I hate all this sugar tax

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It’s an Oregon thing. Use to be 5¢ now it’s 10¢.
To encourage recycling

In NYC, it's 5 cents.

Smoking and drinking still exist because of human rights. Isn't sugar a human right too?

We have sales tax and bottle tax. Feminine products are also taxed. Why is sugar tax any different?

If you have ever seen the movie "Idiocracy", you might recall that they used a beverage they calked "Brawndo", which was essentially Gatorade, in place of drinking water and water for their crops. Brawndo had become normalized, and this had severe ramifications in the form of mass crop failures.

Sugar and high fructose corn syrup are the real life equivalent of Brawndo.

Walk into a market in the United States and you are very likely to be greeted by a display of cakes and cupcakes and brownies. Most of the sugary items are near the front of the store where they can easily be seen and tempt consumers. Ice cream and pies often come before the vegetables in the frozen section And check stands are often lined with candy which is marketed by its producers as a snack. Sugar or high fructose corn syrup can be found as an added ingredient in nearly every snack product, boxed food, and bread. I should note that for most of human history, bread was unsweetened.

Nearly every food product marketed to children is packed with added sugar or high-fructose corn syrup, including but not limited to breakfast cereals, yogurt, and lunch drinks. Soda, High-C, Capri Sun, and that abomination SunnyDelight.

Even the concept of fruit juice as an everyday beverage is a departure from the diets our physiology has evolved to handle. For one, modern fruits have been bred to have significantly higher sugar contents than their wild type ancestors. Second, in the past, fruit was a seasonal thing. If you drink orange juice it would just be a few cups a year, not a cup every day.

The average everyday Westerner consumes astounding amounts of sugar without even realizing, even those who don't eat a lot of candy or sweets, because it is slipped in to just about everything. I went to buy some dill pickles a while back and I noticed they contain high-fructose corn syrup. What is even the point of that? I wanted dill pickles not sweet pickles. But that is how distorted modern western tastes have become. People have been fed abnormally high amounts of sugar and other sweeteners from such a young age that they expect just about everything to have a bit of sweetness.

There is pretty much sugar in everything, even fruit has sugar. If anything tastes sweet, it's because it has sugar. Without sugar, everything would taste bland.

I covered that. The predominant sugar in fruit is fructose, which in small quantities is fine for most people but modern fruits have been bred for shipping, storing, and sweetness and so contain greatly elevated levels of fructose compared to their ancestors. It's the same for some vegetables. Carrots are a good example of this. Our sweet orange carrots were invented in the 16th or 17th century from the less sweet yellow carrot, which came from the less sweet purple carrot. Wild carrots are thin, white or purple, and not particularly sweet.

I don't think eating a modern carrot or piece of fruit once per day is going to harm the healthy person but neither will a soda on occasion. But when a person has added sugar or high fructose corn syrup in every meal, sees a soda or fruit juice as a replacement for water, they are far over the limit of what their body has evolved to handle by the time they eat that apple or those carrots, and the effect of that on society manifests as sky rocketing obesity, diabetes, and perhaps cancer rates. In 1700 the average person is estimated to have consumed 4.9 grams of sugar per day. In 2009 half of Americans consumed 227 grams of sugar each day.

leahbear is a real person/poster on this forum. I brought her post to your attention in another thread when she posted that she was very reluctant to talk about the connection between gut health and ASD on the forums because of the way I am treated here for speaking the truth.

I was going to say I haven't ever had so much as a pm conversation with her, but logged in to see a pm from here to which I just replied.


I wrote that stuff over 5 years ago & now there are medical studies that prove exactly what I've been sharing here.

What makes you think that I'm so special that I would be the only one on these forums to learn these things about ASD & then share them with others it can help?

I'm not saying ban sugar. I'm saying the public needs to be more aware issues surrounding excess sugars in the American diet and this issue needs to be handled as the threat to public health that it is.

You can get your alcohol and cigarettes but you are informed of the risks and our legislatures have taken action to limit the extent of the threat to public health and safety excess consumption of these products can pose. We no longer allow cigarettes and smoking to be marketed as a part of a normal, healthy life and we don't have advertising that represents alcoholic beverages as an alternative to water at every meal.

