The article seems to be shittily written in my opinion but I figure if you watch the video (about a minute) it will get the point across.
My question lies in, do you think this will benefit the health of the people moving forward, or do you fear it being weaponized to endorse or threaten companies to comply with the mention of Kennedy being tied to its future as mentioned in the end of the article
Not subsidizing corn would be a good start. Why is HFCS shit cheaper than vegetables? Rhetorical question.
You know what would be way better than a symbol for “healthy” food would be requiring manufacturers to label food that fails to meet standards as “unhealthy.” Bonus points if you tax it to death so it’s no longer economically viable to sell garbage and label it “food”
Like, shit, the public perception is that I can’t afford healthy food anyway. But at least if the unhealthy food was also labelled it’d be easier to avoid
But that’s like putting “do no chew or crush” on a bottle of prescription pills. That’s how you know it’s the good shit.
Why is a Payday candy bar 1/3rd the price of a bag of peanuts with fewer peanuts than the Payday has?
Because peanuts on their own have to be visibly pleasing as peanuts or people won’t buy them. When you put them in a candy bar, you can use the crap looking ones.
Also, buying in bulk drastically decreases the price. If you had the purchasing power of Hershey, you could get your peanuts really cheap too. Join a food co-op as a starting point.
We at Payday Corporation hear your voices.
We have to give a few peanuts to the cocoa slaves, to prevent an uprising. In exchange we had to replace the peanuts with chocolate. They do not respect wealth in the dark heart of Asia.
We appreciate your lifelong commitment to Payday.
Sincerely,
The Payday Corporation
19 E. Chocolate Avenue
Hershey, Pennsylvania, US
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I don’t want more sin taxes. Sin taxes are anti choice. Subsidizing products that’s meet the healthy label I could agree with though
Edit: aka subsidizing the crops that are used to produce and possibly writing laws to ban the taxation on foods labeled healthy. Thus making such food in states like I live cost 10% less just by banning the state taxes on them before even getting to the subsidization on the crops. Shit, forcing us to move off corn to things like sugar cane would be great. Dense, the crop cycles are better, water usage is less and overall would be easier to manage. As in if we are going to kill ourselves with gas powered cars using 10% ethanol from corn… Why not use 10% from sugarcane which is easier to acquire and better for the population long term
Half of them are only cheap because of heavily subsidized corn being heavily processed into an inordinately cheap sugar substitute.
Taxes aren’t really raising prices so much as undoing the subsidies distorting the market.
Then remove the fucking subsidies! What you’re proposing is that taxpayer money in the form of subsidies goes into the pockets of wealthy agricultural corporations, and then more tax payer money in the form of sin taxes goes to the government to purchase those products, which the government turns around and gives right back to the same corporations. Sheesh! Should we tip them too while we’re at it?
“Repeal farm subsidies” is one of the few things you could walk into congress and have overwhelming opposition to from both sides.
I didn’t propose anything.
But your summary makes absolutely no sense. A tax on manufactured corn syrup after subsidizing corn is functionally the same thing as removing the subsidy for just corn used to make corn syrup.
Farm subsidies do have an important goal, and that seeming contradiction still supports that. It’s important for any society to ensure a relatively stable and productive food industry. Subsidies help farmers stay in business and producing at least enough, even if they are giant agribusinesses. It’s important that we always have enough of staple crops like corn. How can we tune that to deemphasize corn syrup, and support bigger and cheaper supply chains for healthier foods?
How do you support corn but not corn syrup? One way is to subsidize corn production but add a tax to that portion that turns into corn syrup
Yeah, that’s basically what I’m saying.
I didn’t make the argument about the value of subsidies because the actual details of how they encourage domestic farming is above my pay grade, but subsidizing then taxing the specific use that’s damaging is way more “removing the active incentive to do harmful stuff” than it is [whatever his argument is?].
So your saying the sales taxes are like tariffs, as they are being used to spread the cost to all purchasers without reguard to income making them harm lower and middle class people more, without ever having to raise taxes back to reasonable levels for the high income members of society. (3 million a year+)
I’m not saying anything about sales tax.
I’m saying that if you tax foods high in corn syrup, you’re just making it cost what it’s supposed to cost. You’re literally subsidizing the least healthy food at the moment.
Yeah tax on food is strange. It’s 0% in Florida for unprepared food, 10% in Tennessee.
In Florida corn syrup isn’t taxed at 0% it’s taxed below 0% because it’s already gone through layers of subsidies.
I think that’s common. Here in Massachusetts, sales tax does not apply to food ingredients, but prepared food is taxed, and in many places they add a ”hospitality tax” to fleece the tourists and anyone going someplace popular
I think sin taxes are absolutely acceptable if the government is also fully paying for the healthcare of all citizens (which we should totally be doing).
The combination of the two would make America a much healthier place overall.
