Australian Cycling Forums - Bicycles Network Australia

mikesbytes wrote:We brought a Christmas pudding and served it tonight. It was sickly sweet - yuck. So we read the nutritional info and its 50.7% sugar. Ended up binning it.

Lesson learnt - always read the nutritional info

Yup, sickly. OTOH, it is the “preservative”. You’d have to it fresh otherwise

This is down the path of what I preach, everything in moderation

https://coach.nine.com.au/2018/06/14/08 ... meau-sugar

Whether its striking the right point is debatable, some will see it as too much, some will see it as too little and others will see it as just right

What the article doesn't mention is that WHO originally came to a much lower recommendations than 25g/day of sugar, but were the subject of intense pressure from US sugar interests to raise it.

Even at 25g/day though, that is close to giving up sugar for most people, given how widely sugar is used in our food.

Heard on the radio that one MP was objecting to the tax on sugary drinks on the basis that he didn't want to see the family food bill increase.

So sugary drinks are considered part of the family food shopping. Heaven forbid that the children didn't get their daily softdrink.

How about Governments get out of our bloody lives and people take responsibility for their own actions!!!

Foo

foo on patrol wrote:How about Governments get out of our bloody lives and people take responsibility for their own actions!!!

Foo

True however your tax dollars are paying for huge medical bills resulting from others making poor choices

mikesbytes wrote:So sugary drinks are considered part of the family food shopping. Heaven forbid that the children didn't get their daily softdrink.

Obviously politicians are interested in whatever is popular. He/she is making the assumption that the general population will still make the same poor choices regardless of the price. I agree. It will take a lot more than a price hike to stop people buying addictive foods. But like I've often said in this thread, sugar isn't the only addictive food. Some others that they aren't legislating against are processed grains, fat, dairy and salt.

Why isn't there a "Fat it's like a poison" thread? To many people, too much of the wrong kinds of fats are poisonous. So why aren't the authorities trying to tax foods that are high in cholesterol and/or trans and saturated fats? Gram for gram they are more dangerous than sugar. Like you've said in the past, maybe they should have a calorie density tax. But there are heathly foods like nuts with a high calorie density. I think they should tax specific foods, that they know are problematic, like chips (hot & cold), ice cream, cakes, buiscuits, cheese (oh no, not the cheese!) and most resturant & take away foods. They could assess every type individually and even have a sliding scale of tax depending on the assessed lack of food quality. Anyway, just throwing around some ideas.

mikesbytes wrote:True however your tax dollars are paying for huge medical bills resulting from others making poor choices

Yes. The bill is getting bigger every year, compounded by an aging population.

mikesbytes wrote:

foo on patrol wrote:How about Governments get out of our bloody lives and people take responsibility for their own actions!!!

Foo

True however your tax dollars are paying for huge medical bills resulting from others making poor choices

one of the fundamental problems with universal health care..

Nobody, your welcome to start a fat its like poison thread. The pillars of the food industry are salt, sugar and fat so a thread discussing the consumption of excess fat is spot on.

63% of the Australian adult population is overweight or obese. A taxation on sugary drinks in one step in many that is needed and its one small step that has a chance of happening

Where I see a sugary drinks tax having an impact is in the fast food industry as it may tempt them to pricing the softdrink higher than the water option. At a shopping centre I go to, in the food hall is a fish and chip shop that sells the usual array of options, most with salad. What's different about this one is that the packages are priced with a bottle of water and if you want to change the bottle of water to softdrink then you pay and extra $1

BTW Australia has the highest level of food marketing at children and sugary drinks are firmly in there. Get them addicted early and you have a lifetime customer

mikesbytes wrote:Nobody, your welcome to start a fat its like poison thread. The pillars of the food industry are salt, sugar and fat so a thread discussing the consumption of excess fat is spot on.

Thanks, but I posted the question only to highlight the focus on sugar. Which although warranted, is taking attention away from the various other problem foods, which - in the case of bad fats - can be even more problematic than sugar.

why are taxes seen as the solution to everything?

Must reduce incidence of <bad habit #24> in the population -- solution? Tax!

I can't believe so many support such moves.

Maybe they should have taxed eggs when they were 'known' to produce high cholesterol. Or animal fats when they were known to increase obesity.

duncanm wrote:why are taxes seen as the solution to everything?

Must reduce incidence of <bad habit #24> in the population -- solution? Tax!

In many types of governmental systems, the governments are limited in what they can do to curb peoples' self damaging behaviour. If you've got a better idea, then please post it.

duncanm wrote:Maybe they should have taxed eggs when they were 'known' to produce high cholesterol.

Getting off topic, but egg intake still does increase serum cholesterol. Just the egg industries have done a good job of funding studies to gain the (dishonest) outcome they wanted. Then advertised it. Doubt is their marketing tool. Just like the cigarette companies used to do.

duncanm wrote:Or animal fats when they were known to increase obesity.

