I don't understand why they put a sugar tax on whole fruit and vegetable products. I could understand things with "sugar" and its variants added but not real food. It's really frustrating when those fake sugars and flavors make you sick.
Yeah, I agree there. We have to check the labels on things, especially bottled drinks, because the Daughter has really bad reactions to Aspertame, Sucralose and Acesulfame. They just mess with my intestinal flora, which is also not a nice thing. The sugar alcohols are ok, although there are some inconvenient and embarassing side-effects to those. So, I would think food
with sugar added should be in the cross-hairs, not
fruit and veg! That's just crazy. You want people to eat fruit and veg for the vitamins and minerals!
I remember that in California they had to put calorie counts for restaurant foods on the menus. After that it was up to personal responsibility to choose wisely (or pay the consequences). Limiting calories in sold, prepared food is ... well, if I am only eating one meal in a day and it's 1,500 calories, or if I've just run a marathon and want to have two plates of 1,500, it's not anyone's business save mine. If I did that regularly and blimped up too much, that would also be "on me" unless there was some sort of underlying medical condition causing it. Even then, if I knew about the condition and neglected my nutrition, it's on me.
I guess in a country where the NHS has to treat everyone for free I could see an argument for some sort of logical campaign to try to avoid the collateral damage and the cost of treating that damage. I'm just not sure that the proposed restrictions are the way to go about it. I would prefer to think education would be appropriate. (Having sat through a "these are the potential side effects of diabetes" classes, with the slide show of gangrenous feet and other ghastly images, they kind of got my attention. ) Or I could see perhaps some sort of arrangment that ties payment of some of the costs of treatment to the persons who choose a lifestyle that results in that kind of damage, rather than laying it on everyone.
But how do you realistically do that? You, cardiac-patient guy. You've got high cholesterol. You're not eating right. You have to pay a surcharge for your open-heart surgery. (?) In my case, the very few times I've had higher cholesterol than normal I had been on an extremely healthy diet. When the medics chewed me out for eating poorly, I basically said "f' it" and went back to pizza, fries, and cheeseburgers. The next test showed normal levels, and I was congratulated on how much I had modified my lifestyle. That happened to me more than once. I finally blurted out that food had not a damned thing to do with it, as my levels were better when I was eating pizza and chips than salads and lean meats. The docs then kind of grudgingly admitted that other things could cause the levels to be up. Like genetics, which you can't do diddly about. (In my case it was stress, I'm almost certain.) So, how could you fit that into a "one size fits all" consequences matrix? Not very well, I'd think. It's a complicated problem.
But I really don't think legislating what people "can" have for dinner is the right approach.