The government is not the arbiter of morality, only legality, and I definitely don’t want a government of whatever the fuck the GOP has become deciding what’s affordable and what’s not.
To be clear, not literal “sin”, which is why I prefer the term “vice tax”. A vice is perfectly legal and we all have them, but they’re bad in some way. A “vice tax”, is just an extra nudge to choose the vice less often
For example, I sometimes drink alcohol. I know it’s bad for me, but it helps relieve stress and lets me briefly relax in ways I don’t otherwise do. I don’t if it would give me enough nudge toward healthier habits, but I fully support higher alcohol taxes in case it does and despite the direct impact on me
I would never support a return to prohibition nor more restricted access (despite that I know how to make my own beer and have all the supplies)
What is a law but enforced morality?
So since they aren’t…
Right… and your comment was in reply to someone merely proposing taxes that don’t exist yet either…
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They don’t think the US does, they think it should. You don’t need to be so aggressive about it.
I was an asshole, yeah. Sorry mate
So you’re supportive of Canadian sin taxes on sugar? Obviously America is broken as shit but let’s look at a less fundamentally awful example. Canada has a (granted smaller) issue with obesity and the costs of supporting long term care for it - a sin tax on sugar that helps support the Canadian healthcare system due to the outsized costs obesity causes.
I’m in the UK, we have the NHS, and several “sin taxes”, and they still pretty much exclusively penalise the poor (as does the NHS which has been defunded to oblivion in favour of rampant privatisation, so those who can’t afford to go private are left with the ruins), while those selling the “sinful” products (and private health insurance) continue to rake it in.
There is no taxing or legislating or regulating our way our of capitalism, which is exclusively responsible for those in power exchanging the health and well being of the population and the planet for profit, and they will never allow any tax or legislation or regulation to pass that would put them at any kind of disadvantage. The fact that some people still think they would, is frankly quite terrifying.
Sin taxes are an incredibly effective way to reflect externalities of actions… sin taxes on offensive goods with no healthy malady are dumb as fuck - but we should be making sure that consumers are seeing a more accurate cost for expensive consumption habits. In an ideal world those revenues would be earmarked for programs to counter the societal harm (i.e. buying a pack of cigarettes would come with essentially a payroll style tax that’d fund smoking cessation programs) but America is currently deeply dysfunctional.
I’d be okay with that. The key thing is we need to do more than we’re currently doing because the system is broken
It’s amazing to me how many people respond to everything with “tax it” or “ban it”. WTF happened to liberty as a national ethos?
Yes the founding fathers fought for our freedom to checks notes eat as much junk food as we can
Well they certainly didn’t fight for the government to make its way into every little crevasse of our lives, deciding how we will live at every turn, instead of us having the freedom to choose for ourselves.
It died with fucking Reagan. Get with it.
This is a good try, but no I don’t see it helping. Those of us who can afford healthier choices already do so.
My simplification is that most people fall into one of these scenarios
- just need the cheapest, possibly emphasize comfort food - doesn’t matter what’s healthy if it’s not in your budget
- proportions and quantity. This won’t help
- prepared food, whether frozen or restaurant, is a disaster.
I fall in to the second camp. I generally know what’s healthy and try to get it, but I don’t succeed with portion control or proportions. If the wrong things still dominate your plate, and your plate is too full, it doesn’t matter if some things have a healthy symbol.
I have no idea how to fix people like me, but for the first scenario I really believe we need a financial incentive. Back in the old days you ate a lot of vegetables because what came out of your garden was the cheapest food. Now thanks partly to government subsidies, corn syrup is both the cheapest food, and appeals to our evolutionary desire for sweetness. Let’s start by redirecting those subsidies to support a healthier food supply, but yeah I think we’re going to need a vice tax
- proportions and quantity. This won’t help
If we use less high-fructose corn syrup then it will help since fructose delays your body’s feeling of satiation.
I agree with most of your post except the the first 2 sentences.
We don’t know what we don’t know. You assume we already know what the healthy options are. But with 50 years of education propping up a food pyramid that was developed as a marketing tool by kellogs we don’t actually know what’s best for us.
We think grains & cereals are the best. These along with sugars have the highest caloric value. It makes absolute sense to eat these if food is scarce and difficult to get as they provide the best bang for buck.
But in modern society where food is easy to get grains and carbs aren’t good.
So reeducating everyone using the understanding science has developed oner the last 50 yrs is hugely important. We’ve been feeding ourselves based on misinformation.
So are my cheerios healthy? They not only make that claim on the box but I was raised with that knowledge all my life, as were my parents. And it is oats, and does have what used to be a decent amount of fiber. And I eat it with yogurt and fruit. Yet it’s another carb, and has much less fiber, vitamins, protein than many modern breakfast cereal.
