Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

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It isn't a coincidence though that back in the 1990s the sugar industry was spending/lobbying big to attack dietary fat. A lot of foods intentionally removed satiating fats with nutritional value and replace it with cheaper sugars that you can eat almost unlimited amounts of without feeling full.

If I could only name two big "things" that contributed most to the obesity problem of today it would be:

- Agricultural Act of 1970 and the polices of the 1970s, resulted in corn so cheap and abundant that other industries actively looked for usages. HFCS was obviously one such use, and it out-competed all other nutritional sources on price.

- The 1990s "fat bad, sugar good" which resulted in reformulating a lot of staple foods and the beginning of standard sweet food allowing the cheap HFCS to flow.

The US needs, and has needed, to offset the corn subsidies that get turned into HFCS by adding a "sugar tax" at the consumer side. That way it can still exist for animal feed, and be used where appropriate without being unnaturally and unreasonably inexpensive.

The reason they don't is that it is political suicide to suggest sugar taxes in personal-freedom loving US that is pretty anti-tax regardless.

Sugar consumption peaked in 2000 and has been in steady decline since, and not only that, but the decline has been led by a decline in HFCS consumption: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38094768

30% of the US was obese in 2000, now it's over 40%, despite per capita sugar consumption reverting to what it was pre-1975.

> The US needs, and has needed, to offset the corn subsidies that get turned into HFCS by adding a "sugar tax" at the consumer side.

If anything, we need a tax on added fat and sodium, the two biggest drivers of food hyperpalatability, when added in excess of the thresholds identified in this paper (> 25% kcal from fat and ≥ 0.30% sodium by weight):

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/oby.22639

> The HPF criteria identified 62% (4,795/7,757) of foods in the FNDDS that met criteria for at least one cluster. Most HPF items (70%; 3,351/4,795) met criteria for the FSOD cluster. Twenty-five percent of items (1,176/4,795) met criteria for the FS cluster, and 16% (747/4,795) met criteria for the CSOD cluster. The clusters were largely distinct from each other, and < 10% of all HPF items met criteria for more than one cluster.

(CSOD, carbohydrates and sodium; FS, fat and simple sugars; FSOD, fat and sodium; HPF, hyper-palatable foods.)

Why don't we just tax obesity?

So some kind of annual appointment where we get our BMI measured

Because adding fat (usually in the form of vegetable oil) and sodium is the cheapest, easiest way to make food hyperpalatable, and the share of the grocery store shelf space occupied by these products has exploded in the last 40 years, greatly contributing to the obesity epidemic. Ominously, this a trend that the researcher behind that paper I linked to attributes in large measure to the tobacco companies entering the packaged food business: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.16332

The American version would not be tax the Fat, but to make fat pay more for their health insurance.

And the only result would be more people unable to pay their health insurances...

https://slate.com/technology/2018/03/big-sugar-isnt-to-blame...

Did you read that article or just the title? Because the article isn't focused on disproving any facts of the "big sugar bad" side but rather saying the facts as they stand are being unfairly characterized.

The article is well written, and I WOULD recommend it for anyone interest in this topic. But ultimately I'd just point to the same facts presented in the article, and you determine if we're being mean to the sugar industry or fair.

The result is the same either way, regardless of who gets the blame.

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