It makes me angry to think of how wreckless the generations before millenials were. Lead's risks and damages were well-known long before 1996. And they still didn't ban it until then.
I don't think we should be surpsied, as much as pushing to regulate this garbage.
As an aside, Michelle Obama's campaign when Obama was in office was about improvement children's health. Her focus was going to be on nutrition (lunch food). Shortly thereafter Coke and Pepsi came in with "donations" and the whole thing became about exercise, no focus on nutrition.
There should be no surprise that capital takes precedent over health in our current system / culture.
Arguably, we should care more about sugar than we do about covid.
Except that presumably includes the current generation, instead of everyone pre-millenial. There is certainly not any real consensus or meaningful action being taken in regards to sugar. It is as prevalent now as it ever was.
https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...
Also buying fresh vegtables and cooking instead of buying ready made dishes helps.
Even without human interference, fruit can actually be bad for you if you eat it at the wrong time and in the wrong quantities - fructose has the same effect as sugar - but now we are basically getting into nutrition more generally which is a tricky subject. Fruit still comes with many other nutritional benefits compared to sugary manufactured snacks, and even fibre that make it worth while (note that orange juice, as minimally as we are processing the fruit, still allows you to consume it in unnatural quantity and concentration, which can be very bad).
It does require spending a little time cooking and probably to shop around rather than getting everything from a (possibly overpriced) supermarket depending on how much you can spend. So it's strictly an inconvenience, it requires stretching the argument really thin to view it otherwise.
If everyone did this, less processed sugar would be in our food supply. (corn syrups especially but also weird stuff like stevia, sneaky stuff like maltodextrin, etc..)
The problem is there are far too many pollutants for everyone to be able to educate themselves about every one, and take steps to avoid them. Instead, it's the role of government to decide in each case whether to allow, ban, tax, inform or restrict each type of pollutant.
Virtually my entire extended family are working class people, and they all were feeding their kids apple/orange juice on a regular basis without diluting it. When I showed my sister that she could literally do a 5% solution of apple juice in water, and it still tasted sweet, she was blown away. I'm pretty sure most members of the laptop class know that juice is bad for kids (gatorade too), but that message hasn't filtered to most of the population. And these kids are too young to know how toxic it is for them.
Can you cite specific examples of the public health establishment pushing juice as healthy? I got a minor in nutrition over a decade ago and back then, public health officials were very quick to call out the juice industry for its predatory tactics on kids and false equivalencies. This doesn't match my experience in university at all.
Sugar is our generation's tobacco for sure.
This might seem far fetched, but I think it's pretty accurate.
When tobacco was at it's height most people didn't really think it was bad for you - which gradually turned into a denialistic "yeah but it's not that bad" - it took a long time for society to come to terms with just how harmful it is.
The quantity of sugar in every day food has increased dramatically over time, and our attitude to it has been similar to the denialistic phase for tobbaco - "yeah it might hurt my waistline a little bit but it tastes too good" - Making people think if they aren't fat then it's ok, when really the consequences are far worse, sugar is pretty much poison for our bodies, it's bad for every single part of it (melts teeth, causes gum disease which poisons your bloodstream, ages skin, causes inflammation, causes heart disease, causes diabetes, affects the immune system, messes with cognition, makes you more hungry by sharply switching off ketosis, and finally displaces nutritional food making your body even more susceptible to aforementioned ailments).
I wish I understood this better when I was growing up. Thankfully I had a parent who never encouraged sugary food, and put in the effort to cook good meals... but many people don't and are at the mercy of what super markets sell, which is increasingly extremely sugary food.
If there is a single leading harmful substance that is as prevalent as leaded petrol was - i think it's probably sugar (in the west at least).
You know, I wouldn't mind this as long as the scale of the donation was big enough. If they donated $1000 per american to the US government, who could use it to reduce taxes or improve life for americans more than the sugar decreases quality of life through illness and poor health, that would be great.
But they didn't. I bet their donation was $100k or so, or less than 1 cent per american.
This isn't accurate. There were changes to the school lunch program, and by most accounts they were pretty effective: https://sph.washington.edu/news-events/news/obama-era-school...
The main takeaway is that the changes were fairly expensive, so lots of schools didn't participate.
My kids school lunch now is all packaged sugary crap. Corndogs, cinnamon buns for breakfast, Trix yogurt, etc. Even the milk is gross - lowest bidder swill that tastes like wax.
The hot food items are all oven-baked, in plastic wrappers. It’s essentially the same crap that you would see in a university vending machine.
Marijuanna and sugar and a million other potential vices like alcohol and video games should be available.
