September 19, 2009

You lie! Coke.

Finally, the scientific community is jumping off the soda bandwagon.

The venerable New England Journal of Medicine said yesterday that soda is bad for you, and the only way to stop Americans from killing themselves is to tax Coke and Pepsi.

It worked with tobacco and smoking and lung disease; and it will work with corn syrup and soda and obesity.

The Wall Street Journal writes (yes, the Wall Street Journal printed this):
Beverage companies "have spent decades convincing people it's glamorous, sexy and athletic to be drinking sugared beverages, and it's time for some of that damage to be undone," said Kelly Brownell, a professor at Yale University and lead author of the paper.
The latest report joins a growing drumbeat of calls for taxes on soft drinks and other sweet beverages, which some health experts compare to calls in earlier years for cigarette taxes. Dr. Brownell originally put forward the idea of a beverage tax of a penny per ounce in a paper published in April with Thomas Frieden, who was New York City's health commissioner at the time and is now director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Of course -- just like the tobacco executives who lied for 50 years -- the corn lobby and soda executives are against anything that stops them from making Americans the most overweight and least healthy people in the developed world:

Mr. Keane said there is no comparison between soft drinks and cigarettes. "Tobacco kills, directly and irrefutably," he said. "Soft drinks don't. You can be a healthy person and have a soft drink. You can't say the same about smoking. The public gets that."
Remember for years those same executives denied tobacco killed. Now they are telling you the same lies.

September 12, 2009

School lunches get a "F" for nutrition


When you send your children to school, you expect at a minimum, safety.

But in most schools, there's a hidden danger. There's always been bad jokes about bad school cafeteria food. But the truth is even worst. That food could kill your children with its fatty, calorie-laden, salty food.

One parent is fighting back.

The USDA's food pyramid schema emphasizes meals where fruits,vegetables and grains are take up most of a plate of food while meat, dairy and sweets have very little room on the plate. Obviously, this is the reverse of a school lunch menu. These are hard economic times and school lunch issues can easily be forgotten.

But how we can we stand by and let our children eat food that is more chemicals than actual food? By offering the current options for school lunches, Congress is sitting idly by giving the children obesity. This will lead to and eariler onset of diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes.

Read more: Bad school lunches

There's an obese elephant in Obama's health plan


It's clear reading Michael Pollan in the NY Times that obesity, poor eating and the excess calories plied by fast food restaurants are costing Americans billions of dollars, maybe even trillions of dollars.

The real enemy of Americans -- the enemy that will tax us to death -- is American food. Until we address this issue any reform in health care is just moving the deck chairs on the Titanic.

The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care. The president has made a few notable allusions to it, and, by planting her vegetable garden on the South Lawn, Michelle Obama has tried to focus our attention on it. Just last month, Mr. Obama talked about putting a farmers’ market in front of the White House, and building new distribution networks to connect local farmers to public schools so that student lunches might offer more fresh produce and fewer Tater Tots. He’s even floated the idea of taxing soda. (Read more...)