Also alcohol only kills 80k or so Americans per year, way less than smoking or sugar.
I don't think it's clear what is an "addiction", as addiction is part of how humans (and all brains) work. reinforcement of reward is necessary for normal function. The most discrete sign of addiction would be the molecular switch DeltaFosB which is manifest in behavioral and drug addictions. However, for things like sugar things are more nuanced.
The two are also hard to compare side-to-side because alcohol addiction is like 50-70% genetic, and the effects tend affect other people more severely while sugar basically harms the person who eats it.
That's the genetic fallacy. They link to a number of other sources from that article with supporting information such as a Connecticut College study and a Princeton University study. I would deem university sources "good" (although you're still subject to cherry-picking and the like)
But on the other hand, consuming sugar mainly only harms yourself. People that consume sugar (usually) don't go kill innocent people or tear apart their family or cause all sorts of permanent physical and mental issues in children.
See my comment re: health care costs (which everyone pays for).
We should change the law to make sure that every job pays a living wage, so that people are not forced to work 60+ hours per week at irregular hours plus commute time etc. just to survive. We should increase social support for families and children. We should strive to reduce the cost of housing, transportation, healthcare, and education.
Our society is rich enough to dramatically increase public funding for primary and secondary education and adequately train and support career teachers, dramatically increase funding for social workers, mental health professionals, etc.
I always love the 'teachers' pay discussions and argument. While there are many teachers that are dedicated and do a great job there are also many who go into it for the (at one point not sure if it's true everywhere still) guaranteed retirement money and summers off. Also if a career doesn't pay enough for whatever lifestyle you want or place you want to live perhaps you can give thought to either relocating somewhere else or before you pick that career (for whatever reason) what the pay and benefits are for your choice. For sure not everyone is in a position to do this but my guess is most don't even give that thought. Meaning for example they decide to become a teacher in a very expensive place (NYC let's say) and then even at $90k per year can't afford to lead a decent life style. They could probably move 60 miles west from NYC (to say rural Pennsylvania) and earn less and have a better life. But then they wouldn't be in NYC, right? And they've decided they have to be there. As any immigrant who has left their family and the familiarity of a foreign country would tell you sometimes you have to relocate somewhere else if it's not good where you are.
> so that people are not forced to work 60+ hours per week at irregular hours plus commute time etc
You'd have to look at the total picture of how they are spending their money though.
Well not that it would ever happen but why should I pay for someone's dangerous and/or foolish risky activity? (Rescue, health care and so on). People often act as if there is a large pot of money sitting around to cover any and all mistakes and life choices someone makes.
Important to point out that the negative health impact of any 'vice' (and you can consider sugar a vice given this discussion) go way beyond just 'death'. There are so many negative impacts that are significant vs. just 'how many people die'. For example health care costs and related health problems (which result in economic impact as well as costs for everyone).
I am suspicious about this claim because there are plenty of people and families ruined directly as a result of alcoholism. I don’t think sugar addiction is causing nearly as much trouble as alcoholism, despite being a more widely consumed and easily available substance.
Obesity has a variety of contributing factors, (lack of) access to actual healthy food, lack of physical exercise, high calorie intake (certainly aided by sugar), ...
Here's some pictures of guys with that build: https://www.height-weight-chart.com/600-230.html
They're not very fit, but they look "a bit fat/chubby" to my eyes - not dangerously unhealthy like your comment seems to imply.
I still have 26.8 BMI and i'm aiming 23-24 as i'm not a very muscular guy.
I'll have to agree though, alcoolism is worst than low obesity. Etanol is as bad as fructose for the liver, and worst for everything else too.
Also let's not overlook how alcohol could contribute to obesity either.
Not to mention sugar is not the only cause of obesity anyway. Sedentary lifestyle, hormones, gut bacteria, and the portion sizes in the US are all likely causes.
If you could wave a magic wand, wouldn't most obese people prefer a healthy weight? In aggregate, we can add up individual decisions and call the average "human nature." The actions of society have forced individuals to live with bodies that don't function as well as they could, so it makes sense for us to do something about the problem.
How well do we understand the causes of the obesity epidemic? Is sugar responsible for, say, 10% or 90% of the total? If we wish to progress toward a low-sugar future, then it would be good to have an estimate of how much good it would do.
Whereas the oft-quoted figures for smoking and sugar are pretty much all about things like increased cancer or heart disease risk.
I'm not sure what the numbers would be like if you _did_ include those diseases in the alcohol death figures, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up somewhere between smoking and sugar.
NIDA puts the overall US national cost of tobacco use at $300 billion and of alcohol use at $249 billion.
It's impossible to become physically dependent on sugar, whereas an alcoholic can die if they quit cold turkey.
You can still eat less sugary stuff in general (which is what most people do). Changing your taste is not addiction, it's a reasonable shift in preferences.