But we should teach kids discipline, critical thinking, and impulse control - rather than playing whack-a-mole with every vice that comes along.
Sweeteners are heavily subsidized in the US which is why they're in everything.
Likewise we have levers, should we be selling soda / pop with outrageous amounts of sugar in them without some sort of healthcare tax? I don't mind sugar being available, but right now its subsidized by our health care fees. My insurance is more expensive because of diabetes, heart disease, etc.
But monied interests and some vegetarians who think all things that come from plants must be good for you, prevent this from being shoved into near all packaged foods.
"Evidence-informed dietary priorities include increased fruits, nonstarchy vegetables, nuts, legumes, fish, vegetable oils, yogurt, and minimally processed whole grains; and fewer red meats, processed (e.g., sodium-preserved) meats, and foods rich in refined grains, starch, added sugars, salt, and trans fat."
Well also, the right-wing culture war machine decided Michelle Obama was taking everyone's children's freedoms away.
It's also too easy to cast judgement backwards in time, given the lack of context and the benefit of hindsight. Better to look forward.
We saw it with tobacco/lead/etc, so it's only natural/right to apply that experience to other things. Theorizing that sugar/THC could also fall into the same model is not wasting of anyone's time. If evidence is found that it is bad, then good can come from that knowledge. If evidence is found that it is not bad, then party on Wayne. But the studies should be conducted. Let's look forward to having actual knowledge rather than just blindly carrying on in the dark with no flashlight to guide.
However, the planet is arguably the most ideologically polluted it's ever been. First world cultures have developed an aversion to individual and organization/group responsibility. Democracy is not doing great. Many institutions are bankrupt. Hardship is looming. We're in for a wild ride.
Millenials are -not- the ones responsible for disastrous policies (yet). They haven't been around long enough yet. It's mainly boomers, some gen x, and a few silents.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/02/12/boomers-sil...
edit: Added "(yet)" because it's not obvious, I suppose. My point here is that the actual policymakers in congress, right now, are majority "not-millenials". So stop blaming millenials and/or gen-z when they're not the ones currently writing legislature...
Edit: That struck a chord with millenials, ha! Tell your friends that bitching does not help, voting does. Boomers seem to understand this and so they have a disproportionate amount of influence. You want it to stop? VOTE.
2018 was the first election where Gen X and younger together outvoted Boomers and older.
There is, still, a statistical bump in the boomers, hence the baby boom.
There is just more of them, and they vote. They've only just started dying in big numbers.
Plus the older voters get the more they tend to vote, for various reasons.
However, I'm tired of silents/boomers/gen-xers making comments about and blaming millenials as if it's somehow our fault the boomers and silents in congress are out of touch. A quick look at voting demographics and the demographics of congress dispels that notion (for now, as of 2022).
The blame game is unhelpful unless a holistic explanation of Why Did You Do That is also given.
It's difficult to be omniscient about the impact of everything to everything else for all future outcomes.
Smacks of Ageism, to my mind.
And yes, I'm aware that said commodity production produces wealth which also improves well-being. But there's a contradiction there in our economic model that is not serving us well.
EDIT: I should add to my point above that what's common with both these is one overarching world altering product that has completely transformed the world: the automobile.
Ribbons of tarmac lace the earth (it wouldn't surprise me if this is a long term environmental problem, too), even in some of the most remote sections of the planet.
Cities are built around them, privileging automobile use above a bunch of other aspects of quality of life.
Road transport is 75ish% of global CO2 emissions.
And, yeah, leaded fuel poisoned our bodies, minds, and the environment for decades.
The way it usually goes is "everyone is +5, except the village that shares the watershed with the mine"
On anything but the shortest timeline things like like wealth, health and productivity are fungible at the societal level.
If the net cumulative effect of the externalities wasn't smaller than the benefits of the progress then the progress wouldn't happen because more people would be worse off and things would grind to a halt because the gains would be more than offset.
It's still naive, or maybe obtuse. Repeating the "negative externality" buzzword doesn't give you a blank check to peddle your preferred ideology (government intervention/regulation) while crapping on the other team.
Without regulation we get lithium batteries and a couple dozen poisoned watersheds.
With regulation we get slightly more expensive batteries and fewer poisoned watersheds.
Regardless of how you or I or anyone else feels about regulation it's somewhere between farcical and deceitful to pretend that the economic activity in both of those situations doesn't help more than it hurts. If it didn't work this way progress would grind to a halt because the increased material wealth of having the batteries would be more than cancelled out by the problems that poisoned watersheds create, to run with the existing example.
