century, which is why I gave the BBC TV show example, to show that in other cultures it is no secret. It is suppressed and obscured here because of the power of sugar marketing corporations in the Dept of Agriculture and in our cultural media. Sugar in quantities like 32 oz sodas is poisonous and extremely harmful, and is killing people, costing us billions in health care costs for diabetes alone.*
What the sugar marketing companies are doing with the overt and covert advertising (the other two examples) is making public policy. Bloomberg is openly and honestly doing that too, and look at the fuss he created. We’re fucked up.
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*Nutritionists are trained to teach us to avoid fat and too much sugar and concentrate on vegetables, but don’t know how harmful carbohydrate-intensive diets with huge amounts of starch in French fries, breads and pasta (pizza) are adding to our
wastewaist lines. That’s why I said that nutritionists know very little about nutrition, and again, their scientific background is supported by science funded by corporations that market corn-based processed food. (Concepts like “trans-fat” are complete bullshit, but are jargonny and make them sound sciency.)LikeLike
I was wondering if there’s a ton on depositors in Cyprus right now that wished they had some Bitcoins.
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Just wondering of your brain ever lets go with anything other than small farts.
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