> only kills 80k or so Americans per year
Society may care more about alcohol addiction because it tends to affect people other than the alcohol consumer.
Another opened a horse holiday farm, whose abbreviation - "WTK", following the brand's well recognizable name - happens to sound pretty much like "wódka" :)
Edit: Prohibition on advertising is not prohibition on alcohol. I reject the relevance of this suggested equivalency. There is no risk of organized crime getting supercharged by a prohibition on alcohol advertisements.
I think you really do gotta pick one there, because each implies the other's opposite.
You don't really even need two different studies to demonstrate "demand is higher in the presence of advertising" and "demand is lower in the absence of advertising". It's mathematically impossible to experimentally demonstrate one without also demonstrating the other.
Not entirely sure where I'm going with this. But I would say that failure to prove that a group of people responds to advertising is not the same thing as proving that a group of people does not respond to advertising. So, if we really have demonstrated that banning advertising didn't have an effect on demand for alcohol in Russia, we'd expect to also see that alcohol companies don't even want to advertise their products in Russia, because they know it would just be wasting money. Do we see that?
If you advertise a craft beer to take share from budwiser, its possible that no additional beer was drank, but the ads were still effective
In other words, the reason a 40 year old coal miner with black lung drinks every day might be different from the reason a 19 year old frat bro drinks on friday and saturday evenings.
Is it reasonable to say that people wash their clothes more often because there's ads for laundry detergent on tv? I think these ads were designed to make you grab their product when you're in the super market because you've seen their brand before. I remember I recently bought a bottle of shampoo and realized the only reason i grabbed this particular one was that i immediately recognized it because i saw their ads on TV over a decade ago.
If we assume that most people drink socially, then I think it's not unreasonable to think that consumption doesn't really increase with advertising. You probably don't go out with friends for a beer more often because you saw an ad for a particular brand of beer.
>You probably don't go out with friends for a beer more often because you saw an ad for a particular brand of beer.
That's an unjustified assumption. It may very well be the case that "go out with friends for a beer" is such a popular default because it's depicted in advertising and media so often. If your only choice was to drink, then it's easy to see that advertising for alcohol is solely about influencing which alcohol you pick. But that's not the real world, where drinking does compete for attention with other activities.
Alcohol consumption is primarily a cultural phenomena (consumption rates vary GREATLY from country to country. In France people drink 12.2 liters of pure alcohol a year, while in Turkey they drink 2 per year. Neither of these countries are even on either extreme...) Cultures can be changed; history has shown that there is no such thing as an immutable culture. Advertising impacts culture, that is well documented. All of these things we should know. So to suggest that demand for alcohol is immutable seems quite absurd.
I'm not sure how you came to the conclusion that I suggested this. I'm also not interested in an emotional discussion on alcohol advertisement bans, because I frankly don't care.
Please don't put words in my mouth though.
I'm for ban, but I can't even find any sources saying it had no effect (or the opposite). Anyone can help?
German constitutional principles only permit restricting basic rights (this seems to affect free speech, at least in its US definition) if it is "proportional" (verhältnismäßig) - restricting only what is absolutely necessary to reach a legitimate goal.
More specifically, it has to be suitable, necessary, and appropriate/non-excessive ("geeignet, erforderlich und angemessen").
A law that doesn't achieve the stated goal would fail the "suitable" test.
Are you sure about that? It has negatively affected millions of people in the US.
"A new study published in JAMA Psychiatry this month finds that the rate of alcohol use disorder, or what's colloquially known as “alcoholism,” rose by a shocking 49 percent in the first decade of the 2000s."
One in eight American adults.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/...
While there are so many fun activities not involving alcohol. Seems like most of team building events nowadays boils down to pretentious dinner plus drinking to celebrate?
Another thing we can do is to demand an FDA-approval process for recreational drugs! Dr. David Nutt has been developing a safer alcohol alternative, Alcarelle [1], but is having trouble finding a foothold in the marketplace as we have no process for safe-substance certification!
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/alco...
I've lived in others where Alcohol advertising is banned, availability is limited to Government-run stores at certain times, and the taxes are very high.
Binge drinking and general abuse seemed to be much higher in the latter. Particularly people seemed to get drunk before leaving the house, or used drugs, since both were cheaper than buying alcohol at a venue.
If anything is going to be restricted in the form of tax or advertising, hard spirits should bear the brunt instead of beer and wine. It might also make sense to loosen up taxes at licensed venues, which are controlled environments with trained bartenders and security.
I think even the larger cohort studies failed to connect joint smoking with ear/nose/throat/lung cancer, much to the consternation of people who like to throw down the "combusting and inhaling anything has to be bad for you" statement.
Enjoy your drugs, but don't kid yourself that you are consuming bacteria excrement for your health.
Do you eat yoghourt?