No One Wants to Say ‘Put Down That Burger,’ but We Should | Hacker News Reader

No One Wants to Say ‘Put Down That Burger,’ but We Should

nytimes.com

9 pointsfnimick6 comments

Fast food burgers are surely nowhere near as healthy as breadless home made burgers with grass-fed non-gmo meats but I would put the bigger risk on the associated High Fructose Corn Syrup drinks and oil cooked fries.

Shaming people usually backfires whereas some states have had some success with taxing high fructose corn syrup drinks. Given that the long term health effects of fast food ultimately affect the national economy, national health budgets and national security, this is one rare case I believe a sin-tax makes sense provided that tax goes to health care. Diabetes alone will likely bankrupt most first world countries. [1][2] Why national security? For starters, the US military is finding it very difficult to recruit healthy people that can even pass their simple physical requirements. [3]

[1] - https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2017/p0718-diabetes-repor...

[2] - https://youtu.be/5LTWJOi3bCo?t=2 [video][9 mins, t-shirt may be NSFW]

[3] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWN13pKVp9s [video][16 mins]

This article has nothing to do with the health associated with eating burgers, fast food or otherwise. It's about the environmental impact of beef.

Agreed but the only tangible and actionable issue I see with a fast-food burger is health. That should be addressed first and foremost. Consumption of beef is not going away otherwise. If we want to reduce beef consumption then get the government to recognize the national security risk of fast food and tax it to oblivion. Healthy beef is far more expensive. More expensive equals a reduction of consumption whereas shaming people will most certainly backfire.

If the governments started heavily taxing the fast-food grade beef then the demand will drop as a side-effect. When the demand drops we can focus on smaller, healthier regenerative farms and ranches thus reducing our dependency on fragile logistics of our current just-in-time shipping systems.

As a side note and a side benefit that I care about, this will mean less of the massive cattle ranches like Harris beef ranch in California. It is difficult to find the drone footage of these ranches because the cops will be on scene within 2 minutes of someone showing up with a drone attempting to exposing how cruel these animals are treated.

Because put down the burger is a shit publicity campaign. It’s both unpopular and ineffective. Instead of wasting time and money on that you need to develop a campaign to introduce less impactful food to people’s diets

Calories are the definition of health diet in human's. Nutrients are far more than 55 times or 100 times more than in meat than in vegetables. Equating calories with food stuff is near useless, even for weight loss.

[citation needed]

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