All they need to do is treat the water to raise ph like every other city with a large lead solder install base, but they’ve been dragging their feet for literally decades while the people they serve get lead exposure.
1: https://www.opb.org/article/2021/11/30/lead-portland-oregon-...
To make such a statement implies how little perspective one might have for how hard life was, the risk and tradeoffs being made, especially when there were unknown - and especially for 'how good we have it now'.
I'm not even that old, but I have the lived experience from my grandparents who were born on farms without electricity and I believe without a doubt that we have crossed the line into 'civilizational wealth'. We are really rich for the first time in history. Unequal, yes, but even lower-middle class people have access to vast material bounty: actions, travel, decorative clothing, choices, opportunity, education, amazing produce throughout the year, entertainment, technology, delivery, amazing health care innovations. Heck .... people are even less afraid of getting shot these days because we know how to stabilise and save people. Getting 'shot' used to mean 'pretty much going go die'. Even 'heart surgery' is now done on an outpatient basis these days like getting an oil change.
'Millenials' have already let loose Facebook and other completely destructive technologies, and are taking absolutist views on necessarily complicated things like gender identity (and more) and I'm 100% certain that history will come back like a wrecking ball on at least those things, of course it's already happening with Social Media.
The issue with lead is hard to fathom, it's still a bit grey, I'm wondering what the effect of some other things are going to be i.e. micro plastics, and the steroids they use on livestock etc..
I'm not 'organic' by ideology but I'm wary that there's a lot of risk in those kinds of things.
And it goes further: lighting in the cities all night, and noise pollution in the city and with our gadgets. It should be mostly dark and quiet at night.
It seems like so many of these conversations end at the "who is responsible" part, without the understanding that we really shouldn't care.
This despite the fact leaders are overwhelmingly at/past middle age, as is wealth required to make moves as an individual.
I have no issue whatsoever with complaining about individuals who are destroying the world right now [3], I'm certainly not going to sit here and defend basically any fossil fuel executive, but I think saying it's a generational thing is needlessly reductive and doesn't buy us anything. I don't think Noam Chomsky [1] or Bernie Sanders are destroying the world [2], and I don't think millennial/gen-z bozos like Charlie Kirk are helping it.
[1] I realize he's older than a boomer, but I think my point still fits. [2] At least not advocating for stuff that's destroying the planet. I am not trying to take a directly political stand.
[3] clarification edit.
It's crazy to think about having a lower IQ than I was capable of having for something that could have been solved a few decades previously.
IMO weed will be in 50 years where "big tobacco" is right now.
I think the whole point is that it hasn't been studied yet, so we can't say definitively if its safe or not.
Eating marijuana can have some negative cognitive effects but its pretty obvious it doesn't do anything terrible looking at all the old hippies.
I'm not saying I know either way, but this seems like an easy thing to be wrong about.
It definitely hurts parts of cognition, and is linked to certain mental illnesses, there are other odd and end health concerns that pop up rarely. Overall marijuana is pretty gentle when ingested, you can just tell from your own health when consuming it.
When I smoked cigarettes I felt terrible all the time, and when I stopped it was night and day. Consuming edibles I feel pretty darn good actually, less stress, better sleep, and when I get off them I don't feel like I've been harming my body. This opinion is shared by pretty much everyone I know
Granted I still think we have a more enlightened perspective on some issues as a generation just due to better education overall, but at best we might manage a marginal increase in overall quality of life for people.
Plus the basket of crises we've faced starting with the Great Financial Crisis has allowed many to blame external factors for their situation and not take personal responsibility, even when they clearly should. I've met plenty of unwise/stupid millennials who could do more to better their situation, but are happy to just sit still and bitch about everything but their self-destructive habits.
It's like how the Boomers got associated with Woodstock/the hippies/counter-culture, but in reality most Boomers didn't rebel all that much. Boomers elected Reagan, and he ran in part as an anti-counter-culture figure.
One thing that already gets me thinking of future generations looking down on us will be this quest for travel and high living especially for social media glamor and the new keeping up with Jones'. This increases more flights, polluting untouched places and how bad it is for the climate.
Premise is off...
This assuming millenials are not reckless. We're humans and our behavior is not defined by our generation.
And we still have supplements and pots and pans that have lead in them, along with other heavy metals.
Yes I’m aware that idiots are also fixated on fluoridation. That doesn’t make the science wrong though.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6923889/
Neurotoxicity appeared to be dose-dependent , and tentative benchmark dose calculations suggest that safe exposures are likely to be below currently accepted or recommended fluoride concentrations in drinking water.