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Not subsidizing corn would be a good start. Why is HFCS shit cheaper than vegetables? Rhetorical question.
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
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?
Bad nutrition both in the comments and the FDA. :-\
Care to elaborate on what you are referencing?
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)
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
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
Yes… these kinds of taxes are regressive, in that they cost poor people more than they do wealthy people
So since they aren't...
Right… and your comment was in reply to someone merely proposing taxes that don’t exist yet either…
Denmark instituted a sugar tax and that seemed to have very positive effects (manufacturers reduced the sugar content in various products, better health outcomes). It makes sense in countries with socialised health care systems that you'd make the people that end up costing more due to behaviours pay more into it.
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
And it will get reversed in a month...already heard Trumpicans calling it "woke".
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.
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
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.
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
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?
Wondrously helpful to provide a link to the information's source page!!!
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.
It is harder to cook healthy foods nowadays than it was even 40 years ago because commercial farming has expedited the growth cycles of plants and animals to the point where they simply cannot process the nutrition available from the environment the way that they used to.
If you want to eat truly healthy, you basically have to grow the food yourself.
Since that is completely unreasonable for the grand majority of the modern world, your goal should be to try to eat as healthily as you can. Cooking from scratch and not over cooking your food are very good places to start.
I won't debate this point either way. There are definitely ranges to quality, and I haven't see bona fide research on the impact of factory farming and limited strains vs whatever else.
Also, processed doesn't automatically mean unhealthy. It more just enables incredibly unhealthy things to be done either as preservatives or to cut costs.
But the biggest impact on health is from the ready, cheap availability of low quality, high calorie food that is actively optimized for overconsumption, and the fact that frozen prepared foods (and fast food) that are affordable are generally not very healthy because of cost cutting. So that's the best point of emphasis to be healthier.
Lower fat means more sugar. Have less of full fat products.
Doesn't that disagree with most of the mother'l sauces?
Less sauce. But I've cut out roux based sauces, except occasionally. And occasionally I will use half and half for coffee and tea. Moderation in all things, including moderation. Also I do much less bread, mainly because proper flour in a food ~~dessert~~ desert is not easy to get, and store bought bread in the USA is gross.
this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2024
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