Sugar is an addictive poison. These products should be outright banned. Folks can make wonderful pastries at home.
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2009/06/8187/obesity-and-metabolic...
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2009/06/8187/obesity-and-metabolic...
Sugar is sugar. What's the difference between a homemade pastry and store bought pastry?
Sugar is sugar.
Not that too much can sugar is good for you either, but it's more expensive, so before the advent of corn syrup, less was used.
The sugar is the problem and both the pastries have the same sugar. The homemade one may be marginally better but it's a distinction without a meaningful difference. The problems caused by oddball chemicals used in industrial food manufacturing are less than a rounding error compared to the problems caused by obesity.
In Australia obesity increased while sugar consumption decreased. The additives really matter and have a huge impact on human health--they are not a rounding error, but it was a great marketing tactic on behalf of various food industry groups to vilify sugar while deflecting from the other ingredients that are similarly problematic.
Which are present in home cooked baked goods too.
I know it's not as simple as just "sugar=fat" but the difference between home cooked junk food and industrially cooked junk food is vanishingly small.
In terms of chemistry/nutrition I agree. However there is a huge difference in convienence. Pastries are a huge pain in the ass to make, and consequently I only make two or three pies a year. Store bought pastries are trivial to acquire and gorge on seven days a week.
People consume less when consumption is less convenient. A billion people aren't going to start baking cupcakes every day.
I don't understand how this invalidates my point that sugar is sugar. That there is no difference between sugar in commercial goods, and sugar you add when you bake at home.
I'm sure given enough effort, I _could_ find cookies made with half the sugar and dark chocolate, but if you asked me right now, I honestly couldn't tell you where to find such a thing, let alone at a price comparable to run-off-the-mill chips ahoy (never mind the cost of baking them from scratch).
We can certainly be pedantic and say one molecule of glucose is identical to another, but the logistics of buying cookies on impulse at the supermarket vs taking out a mixer to make them on a saturday morning will realistically not likely yield identical amounts of sugar intake. There's also something to be said about the shock of learning how much butter goes into these things!
I can't effortlessly and cheaply acquire a honey bun when I've had a bad day if I have to make them at home.
You can control the amount of sugar within something you bake yourself for starter.
WHO recommends no more than 50g per day for adults, and preferably less than 25g. https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/sugar-gui...
Shifting the responsibility for solving a problem from the government towards individual consumers so that corporations can keep making money is a tried, extremely dirty and old PR strategy, originating at least with BP: https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...
According to Mintz, the production of sugar was at the heart of the transition from pre-modernity to industrial modernity. Pre-modern human diets all over the world varied widely but consisted of very little or no sugar. The production process required a ton of technological sophistication and intensive labor. Colonial era economic slavery regimes developed mostly in service of the production of sugar.
Sugar is now a huge part of diets in just about every modern culture. It really is addictive in a sense, both for individuals and in a collective economic sense (like oil, sugar consumption and production processes are dialetically self-reproducing, the argument goes).
Myself, I don't really know if we should try to constrain sugar consumption via law for moral reasons. Those efforts sometimes reek of a moralizing paternalism that I don't much care for. But the way we consume sugar, like everything else, has a history. We didn't always do it this way. We need not do it this way forever. And there's more to it than just disparate isolated individual consumption choices.
EDIT - To summarize, the way we consume sugar today is not arbitrary or "natural," but an outcome of the particular way that industrial modernity has developed.
Is that supposed to be a contradiction? It is in fruit and therefore it can't be bad? The poisonous fruit of Atropa belladonna comes to mind.
> Of course in excess it's bad, but normal sugar consumption is not an issue.
The thing is, though, that normal sugar consumption is borderline impossible in a modern diet. You have to go out of your way to avoid sugar, it requires informed decision-making and -- all too often -- purchasing relatively expensive products. Consequently, people who lack education and/or have a low-income are particularly vulnerable.
I agree with the original comment, these products should be outright banned.
People can love and care about unhealthy things without being addicted to them. Most white people would hate to give up cancer-causing time out in the sun, but that doesn't mean it's an addiction.
This attitude is more dangerous than sugar.
I mean, I'm against it. A lot of traditional foods, like fruit preserves, have added sugar.
But what is danger, exactly? People would just not have food that tastes as good...
The primary argument against that is that it puts strain on society to provide for people when they experience health issues from that. I have paid my entire life for social health programs and health insurance though, why? So I will be nannied until the age of 90, eating only approved healthy food and doing no activity that may be in some way risky?
If we are going to ban dangerous things which people do for no reason other than they enjoy it, should we go after scuba diving and mountain climbing too after we ban Snickers?
I agree, and think this is probably for the best. My opinion is that these laws are rightful when the interaction is direct and obvious. If I smoke in enclosed spaces, I am directly increasing other peoples' chance of cancer, giving them no choice over their bodies. This is analogous to how one's freedom to move their body doesn't extend to hitting other people in the face.
I do not agree with the government imposing restriction based on indirect, ambigous harm, like the "harm to society" that drinking sugary drinks which might lead to obesity causes. Harm to society has been used to justify a myriad of harmful policies. Unless there is a very clear, direct link between an action and harm to a person, the government has no business stepping in.
(Of course, this is all just my opinion, I'm presenting this as a justification for my viewpoint.)
But... that's not what Mexico's proposal is. It's also not the goal of any of these public health bans.
The goal of the bans is to prevent people from selling and profiting from unhealthy products. It doesn't stop individuals from producing and consuming whatever they want.
Healthy and unhealthy people alike like sweets. Just because some abuse it doesn't mean an outright ban is in order. And why stop at sugar?