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  #1   ^
Old Tue, Aug-06-19, 01:29
Demi's Avatar
Demi Demi is offline
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Default The thing about fat is how much it is costing us

Quote:
From The Australian
August 6, 2019

The thing about fat is how much it is costing us

Next to the architecture, a striking memory of a recent three-months stint in Chicago was how overweight so many Americans are. It is, after all, the home of deep-dish pizza and the global headquarters of McDonald’s, whose large soft drink cups could comfortably accommodate goldfish.

Almost 40 per cent of American adults are obese, more than anywhere else. It’s less than 5 per cent in Japan. It is one of the reasons US life expectancy has fallen for three years in a row, given the array of health problem obesity underpins, especially diabetes~, which afflicts more 30 million Americans, and cancer.

But let’s not be too quick to scoff at slow-moving Americans; Australians are not far behind. Figures last year showed one in three of us was obese, compared with one in five in 1995, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. And obesity rates are projected to keep rising in Western countries, according to the OECD Obesity Update 2017.

With such statistics comes a minefield of costs and burdens to our economy.
Fifty years ago we put a man on the moon, yet we still can’t decide if cereal and banana or bacon and eggs make a healthier breakfast. Nutrition, and the science that underpins it, is unacceptably confused, especially given the researc~h funds invested in it.

So the debate about whether sugar is healthy to consume is noisy and ongoing.

In the 19th century, doctors started attributing obesity and diabetes to excessive sugar consumption, both of which were prevalent among the wealthy. A British medical textbook in 1923 singled out carbohydrates as the source of obesity and diabetes.

“Over the next thirty years, a series of misconceptions propagated by just a few very influential diabetes specialists would come to exonerate sugar almost entirely as a cause of diabetes, let alone the primary cause,” wrote American journalist Gary Taubes in his 2016 book, The Case Against Sugar.

Until the past couple of decades, fat was demonised. The food pyramids we grew up with had bread and pasta in the “eat more” group.

Obesity, conveniently for sugar manufacturers, became an almost moral issue: it was all about calories in, calories out — all calories were the same. “This thinking renders effectively irrelevant the radically different impact that different nutrients — protein, fat, and carbohydrate — have on metabolism,” Taubes wrote.

At the University of Sydney, though, sugar is back. A top nutritionist there, Jennie Brand-Miller, whose books have sold millions of copies, has written: “There is an absolute consensus that sugar in food does not cause diabetes.”

In her controversial paper The Australian Paradox, Brand-Miller argues the consumption of sugar has been falling in Australia while obesity rates have been rising.

So sure is the nation’s oldest university about the health benefits of sugar that it has been running full-page advertisements, pointing out its researchers “have discovered that a low-protein, high-carb diet can delay chronic disease and help us live a longer and healthier life”.

Meanwhile, the latest government guidelines say the evidence that “the association between the consumption of sugar-sweetened drinks and the risk of excessive weight gain has strengthened”.

Economics at least has the excuse it can’t run experiments on animals or people. You’d think nutritionists, with decades of opportunity to do both, might have worked out who was right by now.

In my experience, dumping potatoes, cereal, pasta and sugar for bacon, eggs, green vegetables and steak leads to weight loss. Certainly, remote indigenous communities, blighted by shocking rates of obesity and sugar consumption, provide a good example, with Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders almost four times likelier to have diabetes. A 2013 study found 61 per cent of remote Northern Territory Aborigines’ diet was carbohydrates, half of which was sugar. That’s far more than the national average of 38.3kg of sugar a year each.

It’s not fair to blame individuals for becoming fat if experts can’t agree on what’s healthy. Finding out definitively would be a good idea for taxpayers, too, who fork out more than $20 billion a year in additional health costs. In 2015, about 125,000 weight-loss procedures were billed to Medicare in public and private hospitals. That year, about a tenth of all hospital~isations were related to diabetes.

Perhaps obesity receives less attention because decision-makers incline to affluent areas where it is less of an issue and gyms proliferate.

Ignoring Sydney University research, many governments do blame sugar. The British Conservative government joined almost 30 countries last year in imposing a tax on sugary drinks. Similar proposals here have been slammed as nanny state overreach. Former chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne told me in 2017 that conservatives were right to embrace sugar taxes.

“The overwhelming evidence was sugar was doing enormous damage to kids’ health,” he said. “Taxes are things that discourage behaviour, so reduce tax on things we want — like business — and increase it on the things we don’t.”

