Should sugar be controlled like tobacco and alcohol

devil_in_a_blue_dress

Somebody pass me the chicken processed in China, my teeth are starting to rot from eating a 5 pound bag of sugar.

The_Enginerd

So. 8.00 dollars for a bag of sugar you can't buy until you're 21?

I'll ferment it into alcohol. It'll be safer that way.

NonnyMary

if they think regulating sugar is gonna do it, they need to start next with fast food.

i dont believe in the government being a nanny state. we should be able to regulate ourselves, even if we wanted to eat all the sugar we want.

Acg67

http://arch1design.com/blog/2012/02/should-sugar-be-controlled-like-alcohol-and-tobacco/

According to a team of UCSF researchers it should. They maintain, in a new report, that sugar is fueling a global obesity pandemic, contributing to 35 million deaths annually worldwide from non-communicable diseases like diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Non-communicable diseases now pose a greater health burden worldwide than infectious diseases, according to the United Nations. In the United States, 75 percent of health care dollars are spent treating these diseases and their associated disabilities.

In the Feb. 2 issue of Nature, Robert Lustig MD, Laura Schmidt PhD, MSW, MPH, and Claire Brindis, DPH, colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), argue that sugar’s potential for abuse, coupled with its toxicity and pervasiveness in the Western diet make it a primary culprit of this worldwide health crisis.

This partnership of scientists trained in endocrinology, sociology and public health took a new look at the accumulating scientific evidence on sugar. Such interdisciplinary liaisons underscore the power of academic health sciences institutions like UCSF.

Sugar, they argue, is far from just “empty calories” that make people fat. At the levels consumed by most Americans, sugar changes metabolism, raises blood pressure, critically alters the signaling of hormones and causes significant damage to the liver – the least understood of sugar’s damages. These health hazards largely mirror the effects of drinking too much alcohol, which they point out in their commentary is the distillation of sugar.

Worldwide consumption of sugar has tripled during the past 50 years and is viewed as a key cause of the obesity epidemic. But obesity, Lustig, Schmidt and Brindis argue, may just be a marker for the damage caused by the toxic effects of too much sugar. This would help explain why 40 percent of people with metabolic syndrome—the key metabolic changes that lead to diabetes, heart disease and cancer—are not clinically obese.

“As long as the public thinks that sugar is just ‘empty calories,’ we have no chance in solving this,” said Lustig, a professor of pediatrics, in the division of endocrinology at the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital and director of the Weight Assessment for Teen and Child Health (WATCH) Program at UCSF.

“There are good calories and bad calories, just as there are good fats and bad fats, good amino acids and bad amino acids, good carbohydrates and bad carbohydrates,” Lustig said. “But sugar is toxic beyond its calories.”

Limiting the consumption of sugar has challenges beyond educating people about its potential toxicity. “We recognize that there are cultural and celebratory aspects of sugar,” said Brindis, director of UCSF’s Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies. “Changing these patterns is very complicated”

According to Brindis, effective interventions can’t rely solely on individual change, but instead on environmental and community-wide solutions, similar to what has occurred with alcohol and tobacco, that increase the likelihood of success.

The authors argue for society to shift away from high sugar consumption, the public must be better informed about the emerging science on sugar.

“There is an enormous gap between what we know from science and what we practice in reality,” said Schmidt, professor of health policy at UCSF’s Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies (IHPS) and co-chair of UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s (CTSI) Community Engagement and Health Policy Program, which focuses on alcohol and addiction research.

“In order to move the health needle, this issue needs to be recognized as a fundamental concern at the global level,” she said.

The paper was made possible with funding from UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, UCSF’s National Institutes of Health-funded program that helps accelerate clinical and translational research through interdisciplinary, interprofessional and transdisciplinary work.

Many of the interventions that have reduced alcohol and tobacco consumption can be models for addressing the sugar problem, such as levying special sales taxes, controlling access, and tightening licensing requirements on vending machines and snack bars that sell high sugar products in schools and workplaces.

“We’re not talking prohibition,” Schmidt said. “We’re not advocating a major imposition of the government into people’s lives. We’re talking about gentle ways to make sugar consumption slightly less convenient, thereby moving people away from the concentrated dose. What we want is to actually increase people’s choices by making foods that aren’t loaded with sugar comparatively easier and cheaper to get.”

Sugar consumption also peaked 1999-2000 or right around there and has been declining...

And LOLstig?

rml_16

I think I need to go buy up a whole bunch of sugar so I can become rich when this happens.

Cranquistador

ThickMcRunFast

bookworm_847

MORE GOVERNMENT!! WE NEED MORE GOVERNMENT!!

