coca cola and similar should be 18+ just like alcohol anyway
One of my favorite memories of my Dad is being out with just the two of us and we took a break for a surprise ice cream cone. Having him just to myself for a bit was pretty rare and to sit in a Dairy Queen somewhere for 30 minutes chatting and having ice cream was the absolute best.
I once quit sugar for 6 months. It was harder than quitting alcohol, nicotine or caffeine. My first super-sweet treat after those 6 months was a donut and it almost made me vomit on the first bite. The dopamine rush quickly overwhelmed my physical aversion.
Anyway, by the time I got to AIT I was so happy to not have to touch any of it, I didn't. So while my classmates went off-post on weekends and got fat on garbage I went out and had fun, but at well at the mess hall.
By the time I was out of the service (2yrs) I hadn't touched sweets/caffeine/crap in almost that whole time. I remember being able to taste the caffeine in sodas(if you've ever drunk ginseng you probably know what it tastes like), and they felt like straight syrup.
Somewhere along the way I had a girlfriend who got me back into them, and they just became a part of my life again.
Now, here I am, 40, getting rid of them again. But now it's worse because I really enjoy my morning coffee and knowing I will be replacing it with running (which I used to love until the US Army), doesn't help my motivation much.
But yea, quitting sugar and caffeine. Smoking cigarettes wasn't this hard to quit :(
During college I availed myself of all-you-can-drink soda, and pretty much stopped drinking milk. Surprise, surprise the change (coupled with stress) resulted in some pretty serious and frequently recurring GI issues.
Finally isolated the cause (docs were useless), went back on a 1+ glass of milk a day practice, and everything returned to normal.
Since then, I pretty much cut soda out of my diet as well. IMHO, if we're looking at it from a caloric perspective, there are a lot more delicious things to spend 140 calories on.
Now as an adult I am happily consuming great amount of Coca Cola, however never developed a taste for Americanized supermarket style sweet treats (Oreos, etc. )
But to each their own. I think this whole guessing the best diet for kids can go any way because it's just one of many factors. Though there are definitely known risk factors, e.g. how drunkenness at a young age greatly increases the risk of alcoholism later on.
If you specifically deny your kids sugar and tell them it's the debbil and all that, you're gunning for the disorder when they finally rebel and try the forbidden carbohydrate.
However, if it's just not a thing. You never point it out, you never mention it, you just don't have sugar around, then they're more geared for the dismissal of it.
Sugar is more addicting than alcohol and it definitely is mood-altering, though it seems the effects are more subtle and less severe than alcohol
Parents should be jailed if they fed them cakes.
Diet soda, dunno what to do with that one.
Let people decide for themselves? Alcohol is unhealthy, so it should be banned. Hamburgers are high fat and environmentally impactful, so those should be banned, too. Let's not forget cigarettes....
Yes people should opt to not consume unhealthy stuff, but how much authoritarianism do you really want?
I'm not convinced Rugged Individualism and anything like the modern economy are compatible, in any kind of way in which the outcome of trying to have both is pleasant. It may be a "choose one" kind of situation.
Things like breaking up monopolies, mandating open access to infrastructure, and, yes, countering the effects of companies and advertisers manipulating us and exploiting our weaknesses.
Our societies socialise the costs of peoples’ bad decisions, so it can’t be 100% laissez-faire. That said, I disagree with the Prohibitionist instinct. Adding a tax that pays for the edge-case costs seems to make the most sense.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/do-vegetarians-live-longer...
I realize this is not a very practical worldview.
This gets worse with Monster and others pushing the caffeine limits. (I remember a free Monster giveaway at uni - could not sleep for close to 30h - that stuff is not healthy)
How was the silhouette of the people who drank the most of it?
> Several studies identified a strong, positive association between the use of energy drinks and higher odds of health-damaging behaviours, as well as physical health symptoms such as headaches, stomach aches, hyperactivity and insomnia
One thing I noticed is that people who are for banning soda or alcohol are surprisingly for legalization of soft and hard drugs.
But the state of things in which unlimited free refills of soda is the norm, 64+oz fountain soda servings are common, and 300+ calories of soda are often added on to "combo meals" for effectively just ¢20-¢30 over the cost of the food as a "sweetener" (ha) to get people to choose a combo over a single item, is clearly not great. Something's out-of-whack.
An exaggeration, obviously, but it is really bad. The number of fruits you have to eat to equal a glass of juice is significant.
And here's the thing: Sugar is not a bad thing per se. It's overconsumption of it that's the issue. I'd rather have someone drink fruit juice than soda, but all in moderation.
A search on Google Scholar shows multiple publications exploring the adverse effects on sweeteners on gut microbiome:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=artificial+sweeteners+e...
Also, I think there might actually be some links to type II diabetes, but I'm skeptical of causation on that one. It's not implausible, but fully correcting for people already trying to reduce sugar intake sounds essentially impossible in that case.
I think this should be normalized. In a lot of threads like this, there's some teetotalers that say all vices are bad and you should stop all of them at once.
But vices are fine, in moderation. Having some soda every once in a while is fine. Drinking it by the gallon every day is problematic. But it's been normalized like that by the companies that produce them.
Back in my day (shush kids, grandpa is talking), we got one, maybe two small glasses of soda and some crisps on a sunday. That was it.
Or are you talking about other ingredients?
Even the studies of them being bad for "getting used to sweetness" and thus making people more obese through compensatory over-eating are studies that rely on self-reporting and polling.
When properly controlled, physics works as it always has and you can't magic mass or energy out of thin air.