Mexican states are moving to ban the sale of junk food to children (opens in new tab)

That is my general concern with almost all of the nutrition research on fats. They are not grouping the fats appropriately. If you group butter and hyrogenated vegetable oils together because they are both "saturated" fats and then do your analysis lumping them together then you can't distinguish whether the problems caused by saturated fats are due to the hydrogenization or due to the butter being saturated or both.

Saturated fat consumption is decreasing, while unsaturated fat consumption is increasing, but people continue getting less healthy. So it seems the premise that saturated fats are that bad needs to be questioned. Or at least we need to ask if it's really saturated fats like coconut oil and butter that are bad or something that happens to the fats like canola oil when it is hydrogenated.

Edit: also as anecdotal evidence, what is the one common feature of almost all food generally considered harmful? Lots of processed vegetable oils in it, often in conjunction with sugar. I have not seen a reasonable explanation of how this can be the case if poly-unsaturated fats are as healthy as they are claimed to be.

My take is that "everything in moderation" is a mental crutch that people adopt when there's some part of their diet that they know isn't _good_ but that they don't want to give up completely. It is true that we can sneak in unhealthy food here and there without hugely detrimental effects, but that doesn't mean it's a good baseline practice.

The one scenario where it might be useful advice is with somebody whose diet is terrible, and you want to ease them towards a somewhat nutritionally positive diet; even in this circumstance, a more direct approach of "eat less crap and more good stuff" would be more accurate.

You generally want to avoid smoke, so safflower oil and avocado oil are the best choices choices. But probably even better to not cook in oil at all, and just add olive oil (or your favorite source of fat) at the end

Not going to do well on this site if you make baseless nonsensical claims like that.

Paper[1] from 2009 stating that: 1. We actually use caffeine as a first-line treatment in premature infants for treating apnea and 2. Nobody has done the research on adolescents to assess any negative impact on brain development.

[1] https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2009.01.001

Everyone (more or less) is outside a few liberal, urban, health-focused pockets of the US, too. Or to sweet tea, or some other sugary caffeine drink. Unless you intended "developing nation" to cover those parts of the US, as well :-)

[EDIT] Not sure what rubbed people the wrong way about this, but if it's the qualifiers then it's my understanding that both "liberal" and "urban" are, independently or together, correlated with smaller waistlines and healthier lifestyles, in the US. Almost certainly including consumption of sugary drinks (indeed, this seems to peak in the "deep red" South, in the US, from what I can find). If that's wrong I'd be interested to know about it.

Additionally, measuring calories in food is done in a purely chemical fashion - the food is burned and the amount of heat energy released is measured. This of course does not actually measure how much energy your body is actually able to absorb (for example, dietary fiber burns just as well as refined sugar, but isnt absorbed the same in the body).

But just trying to explain this phenomenon to people is often met with extreme defensiveness. You'll hear: I could NEVER give up pasta/meat/whatever. But they absolutely could, and it wouldn't be nearly as hard as they're imagining.

I'll always encourage anyone curious about tweaking their diet to just go for it, but I've given up entirely on trying to nudge people toward a healthier lifestyle if it's not something they're already working toward.

stemming from this, I think the most important thing is that people "get fit" for the right reasons. that they want to have better health, be able to do more activites, etc. vs some of the more usually toxic reasons like trying to meet conventional beauty standards, hating their own appearance. far too often I have seen people who "rush" trying to get fit, or do it for the wrong reasons, and just set themselves up for failure in the long run - or potentially much worse, like depression and the like.

so I think things like having a good measure of "self love" and self worth no matter what you look like, patience, consistency, etc. are all keys to succeeding over just "eating less" or whatever

That may seem illogical since you can't have freedom if you're dead, but we ask people to make a similar trade-off (risk life/health for freedom) when joining the military, and many do.

I'm generally sceptical of tying this kind of advice to crises anyway. It's a social and long-term issue. We ought to eat better not just so that we are better prepared for a pandemic but because it's the right thing to do in general.

I think there is more counter evidence then supporting evidence for authoritarian governments being necessary for dealing with pandemics.

1. Please note - comparatively well, Canada, Europe & Oceania aren't doing perfect they're just doing significantly better than the states.