Animal fats and processed fats in general will increase obesity with a standard diet due to their higher calorie density. So the same problems that sugar have (high calorie density, no fibre). That is with the assumption that excess calories are being consumed, which is fairly typical in affluent countries these days.

Nobody wrote:

duncanm wrote:why are taxes seen as the solution to everything?

Must reduce incidence of <bad habit #24> in the population -- solution? Tax!

In many types of governmental systems, the governments are limited in what they can do to curb peoples' self damaging behaviour.

There's your problem -- why is it the role of government to stop me doing whatever the hell I want, if it doesn't harm anyone else?

Taxes are one of the easiest ways to send a price signal (was arguably the biggest factor in the reduction of smoking rates) as well as providing the public with the funds to deal with the consequences of those products.

Another price signal would be to cut all the subsidies to mass monocultural chemical-based agriculture, that can provide unhealthy food at artificially low prices, as well as the tax subsidies for marketing and advertising that stimulate demand.

It's no coincidence that the purveyors of toxic food spend a huge proportion of their budget on (tax-subsidised) marketing - that's because marketing works (and because they know their "food" has little intrinsic appeal) successfully to change behaviour.
These multinationals are in the business of making profit, not of caring for the society that sustains them, and they have a lot of very clever, very well-resourced people finding ways to stimulate demand and disadvantage suppliers of real food.

To lay sole blame at the feet of the person at the very end of this chain for their "personal" choices seems a little skewiff to me.

BobtheBuilder wrote: To lay sole blame at the feet of the person at the very end of this chain for their "personal" choices seems a little skewiff to me.

To treat people like mindless drones at the mercy of marketing seems a little elitist to me..

duncanm wrote:
To treat people like mindless drones at the mercy of marketing seems a little elitist to me..

I didn't. That's called a straw man argument.

I'll leave the fat vs sugar to another thread, it would make a good debate.

Probably repeating myself but I see a sugary drink tax as making little or no difference to the family shopping bill. Where I perceive it will make the difference is with manufactured goods and the fast food industry

Manufactured goods;
1. With the exclusion of almost all drinks (see 2.) if an ingredient is more expensive they will reformulate the product to use less of it. This will improve the quality of some products however not all as they may end up increasing the quantity of the other 2 pillars of the food industry to compensate
2. Drinks. As it stands there is little cost difference between providing a customer a bottle of water and a bottle of soft drink, so the drink manufacturers and retailers my choose to have different margins on the products so to present the same retail price or to price differently based on the costs.

Fast food;
a. They could decide to have unified pricing differentiated pricing. The screen based ordering systems already cater for fine tuning the "meal" with fine tuning of pricing and more importantly not consuming extra time of those costly staff standing at the counter.
b. I don't see unified pricing as being all bad providing it changes their marketing, for example the default drink is now water instead of soft drink and the marketing images show water instead of soft drink.

For both of the above there's the option of artificial sweeteners and I highly doubt the sugary drink tax would cover those either and I know how much that one would be debated so I'll leave that one alone too

Well it looks like artificial sweeteners make sugar look good.

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/healt ... d9b21c5a06

Nobody wrote:Well it looks like artificial sweeteners make sugar look good.

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/healt ... d9b21c5a06

I'm not surprised of the number of things that artificial sweeteners can do. What I would like to know is whether there's safe quantity where underneath it the risks are low or if any amount is simply bad?

I see diet drinks as a stepping stone away from sugary drink addiction for those who simply can't go cold turkey

Government orders review to weigh up 'added sugar' labels

"Added sugars are empty calories and a major contributing factor to the obesity epidemic, rising rates of type 2 diabetes and tooth decay."

Although I can't disagree with the above statement, it's too simplistic a view IMO. Sugar is an energy dense and addictive food which contributes to obesity. But so are many foods. Many are even higher in energy density. Oils in particular are also considered empty calories (having few to no vitamins and minerals etc). Fat is also considered addictive and oils have the highest calorie density of any food. But (to my knowledge) no government is considering adding "added oil" or "added fat" labels to processed foods.

Nobody wrote:Government orders review to weigh up 'added sugar' labels

"Added sugars are empty calories and a major contributing factor to the obesity epidemic, rising rates of type 2 diabetes and tooth decay."

Although I can't disagree with the above statement, it's too simplistic a view IMO. Sugar is an energy dense and addictive food which contributes to obesity. But so are many foods. Many are even higher in energy density. Oils in particular are also considered empty calories (having few to no vitamins and minerals etc). Fat is also considered addictive and oils have the highest calorie density of any food. But (to my knowledge) no government is considering adding "added oil" or "added fat" labels to processed foods.

There's also the problem that if it is just specifying added sugar, then food/drink manufacturers will devise ways to include sugar that technically isn't added, for example concentrated fruit juice.

Anyway its a step in the right direction and could be followed up by symbols for trans fats, saturated fats + others

The AOTY can go root a boot.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal ... 53unt.html

“We’ve got to make them less accessible to the public"

Note 'we' vs. 'the public'.