Back in a 2007 column, I mocked a tax on sugary drinks, suggesting a tax on obese people might be more efficient. “Everyone would submit an official body mass index report with their annual tax return. The (tax office) would make the fat tax calculation for you. It would be a progressive tax: the fatter the taxpayer, the higher the tax,” I wrote.

Nevertheless, taxing food and drinks that damage people’s health — and so imposing a great cost on the health system — has merit. The problem is government rarely uses such revenue to cut other taxes. Tobacco excise has been lifted far beyond the point of economic or moral justification, crushing the disposable incomes of poor, addicted smokers rather than reducing smoking rates.

If sugar is as damaging as some suggest, eating well without it should be much easier, including consolidating the mishmash of hearts, stars, ticks and dietary tables that confuse as many consumers as they help.


Adam Creighton, Economics Editor
Adam Creighton is an award-winning journalist with a special interest in tax and financial policy. He was a Journalist in Residence at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business in 2019.




https://www.theaustralian.com.au/co...4dd25dba81404bc
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  #2   ^
Old Tue, Aug-06-19, 04:53
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WereBear WereBear is offline
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In other words: carb counting. 😂
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  #3   ^
Old Tue, Aug-06-19, 08:11
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Bob-a-rama Bob-a-rama is offline
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Taxing cigarettes didn't cut down smoking.

Taxing alcohol didn't cure alcoholism

Taxing sugar will not stop people from eating it

As far as Jennie Brand-Miller is concerned, she may well be on the sugar payroll via tacit bribes. The American Heart Association gets millions of dollars each year by big ag along with test results created by big ag designed to show that fat is bad. Back when I was a child, doctors recommended smoking to release tension. And today they say there is no climate change.

The merchants of doubt make millions of dollars selling scientific sounding propaganda to the masses. That's why we are on a low fat, high carb diet.

If a person's pursuit of happiness is eating donuts every day like my dad did, they should have the liberty to do so. Actually, he saved Medicare a lot of money by dying at 72.

As we mentioned before, hang gliders, skiers, high school football or soccer players, motorcyclists, skin divers, raw shellfish eaters, rock climbers, and so many other pleasure activities also cost the health service millions.

At a convention of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, one speaker after showing the statistics that prove if your child plays soccer or football he or she will have a 25% greater than average chance of getting Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. He added that you shouldn't let your child play any sport that results in head impact, helmet or not, unless you don't like your child. But are we taxing balls or making that illegal? No, we glorify it.

So what makes Sugar the lone culprit? Is it singled out because we in the low-carb group all agree it is bad for us? How many of us use their cell phone while driving? Distracted driving by cell phone is worse than driving drunk according to my insurance carrier. So since sugar is NIMBY shall we pick on it while we do other things for our own pursuit of happiness that have a negative impact on our own health?

Especially since it has been proved that price doesn't matter to the addicted. When I was a hippie an ounce of marijuana cost $10. Now according to Forbes the nationwide average is $324, and that hasn't cut down the use of pot one bit.

So the sugar tax is obviously not about stopping sugar consumption. Only the most gullible will believe that. Instead the sugar tax is just another way for the government to put their hands in our pockets.

Bob
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  #4   ^
Old Tue, Aug-06-19, 08:55
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NewRuth NewRuth is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob-a-rama
At a convention of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine, one speaker after showing the statistics that prove if your child plays soccer or football he or she will have a 25% greater than average chance of getting Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. He added that you shouldn't let your child play any sport that results in head impact, helmet or not, unless you don't like your child. But are we taxing balls or making that illegal? No, we glorify it.


Stop using facts and thinking for yourself. We have found the enemy and it is sugar.

Don't talk about fructose and the increased damage it does.

Forget processed and unsaturated vegetable oils and their negative effect on satiety (per Dr. Eades). Forget glyphosate laden grains, potatoes, etc. Forget all the other questionable processed profit centers.

It's sugar. Sugar is the only thing that ruins our health.

Last edited by NewRuth : Tue, Aug-06-19 at 09:09.
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  #5   ^
Old Tue, Aug-06-19, 10:11
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bevangel bevangel is offline
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Default

Quote:
Back in a 2007 column, I mocked a tax on sugary drinks, suggesting a tax on obese people might be more efficient. “Everyone would submit an official body mass index report with their annual tax return. The (tax office) would make the fat tax calculation for you. It would be a progressive tax: the fatter the taxpayer, the higher the tax,” I wrote.


