Taxing junk food may help reduce obesity and improve health, researchers have found.Here's the killer part, though. After proclaiming the decrease in calories to be "significant", they tell you what they actually mean about six paragraphs down:
Patients got significantly less of their energy (calories) from soda or pizza when there was a 10% increase in the price of either, Penny Gordon-Larsen, PhD, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues reported in the March 8 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine.
A $1.00 increase in soda prices, for example, was tied to a mean of 124 fewer total daily calories, which amounted to an average weight loss of 2.34 pounds, and a decline in HOMA-IR scores of 0.42.
Got that? A $1.00 increase in a soda - notice there's no descriptor whatsoever, so we don't know if that's a 12 ounce can or a 64 ounce SuperMegaGulp - results in a whopping 124 calorie decrease. In a 2,000 calorie-a-day diet, that's all of a 6% decrease in calories for what could be a 100% increase in price.
So why stop at 10% increase, then? Why not make it 100%, like their soda example? Why not 1,000%? Make a 12 ounce can of soda cost $75, I guarantee you no one would drink it, and then watch the daily calories just plummet! Imagine the calorie savings if Big Macs cost $50 each! What could possibly go wrong? (besides driving several very large companies out of business, that is...)
Sometimes it's hard to decide if it's gross ignorance and incompetence or wicked malevolence...
That is all.
6 comments:
"wicked malevolence..." Hands Down!
Jay, I'm a lurking ex Bay Stater living in North Carolina for over 20 years. Thanks Uncle Sam for getting me out of Mass!! Anyway remember the source of this little study, UNC Chapel Hill. Where polititcal correctness is everything and anything logical is worthless!! Besides UNC is having a bad year, their basketball team can't do squat this year...LOL
Wrkngstf
To steal from Fark: Still no cure for nicotine addiction.
I'm sure this tax will not apply to diet soda. Positive. No doubt at all.
When I first read this article, two things came to mind:
1.) This is not going to work at all, because people will still shell out for their soda. They'll bitch about how expensive it is, but they'll still pay for it.
2.) Says a lot about our priorities. Beer causes so many accidental deaths that it's not even funny, yet they want to go after the soda first.
In other words, being obese makes you more of a threat to society than being drunk and trying to drive your car.
Make a 12 ounce can of soda cost $75
Then you will really see "Cola wars".
The Bloods and the Crips, selling Coke vs Pepsi on the black market.
Another 5000 "kids" murdered every year for control of that "Gold in a Can".
;)
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