Sugars are fine in moderation but they are not being consumed in sufficient moderation and a large part of that is ignorance and lack of holding food manufacturers accountable for the sugar content of their product and who they target in their marketing.

I don't think merely taxing things is a solution though. There needs to be a public education campaign and more regulations concerning sugar content on producers and labeling that helps consumers understand their sugar consumption a little better as compared to what it should not exceed.

A soda needs to become an occasional 8 or 12 oz treat again instead of a 64 oz beverage a person regularly has with their meals.

Last edited by Chronos on 30 Jun 2018, 9:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

Like all good religious fanatics, I'm sure you see nothing wrong with a "pious fraud" so stop with the socks. I think Ez nailed it.

The United States tops the list at sugar consumption.

The U.S. tops the list for sugar consumption.

So where does your sugar hide?

Here is typical American meal plan.

Breakfast: Cold cereal is most common and the best selling cereals are...

Cinnamon Toast Crunch: 8g of sugar per serving. 6g in the low sugar variety.

Honey Bunches of Oats: 12g of sugar per serving.

Raisin Bran: 18g of sugar per serving.

Milk: 8g to 12g of sugar per serving, intrinsic.
Vanilla Soy Milk: 16g of sugar per serving.

Beverages: Water or black coffee or unsweetened tea 0g of sugar.

Orange juice: Tropicana. 23g of sugar per serving.

Bottled Starbucks Frappucino: 31g of sugar.

Lowest sugar breakfast: 13g of sugar.
Highest sugar breakfast: 65g of sugar.

Lunch:
Sandwiches on Wonderbread.

Unsweetened meat with with mayonnaise: 3.1g of sugar.
Peanut Butter and Jelly: 19 grams of sugar.

Subway Sandwhich: Between 3 and 16 grams of sugar.

Fruit:
Banana: 14g of sugar.
Apple: 19g of sugar.

Beverages:

Water. 0g of sugar.
Box of MinuteMaid apple juice: 19g

Typical 16oz bottle of sweetened beverage. 36g of sugar.

20oz bottle of Coke: 65g of sugar.

Lowest sugar lunch: 17.1 grams of sugar.
Highest sugar lunch: 103g of sugar.

I'm going to stop here because the lowest sugar intake for breakfast and lunch combined is already at 30g of sugar and that is 5g over the recommended highest daily sugar intake for women and the highest breakfast lunch combo sugar intake is at 168g which is insane.

For comparison, according to the article, "In India, people eat only about 5 grams per day on average. In Israel, it's 14.5 grams. In Indonesia, it's just over 15 grams. And in China, it's just under 16 grams."

Some caveats.
I did not include snacks but most Americans snack between meals.
I did not include the fact that most Americans do not measure out servings of milk and cereal and probably consume about two servings of each in actuality.
I DID include the fact that Americans tend to not heed serving sizes on small bottles of sweetened beverages and sodas and see the entire bottle as a single serving even though it's usually two servings.

Also, most importantly, notice that even the high sugar breakfast lunch combo isn't anything most Americans would be able to readily identify as high in sugar. Raisin Bran with Vanilla Soy Milk and Starbucks Frappacino, a 6" Sweet Onion Teriyaki subway sandwhich, and a 20oz bottle of Coke.

And that is the problem.

Of course the USA tops the world in sugar consumption. We have lots of farmers who grow great fields of corn just for that, and they are well connected in Congress and have put their high fructose corn syrup in everything.

Besides that, the USA has always eaten a high sugar diet relative to the rest of the world, esp in the Southeast states.

Not always. But either way it needs to stop.

It wont. What you are talking is large scale social reengineering, and it will never work if you try to force it all at once overnight. The people will resent and resist, and since the USA is a place where the people elect their leaders, none of them will rush to do this.

Who said anything about forcing it all overnight?

I work in a restaurant.

From my observations, Americans are very deluded about healthy eating and proper portion size.

We always get crazy busy around the holidays, which means, in addition to consuming cakes, pies, and large meals at home, people are adding to the load by eating out. Also, Americans use eating as a social comma:

"It's my birthday, let's stuff our face!"

"I got promoted, let's stuff our face!"

"It's the weekend, let's stuff our face!"

People in the West would do well to find other things to do with their time besides eating.