I'm against a tax on sugar for all the reason's Bob-a-rama mentioned. But, I suppose it is progress of a sort if the author of the article has come to finally recognize that becoming/being fat MIGHT NOT be due to some sort of moral failure!

I don't know if he was ever serious about A direct tax on fat people (based on a submitted official BMI report) or if that was just a tongue-in -cheek suggestion. But, such a tax would only push fat people towards consuming an even higher ratio of cheap carb-laden processed crap as they would have even less money in their pockets to splurge on more-expensive high quality REAL food.

Maybe what we really need is for someone to figure out how to ensure that unprocessed foods cost less to purchase than processed (convenience) stuff.

One would THINK that it would cost more to buy processed (pre-made) convenience foods than the "raw" (as it comes from the field) materials to make one's own. But sadly, that is often NOT TRUE.

Big buyers (i.e. food manufacturers) get a major price break on the cost of their raw materials...and then they save more money by bulking up their processed stuff with cheap sugar, corn syrup, and grains. When you purchase tons of tomatoes right out of the field, you don't pay anywhere NEAR the supermarket price per pound. Plus, it doesn't matter to the bulk purchaser if there are a bunch of misshapen, green, and bug eaten tomatoes among the truck-load. It's all going to look the same once chopped and processed with a bunch of sugar and chemical flavorants and preservatives added.

And, as long as it costs more for a consumer to buy fresh tomatoes, pepper, garlic, onions, cilantro etc to make their own salsa (without the added sugar) than it does to just buy it by the jar, very few consumers are going to go to the trouble of making their own. Ditto pretty much everything else now available as a convenience food on the supermarket shelves!

BTW - fat people already pay a financial premium for being fat. One simple but ubiquitous example: women's "plus-size" garments are ALWAYS more expensive that the exact same garment (style, color, material, and manufacturer) in a "miss-size." That is, if the exact same garment is even available for purchase. More often, when compared side-by-side, the more expensive plus-size garment is more cheaply made that it's purported twin in missy sizes. Linings are left out, cheaper buttons are used, elastic waist-bands replace fitted waists, and very often thinner, cheaper fabric (but with the same print pattern) are used to make the plus-size garments. I know b/c, when I was on my way down from 265 lbs, I went thru a phase where I didn't know whether the largest missy size or the smallest plus size would fit me better. So I often compared supposedly-identical garments in the two size ranges! It's one thing to have to pay more for a garment (fair enough assuming the larger garment requires more material) but quite another to pay more and then get an inferior product!
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  #6   ^
Old Tue, Aug-06-19, 13:39
Bonnie OFS Bonnie OFS is offline
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I've seen ads from the '40s or '50s saying that sugar is so healthful, it's a great thing to feed your kids. Don't want them running out of energy! It was also touted as a way to lose weight - which was the logic behind the Ayds diet candy.
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  #7   ^
Old Tue, Aug-06-19, 13:39
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Bob-a-rama Bob-a-rama is offline
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I'd really like to reduce the general population's addiction to sugar. I just don't know how.

Tax won't work, that's been proven

Making it illegal won't work, that's also been proven

How about a charge for health insurance tied to an obesity index? Unfair as the football and soccer kids are going to cost the health industry more not to mention the hang gliders, golfers (bad for your back), aerobic gym folks (bad for your ears), motorcyclists, rock climbers, etc.

Education seems to be the best way, but unfortunately, we have the best lawmakers money CAN buy - and that includes both major parties and the independents.

When the FDA became a group to support the food and drug industry instead of what it was designed to do, protect the citizen, we lost the integrity and the fight.

I can't stop a parent from letting their children play contact sports, I can't stop an adult from going out rock climbing, I can't stop someone from drinking too much, and I can't stop someone from eating too much sugar.

I guess I just have to take care of myself. I know not to eat sugar, I know not to play football, I know not to go rock climbing, I know not to go to places where the volume of sound is over 85dba, I know not to drink too much, and I know not to believe everything the media and the government tells me.

I'm only 73 years old, I've outlived my dad and quite a few of my friends, I'm on zero prescriptions and I have the circulatory system of a 50 year old (per a heart doc). If I don't step on a land mine or get hit by a falling meteorite, I think I'll have the last laugh.

My DW who is also low-carb will probably be there with me.

I can't be my brothers' keeper.