Yes! I still come across situations where I have to think for myself. :grumble:

MoreBean13

LOLLLLLLLL

Alcohol and tobacco have no biological necessity. Sugar has nutritional value. If someone asked me for ID for the gummy bears I consume in the middle of a training run I would go apeshiz on them, very weakly because I'm glucose depleted.

cwolfman13

The problem is over population, which is leading to an exponentially larger number of stupid people in the world who use zero common sense and don't take any accountability for what they do/consume. The obesity pandemic is just evolution at work. Somehow I managed to get un-obese with sugar being a readily available and uncontrolled substance.

I put down the 32 oz big gulps and started getting my nutrition and fitness on...it was pretty easy and mostly a lot of common sense changes that did it for me.

_Waffle_

MORE GOVERNMENT!! WE NEED MORE GOVERNMENT!!

pinkstp

Nah.

People have to learn to be better for themselves, not for government exercising more and more control over what we can and can't do. Although I do think sugar/salt/fat shouldn't be added to EVERYTHING. Hard to taste the flavor of real food when corporations mask it with additives and "natural" (read: artificial) flavoring.

IsisRosa

All joking aside, I think the first step is education. Sugar is in practically every processed food and most people, who do not read labels, do not know this. In addition to that, I firmly believe that sugary foods (i.e. candy, sodas etc) should not be sold in schools.

Minnie2361

Tax It Tax It Tax It There are taxes on tobacco and alcohol.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/06/while-soda-tax-debate-continues-in-the-us-taxes-on-unhealthy-foods-gain-traction-in-europe.html

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/06/while-soda-tax-debate-continues-in-the-us-taxes-on-unhealthy-foods-gain-traction-in-europe.html

While the movement to tax soft drinks in the United States is still in the debate stage, things are moving faster in Europe, where countries are imposing taxes on soft drinks and other unhealthy foods.

Last year in Denmark, the cost of a container of butter went up about 30 percent because of a tax on saturated fats. Hungary and Finland introduced taxes on soft drinks and other high-fat and -sugar foods. And the French government approved a controversial tax on colas and other sweetened beverages.

About the tax in France, Laming said, "It's a revenue-raising measure; it falls on soft drinks that contain added sugar. But it also falls on calorie-free soft drinks with artificial sweeteners, so there's no pretense that this is an obesity-related tax. And while we understand that governments have got to raise revenue, they shouldn't single out individual products for doing so.http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2012/06/while-soda-tax-debate-continues-in-the-us-taxes-on-unhealthy-foods-gain-traction-in-europe.html

At about 9 cents a liter, the French levy is relatively small; it was passed as a part of that country's austerity program. But the amount was enough for Coca-Cola to threaten to pull some investment from the country.

Also last year, British Prime Minister David Cameron said he would consider a "fat tax" on some foods, saying the American obesity rate "should be a wake-up call" for his country.

The British Medical Journal published an article last month suggesting at least a 20 percent tax -- not just on soft drinks but also on other unhealthy foods -- would be needed to curb soft drink consumption and reduce obesity.

And another report this year, by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, advocated for taxes on unhealthy foods, saying that at least one in two people in OECD member countries is overweight or obese. "Revenues from taxes on unhealthy foods can be substantial," the report said, and "this money could be used to provide subsidies for healthy foods and to pay for health-education campaigns."

"We're not saying, and I don't think anybody is saying, that these taxes are a panacea and will cure obesity," said Oliver Mytton, an Oxford researcher and lead author of the British Medical Journal article. "We're just saying they're an important measure that should be pursued along with other measures."

Mytton* cited a study estimating that a 20 percent tax on sugary beverages in the United States would reduce the obesity rate by 3.5 percent. The tax would have less of an effect on obesity in Britain, where soft drink consumption is lower in general, he said.

TodayImEvolving

According to Brindis, effective interventions can’t rely solely on individual change, but instead on environmental and community-wide solutions, similar to what has occurred with alcohol and tobacco, that increase the likelihood of success.

Basically, it isn't up to obese people to change themselves. It's up to society to change obese people.
Lol, what? :indifferent:

nomeejerome

MiloBloom83

MORE GOVERNMENT!! WE NEED MORE GOVERNMENT!!

Somehow, this is Obama's fault.

BrainyBurro

There should be a logic question that must be answered before every forum post.

no logic needed... a simple "what's 2 + 2 = ?" would suffice.

Minnie2361

The problem is over population, which is leading to an exponentially larger number of stupid people in the world who use zero common sense and don't take any accountability for what they do/consume. The obesity pandemic is just evolution at work. Somehow I managed to get un-obese with sugar being a readily available and uncontrolled substance.

I put down the 32 oz big gulps and started getting my nutrition and fitness on...it was pretty easy and mostly a lot of common sense changes that did it for me.

Survival of the fittest, the clean eaters will survive and the obese will fall away.

Thomasm198

JFC!