I disagree. I had a bad bowel obstruction once after minor surgery. I was backed up for over a week. My doctor told me to head straight to the local mall and get a Cinnabon. It flushed me out like it was opening the gates of the Erie Canal.
It was a miracle. The doctor later told me that he is 14 for 16 for getting people to start pooping again through Cinnabon.
In this case, it's the 15 teaspoons of sugar that helps the medicine go down!
My doctor quite literally “prescribed” a can of Pepsi: the carbonation and acidity did the trick! Now I keep a bottle of soda water in the fridge for all meals :)
"The company anticipated mega sales when it opened bakeries in a handful of Seattle-area QFCs in 1996. Instead, remembers Greg, “We’d get a three-month boost, and sales would just die.” In marketing speak, Cinnabon suffers from high levels of “product fatigue.” In real talk, it’s not the type of thing most people can eat on a regular basis and maintain their self-respect—or their pant size. Grocery store regulars eventually learn to resist the siren song of icing, dough, and cinnamon goo."
In any case, you choose to smoke, you choose to eat too much, you choose to do things - while yes, you can get addicted to nicotine (and likely will), and you might get addicted to junk food - you made the choice in the first place - its not as if the risks are unknowns.
While I'm in favor of a gradual delegalization of tobacco, banning food is beyond the pale for me - moderated consumption of even calorie bombs like cinnabon, has not been proven harmful - what alternative do you have?
Please don’t say “you made the choice” when talking about substance abuse, regardless of the substance. While I’d advocate outlawing tobacco, I think products based on sugar should carry a hefty tax to fund healthcare costs and dissuade their consumption.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/brainwaves/is-sugar-rea...
Internalize the economic externalities. You can lead an unhealthy life if you want, but you should pay for it.
Are you sure? You also said:
>While I’d advocate outlawing tobacco, I think products based on sugar should carry a hefty tax to fund healthcare costs and dissuade their consumption.
Were you talking about costs related to private insurance, or government-imposed taxes?
To be clear, I'm for both, as I believe that government should provide a single payer system and activities that make you unhealthy and have an excessive cost to treat should be taxed to fund those treatments.
In other words, taxes can influence behavior, regardless of the role of "choice".
> “Let’s face it, people really want to avoid us,” Greg Komen once told an audience. “We have to get in your way.”
What if this were a tech company? Facebook got a lot of heat for supporting an experiment where they influenced people’s emotions.
This seems a lot worse because there are negative mental and physical effects. And they can’t even try and justify it with any sort of “connecting the world” style message. It’s purely about making cash.
The difference is, facebook is targeted in such a way to encourage constant engagement, and Cinnabon markets itself in such a way as to encourage occasional engagement.
Let’s regulate our way to utopia.
Meanwhile, there is the similar perverse truth that bad regulations got us into some of our current situation. In particular, the sugar and gun lobbies were remarkably effective at promoting their topics.
So, by all means, if you are just trying to rhetorically shut down conversation; keep at it. Just please don't be surprised to find nobody wants to talk back at you someday.
To clarify — I think people should be free to buy or sell any food product. I don’t think we should punish a seller because buyers happen to overbuy the product.
I think the goverment’s role should be limited to punishing bad actors. For example, a seller who deceives or cheats buyers.
For me, I see it less about limiting peoples freedoms, and more about moving delayed costs up front. People are still free to buy/sell most any food product. However, some appear to have a marked impact on society, but in a delayed fashion.
That is, you won't get sick from drinking 32 ounce sodas the day you drink them. However, you are likely to get addicted to them and they will make you unhealthy eventually. Increasing the costs moves some of that pain early, so that it is easier to make the choice to avoid.
Do I think this is perfect? No. Not even close. Nor do I think people should be disallowed from buying stuff like this. I do think more of the proceeds should go to making people healthy or at least educated. Going into the producers of these products doesn't help the health, and the way marketing works, they become less educated on the risks of these products. There is a reason we had to regulate the hell out of cigarettes, for example. And I don't shed any tears over that.
On one hand, yes, it does make sense that increasing the prices of cigarettes, for example, decreases the number of people who smoke. That’s a nice result.
On the other hand, the sin taxes hit poor people the hardest. First, the incremental increase is a larger percentage of a poor person’s budget. Second, humans do not have a linear response to price changes — to achieve the desired cessation rate, you might have to massively increase prices, which exacerbates the first point. Third, one could argue that rich people can afford a multitude of stress relievers and therapy methods. Poor people cannot afford that, so the sin tax is a draconian method.
Does it have the problems you are listing? Yes, absolutely. However, they already have problems that they will just have to pay for later in some of these. This is forcing some of those extra costs to be factored into the decision in the first place.
Whether people agree with deploying these tools is one thing, but it's clear that even the fear of regulation is enough to make companies act. Coke has been heavily invested in zero calorie drinks for a while now, and candy companies have been self-imposing size restrictions.
I am not convinced simply by the obvious statement that corporations will respond to the threat of regulation. The advent of Coke Zero does not prove effective fighting of obesity.