You don't have to ban things not be authoritarian. Smart governments just price in externalities, which is why you slap tobacco and alcohol with extra taxes to offset the increased costs of health care and reduced adult lifetimes.

Now, if only the government was not as corrupt as it is in Mexico...

I sincerely hope there is someone there to stand for you.

I don't think the obesity epidemic is from lack of information.

"Junk food" is a pseudo-scientific designation selectively targeting certain kinds of calorie dense foods. These foods may epidemiologically contribute to obesity, but on an individual level they're far from universally bad.

I think warning about food over-consumption would be great. But selectively targeting some foods only misinforms the public.

[0] And alcohol is still getting far less attention than cigarettes. Most places still don't have warning labels about the risk of cancer or even broad public awareness, despite 3.5% of cancer deaths being alcohol attributable.

Ban HFCS/similar garbage sweeteners in all food products, and incentivize farmers to grow something other than corn. Give them grants to build all-year-round hydroponic farms to grow vegetables or something. And then from there, I think we can start to address other ailments like school lunches and the like.

Tax is charged on cigs because it works and no other reason, its regressive tax too.

I prefer that to a ban, but let's not pretend selling cigs at high prices is in the interest of cig smokers. The only place it works is where there are nicotine alternatives.

I don't know if anyone has quantified the effects on sales of each measure, but they certainly add up with the additional taxes.

Frankly to blame America is to take agency away from Mexican people and reeks of paternalism and ethnocentricity.

People consume less when consumption is less convenient. A billion people aren't going to start baking cupcakes every day.

I can't effortlessly and cheaply acquire a honey bun when I've had a bad day if I have to make them at home.

You can control the amount of sugar within something you bake yourself for starter.

WHO recommends no more than 50g per day for adults, and preferably less than 25g. https://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/sugar-gui...

Shifting the responsibility for solving a problem from the government towards individual consumers so that corporations can keep making money is a tried, extremely dirty and old PR strategy, originating at least with BP: https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-sh...

According to Mintz, the production of sugar was at the heart of the transition from pre-modernity to industrial modernity. Pre-modern human diets all over the world varied widely but consisted of very little or no sugar. The production process required a ton of technological sophistication and intensive labor. Colonial era economic slavery regimes developed mostly in service of the production of sugar.

Sugar is now a huge part of diets in just about every modern culture. It really is addictive in a sense, both for individuals and in a collective economic sense (like oil, sugar consumption and production processes are dialetically self-reproducing, the argument goes).

Myself, I don't really know if we should try to constrain sugar consumption via law for moral reasons. Those efforts sometimes reek of a moralizing paternalism that I don't much care for. But the way we consume sugar, like everything else, has a history. We didn't always do it this way. We need not do it this way forever. And there's more to it than just disparate isolated individual consumption choices.

EDIT - To summarize, the way we consume sugar today is not arbitrary or "natural," but an outcome of the particular way that industrial modernity has developed.

Is that supposed to be a contradiction? It is in fruit and therefore it can't be bad? The poisonous fruit of Atropa belladonna comes to mind.

> Of course in excess it's bad, but normal sugar consumption is not an issue.

The thing is, though, that normal sugar consumption is borderline impossible in a modern diet. You have to go out of your way to avoid sugar, it requires informed decision-making and -- all too often -- purchasing relatively expensive products. Consequently, people who lack education and/or have a low-income are particularly vulnerable.

I agree with the original comment, these products should be outright banned.

I mean, I'm against it. A lot of traditional foods, like fruit preserves, have added sugar.

But what is danger, exactly? People would just not have food that tastes as good...

I'm no agriculture nerd but isn't much of the US particularly well suited to growing corn, regardless of subsidies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-alcoholic_fatty_liver_dise...

I remember growing up (I'm from Mexico) chips often had promos where you could find collectibles with cartoon characters in the bags [1]. The cool kids had huge stacks of these, so I begged my mom to get me chips mostly for the toy. I didn't have an allowance and my mom knew better so I never got any though.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tazos

As someone who knows a little bit about Mexico, this seems like a law that completely ignores reality.

Would you agree that government should avoid creating laws that in practice do more harm than good, even if the idea behind the law is good and just?