Soda Sugar Comparisons | Hacker News Reader

Soda Sugar Comparisons

xkcd.com

12 pointsayanai4 comments

In a couple decades people are going to look back at the 1990's/2000's as a savage time - large tracts of the earth desperately poisoning themselves daily and being totally unconcerned by it.

According to the CDC[1] Diabetes incidence in the US has increased from roughly 2.5% to 7% since 1990.

The numbers are:

* 1980 - 2.54%

* 1990 - 2.52%

* 2000 - 4.40%

* 2010 - 6.95%

Unless legislation similar to that applied to cigarettes is introduced this train is going keep speeding further out of control. At least there are now increasing numbers of advocacy groups trying to make progress on the legislative side of things[2].

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/statistics/slides/long_term_tre... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/17/upshot/soda-tax-passes-in...

A big difference is that drinking soda has no effect on the person next to you. Another difference is that drinking soda occasionally likely has as much effect on your overall health as occasionally eating ice cream or a candy bar, which is to say, not that much. Another difference is that sugar and caffeine is much less of an addictive substance than nicotine.

To equate ingesting sugar with inhaling (and exhaling) carcinogens is pretty unhelpful.

Of course, there is more of a sliding scale, where a population en masse ingesting way too much sugar combined with a sedentary lifestyle can be a bigger health crisis than cigarettes, but that has much more to do with culture than the actual fact of the food itself.

These comparisons are actually pretty weak. Their effect on me as a reader is significantly dampened when you look at the duration of time required to consume the edibles on the right hand side.

A week to consume a bottle of frosting? Considering how much frosting is on a single slice of cake I'm really not bothered by this.

Four gallons of Skittles over 6 months? I guess if you're snacking regularly, just as regularly as you're drinking soda, that's not really a whole lot.

What makes it seem the most reasonable is consuming an entire 20-foot candy counter in 3 years. 3 years. Really? If you said a 20-foot candy counter in 3 months, my eyebrows might raise slightly.

I know we all love XKCD, but there's really no reason for a weeks-old cartoon to be on HN IMHO.

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