BOSTON PUBLIC Health Commissioner Barbara Ferrer knows that signing a petition to the Food and Drug Administration to regulate sugar in soda is like taking the first step up Mount Everest. Few federal agencies move with the sloth of the FDA, and few move so slowly only to do so little.
“We’re doing everything we can at the local level to combat obesity,” Ferrer said in an interview last week. “But you can do only so much when companies spend billions advertising unhealthy products. It’s been frustrating that there has not been a lot of action at the federal level to clearly state what is safe to consume.’’
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It would be a better use of their time to ban the poisonous diet sugars like aspartame that have serious health risks. People have been eating sugar for millenia. These frankenfood cancer-causing "sugars" treat humanity like guinea pigs.
Although I prefer Splenda, there is no proof that aspartame in harmful. It has been the subject of a very large number studies over years and has been repeatedly labelled as harmless. I'm sure somebody somewhere has concluded otherwise. After all, there are people who still claim the Earth is flat.
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More nanny state nonsense. Let's regulate BHT, dyes, crappy hidden fat (especially corn oil) and hidden HFCS, and as Cordgrass suggests, artificial sweeteners. People know how much sugar is in soda and that their chips are saltly, and if they consume these things to excess--well, you can't fix stupid. I don't like paying for people's bad diet choices either, but I like the idea of nonsensical government regulation even less.
What about the things you don';t know about that are poison, like BPA in plastics? What else don't we know about, hidden by industry? Government regulation is the only thing protecting you, but you prefer to trust big business. How intelligent is that?
I said nothing about trusting big busness. How you managed to extrapolate that from my above comment is beyond me.
And one other point EVERY LIVING THING dies. When is some braintrust going to file a petition with the FDA to regulate death? (yes, I am being somewhat facetious...)
Death is regulated. You need a qualified death certificate to be buried.
"Death is regulated. You need a qualified death certificate to be buried."
That's not regulation. It's just a government acknowledgement that someone has died. If a skeleton is found in the woods 20 years after death, nobody argues whether they qualify.
It's similar for birth certificates, which don't regulate births. They merely record them.
Thank you, Derrick Z. Jackson, for making these suggestions. I, myself, do not salt my food including all that I cook and bake (from scratch). And there's no salt shaker on my family table. I try not to eat so-called "processed food" but long for crackers and other such foods that contain no salt. What's up w/ that? There's got to be a market for food products w/o salt? Our medical doctors certainly recommend it.
However, restaurants? I consider it a losing battle. After all, salt is the cheapest flavor enhancer on the cook's shelf. And chef's are known for salting almost each ingredient as added to a dish while it's cooking, sauteing or whatever. Some chefs are so damn accustomed to salting, salting, salting that food w/ little or no salt is foreign to them, tasting bland. For example, watch any "celebrity chef" tv program: salt, salt, and more salt.
The other problem is, of course, sugar. Hard to get around that one too. It's easy not to add sugar at home as well as stay the hell away from those heavily sugared soft drinks. But ever read the ingredient labels on products while shopping? Sugar is a heavy ingredient in a lot of products on grocery shelves.
Both salt and sugar wear lots of disguises on food product ingredients. Thus caution is recommended.
So, yes, I agree w/ you. It would be a fine day if the FDA would tell us what is a healthy limit for both salt and sugar, according to life style, age, gender, health, and activity. I wonder if there are any clinical trials on this subject published in a reliable medical peer review journal?
What about potatoes, all fried foods, hamburgers, smoked fish, frankfurters, beer, wine - the list is endless, and anyone, who like this columnist, advocate the GOVERNMENT should dictate what people should or should not eat should seek out any of the world's dictatorships where their ideas of utopia would fit right in. For the rest of the mentally functioning masses, continue to decide for yourself what you wish to eat or NOT eat and let your neighbors do likewise.
Research makes it clear that sugar is detrimental to health, and Robert Lustig, MD has provided a good argument that it is toxic. It certainly makes sense to discourage it's use. A tax is a fair way to discourage use while still allowing people to use it if they are unable to overcome their sugar addiction. The government has taken the opposite approach by subsidizing corn sugar to encourage people to consume more sugar. There are certainly problems with aspartame as well, but stevia provides a safe alternative that people can easily grown in their gardens. The research on salt is not at all clear. Those who argue that salt is detrimental claim that people can reduce their blood pressure by 1 point (e.g. if their blood pressure was 150 over 90, they could reduce it to 149 over 89) on average, and that this would save lives. Some claim that blood pressure could be reduced by up to 4 points by reducing salt, but the statistical method on this is very dubious. Others argue that reducing salt consumption will not affect blood pressure. This debate has been going on since 1940, and studies have shown conflicting results. We know that countries with the highest salt consumption have less hypertension than countries with lower salt consumption. It seems that a small part of the population (under 5% of the population) is sensitive to sodium, and that a reduction would be helpful for those individuals. We also know that potassium and magnesium lower blood pressure. Natural salts contain potassium and magnesium, and there is no evidence that natural salts raise blood pressure. Many doctors recommend using more natural salt as a way to reduce blood pressure. Refined salts are just sodium chloride so they do not have the good effects of potassium and magnesium. Gary Taubes provides a good summary of the literature on salt for the layman: http://garytaubes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/science-political-science-of-salt.pdf Given that the research on salt is so ambiguous, one has to wonder why Derrick Jackson wants to base public policy on such a flimsy foundation. Everyone agrees that licorice causes hypertension, but he does not mention any policy changes on licorice. While it's true that people don't consume as much licorice as salt, the link between licorice and hypertension is not as dubious as the link between salt and hypertension. Many of the people who support salt reduction, also claimed that people should avoid egg yolks and shellfish, and that they should consume partially hydrogenated fats (e.g. margarine), and polyunsaturated oils high in omega-6 fatty acids, such as corn oil. Their advice caused many people to die prematurely in the past, and their current advice is not any better.