Are my eggs healthy? Or do they raise cholesterol? Or am I likely to cook them with less healthy choices? Is my toast more carbs than cereal or less? More fiber or less? Is butter bad or good this week? What if I pair with sausage or bacon?
Weird to write an article that links to the page it’s mostly plagiarized from: https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-food-labeling-and-critical-foods/use-term-healthy-food-labeling
Thanks for posting that. Honestly I would almost guess the article was compiled by AI, as it seems to assume you know information it has not previously mentioned.
If you notice it mentions the symbol multiple times but never shows it. (Not a symbol it can type) Where as a human would have written/drawn/ known it has to be shown or none of the references make sense.
Or I’m an idiot and they just are saying the term “healthy” is the symbol they are going to use?
I read in another article that the “healthy” symbol is currently under development.
Is it an actual symbol or just the word?
No, it’s gonna be some kind of logo that can be used on labels. Like I said, it’s under development currently. What it will look like, nobody is quite sure, in the article. I read mentioned that some critics believe it will oversimplify the matter of buying healthy food, and that it should be more like a label That has some kind of explanation.
Thanks I was an ass just now elsewhere in the comments so I appreciate you being sound. I am not always lol
And it will get reversed in a month…already heard Trumpicans calling it “woke”.
Damn librulz always tryna take my trans fats!
First, they came for frogs and made them gay, and I didn’t speak up for I’m not a frog.
Then they came for my fats and made them trans.
Ooh ohh, let me play ….
I didn’t speak up because I’m not a French fry
Then they came for my weekly paycheck and made it bi
I just don’t put fats on any sort of pedestal.
They’re just part of cooking, a means to an end. Excess is the enemy of any form of health, just have a balance.
No steak cooked in butter will be healthier than broccoli boiled in it.
Sorry, trail mix isn’t healthy.
And saturated fats can be. The whole thing against sat fats is wrong, and was proven so by 1994.
The FDA is full of shit on this.
Saturated fats are not good actually. That’s a lie funded by dairy industry.
And trail mix (with nuts and whole grains and fruit) is in fact healthy.
The overwhelming majority of Americans eat nowhere close to the bare minimum recommended amount of fiber. Guess which one has lots of fiber? And is also full of minerals not found in many other foods
Yet there is evidence to suggest dairy fat has a different effect than other animal derived fats, and there is certainly plausible deniability.
This this may be big dairy propaganda, the overriding fact is that every time we’ve been wrong with the health impact of fats, it’s been treating them as if they were one thing with one effect. Fats are a huge family of chemicals that are both necessary for life and have both positive and negative effects in quantity. It’s always more complex than we think, and studies of eating habits in humans over long periods are next to impossible.
First they were calorie dense and I was fat …. But fats are a basic building block for my entire body and help me feel full. Then they raised cholesterol, but some lowered cholesterol ….
Doesn’t bacon have a lot of fiber ?
It has no fiber at all. No animal products contain any dietary fiber. Dietary fiber is by definition cellulose and other non-digestible starches found in plant material.
From what I could find, the whole “saturated fats are healthy actually” and the whole “seed oils are bad” and “polyunsaturated fats are not good actually” are things originating from meat and animal products lobbying, and recently popularized by the Joe Rogan podcast when he had a self-identified carnivore on? Or something?
Basically, it seems to be yet another manufactured culture war shit by the right filled with misinformation and disinformation that goes against the science. At this point I feel like anything that gets championed by the right needs to be very heavily examined for truthfulness.
Also, expect a lot lot more of this after the Trump administration takes over. Be skeptical of people skeptical of seed oils and polyunsaturated fats. Be skeptical of people glorifying meat and butter and saturated fats.
There was a metaanalysis paper that suggested that saturated fats alone were not highly correlated with heart disease.
Same paper recommend a high fiber diet over a high carb or high protein diet. Which tracks tbh
They’ve always been behind the times. If you’re old enough you’ll remember the cholesterol scare. They apparently hadn’t learned the different types of cholesterol yet. This is from my youth.
To be fair regulation will always trail research
OP, please reword title of your post to be an open-ended question.
Ah, I just clicked the copy button as I thought it was one of the communities that required the title to match the articles title. (Jerboa doesn’t show community rules on the side). Sorry about that
Edit: done
I know I’m an awful pedant who doesn’t wurd gud either half the time, but you meant to say populace not populous in the title. Hope you don’t mind me pointing it out :-)
Haha thanks. Nah I added that part in to make it fit the community rules I violated by accident. Thanks for the heads up.
Constructive critiques are always good in my book. (Wish I always kept that demeanor)
Not really.
If you cook from ingredients, you’ll usually be reasonably healthy. It’s not impossible to make healthy prepared foods, but it’s (comparatively) expensive enough that that, not awareness, is the main limitation.
Probably most people like myself will ignore the guidelines. The advice looks better than before but I don’t like half of it.