Bob
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  #8   ^
Old Tue, Aug-06-19, 15:04
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WereBear WereBear is offline
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Putting out accurate information would help.
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  #9   ^
Old Tue, Aug-06-19, 17:02
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Ms Arielle Ms Arielle is offline
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Taxing certainly brings sugar into the light, and that focus is an opportunity to then educate. About all carbs.

My kids played soccer.... not the best teams that win at all costs, but the second string teams that played for FUN. Neither my DH nor I will sign for permission to play football.

Heard football viewership had dropped significantly.... hope that is true
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  #10   ^
Old Wed, Aug-07-19, 09:35
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WereBear WereBear is offline
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Plan: EpiPaleo/Primal/LowOx
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ms Arielle
Heard football viewership had dropped significantly.... hope that is true


When the long-covered-up information broke about the brain injury risk, knowledgeable insiders knew their business was dead, in a few generations at the most. They would be bleeding money for damages. A lot like tobacco, in fact.

The system is fed by college scholarships which further breed high school players, and they start as young as eight.

Who is going to give their fourth grader a concussion? Anyone?
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  #11   ^
Old Wed, Aug-07-19, 18:17
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Bob-a-rama Bob-a-rama is offline
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What gets me is doctors have known about the concussions for years now. I think I read that in the A4A report in the late 1990s. Yet colleges, institutes that are supposed to be enriching their student's brains are still filling stadiums with fans watching people hurt their brains. Why? Money.

IMO Football, soccer, hockey, and anything else that causes head shock shouldn't be played in schools.

Fortunately, I wasn't very good in sports because I spent all my time practicing saxophone -- I was in the band.

Bob
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  #12   ^
Old Wed, Aug-07-19, 19:30
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Ms Arielle Ms Arielle is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WereBear
When the long-covered-up information broke about the brain injury risk, knowledgeable insiders knew their business was dead, in a few generations at the most. They would be bleeding money for damages. A lot like tobacco, in fact.

The system is fed by college scholarships which further breed high school players, and they start as young as eight.

Who is going to give their fourth grader a concussion? Anyone?


Our local program started when my oldest was FIVE. Full contact. I was disgusted yey everyone signed up. Not me. A few years later, it would be soccer- soccer-soccer. At a championship match the other team was so violent, our coach wanted to forfeit to prevent injury. Good coach.

I read dr amens work looking at brains of football players. The rage is due to brain damage. Some supplements help but cant restore to original co ndition.

Met a man that met a doc flying home from a conference: those that exercise for fun not organized sports live longer.
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  #13   ^
Old Wed, Aug-07-19, 19:37
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Ms Arielle Ms Arielle is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob-a-rama
What gets me is doctors have known about the concussions for years now. I think I read that in the A4A report in the late 1990s. Yet colleges, institutes that are supposed to be enriching their student's brains are still filling stadiums with fans watching people hurt their brains. Why? Money.

IMO Football, soccer, hockey, and anything else that causes head shock shouldn't be played in schools.

Fortunately, I wasn't very good in sports because I spent all my time practicing saxophone -- I was in the band.

Bob


Totally agree.

It is the fans, aka college grads, that give huge money to their winning alma mater.

Crazy.

I tell my boys their body must last to 100 years old...in good condition. They got to see grandpa who played college basketball, Syracuse, have multiple joint replacements and now in assisted living. Of course, he eats SAD.
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  #14   ^
Old Wed, Aug-07-19, 19:43
Bonnie OFS Bonnie OFS is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Ms Arielle
I read dr amens work looking at brains of football players. The rage is due to brain damage. Some supplements help but cant restore to original co ndition.


My mother was a big fan of Dr. Amen. It was probably from her that I learned about the brain injuries in contact sports. My kids ended up in a non-contact version of Taekwondo. My daughter loved it - my son not so much. I wish I hadn't pushed him to stay in it, but, in my defense, there wasn't much else in our small town. Now he's a body builder.
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  #15   ^
Old Thu, Aug-08-19, 07:04
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Bob-a-rama Bob-a-rama is offline
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Plan: Keto (Atkins Induction)
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Muhammid Ali got Parkinsons, most likely from head injuries during boxing matches.

His daughter is a boxer.

Some people just don't learn from others.

I'll repeat the advice from the A4M conference, "Don't let your child play football or other head impact sports, unless you don't like your child."

So if people won't listen to that, how are they going to listen to no sugar?

Bob
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