It’s a raw calculation between 0 to 5 stars on how healthy the food is. It’s basically calories (with some bias to the type of calories) divided by fibre+protein. These days you don’t see products in supermarkets or chain restaurants without the stars shown on the front of the box. It’s become an expectation of customers. Even snacks like tim tams clearly show .5 stars on the front indicating they are high in calories for how filling they are.
It works well. A high protein and high fibre food can indeed have high calories and score well. But you know what? High protein and high fibre foods are extremely filling. So fair enough!
Obviously any such system is high level and misses all the micronutrients etc. but in general calories divided by fibre+protein provides a reasonable guide. One behavioural thing i’ve seen come out of this is parents allowing children to pick snacks and cereals themselves provided it’s 4+ stars. This usually leads to kids adding wheat bran cereals and muesli bars to the cart by their own choice. Kids love freedom and guidelines that it must be 4+ stars give that freedom without overly sugary crap being allowed. It’s also great for adults wanting to spot clearly unhealthy food for their own goals. Setting a guideline of only 4.5+ foods in the cart is so simple. You can still find good snacks, it’s just that they’ll undoubtedly be very filling too.
The EU has nutri-score which looks like this, but less information.
I quickly skimmed to the article you linked. I couldn't find anything as to whether it pertains to cooked or uncooked food?
For example, in the EU frozen pre-fried French fries have an A score (best), but that isn't correct, as no-one eats them like this. You fry them again in your home fryer.
Whereas smoked salmon is D or E because of the higher fat content, and the salt used for drying.
It's meant to be 'as prepared' but as the above notes there's trickiness in certain brands claiming "our guidelines say to prepare it with skim milk" while everyone adds ice cream.
Still while no system is perfect and there's a need to call out brands that claim it's prepared with skim milk when it's clearly not i still think it's pretty damn great.
As a non American some of these numbers are just mind boggling. Only putting the warning on drinks with more than 50g of added sugar, a 'medium' Dr Pepper with 67g of sugar and a large with 96g.
Sugar content is a function of serving size, of course.
The astonishing thing to me is that we can sell a 32 fl oz (950 mL) drink as "large", instead of "a week's supply of empty calories that you should never consume in one sitting".
I distinctly remember having my mind blown by fast food drink sizes when I visited the US. A "small" there felt like what we would call "large" here in Russia. Our small soda is usually 300 ml at most.
Activity level matters a lot. Genetics matter a lot. There are a lot of late teen boys (teen boys are likely in sports at school, and hormones means they will use a lot of energy anyway) who need 6000 calories per day. There are a lot of adults only only need 1700 per day (they really should exercise more!). We can talk about the 2000 calories daily requirement, but that is a round number that is close enough for discussion but not really relevant to any individual.
What you grew up with matters - if your body is always low on calories it will compensate by growing less, so if you someone young gets calories they will tend to be larger (there is a lot of genetic variation between humans that makes hard to measure at levels smaller than national population over decades), in various ways and need more calories to maintain the same weight. It isn't clear if this shows up in anything other than body size though some suspect it does.
There is also the question about what people eat between meals. Some people eat big meals but never snack between meals. Some people don't eat much at a meal - but they always have snacks in between. There is a lot of variation. I know some people who get half their calories from soda (beer is another large source of calories for some people, but that starts to get into alcoholism).
There is probably more that you don't know about others and so be careful about drawing any conclusions.
You're missing the forest for the trees, and the point of OP.
That growing young male teen you reference (not sure why we need to focus on boys, here) would not in any circumstance choose a 500ml Coca Cola to satiate their "hormones". Nor word any trained dietican.
That's the point of this discussion. There is enough information to learn everything about a healthy balanced diet. Your point is not that; rather your point is that there are....different habits of animals. Yes, agreed.
> Only putting the warning on drinks with more than 50g of added sugar
Wait till you see all the tricks food producers use to avoid the added sugar label. “grape juice concentrate” is not an added sugar if the food is grapes flavored, for example.
Increasingly marketed-as-healthier foods don’t include any sugar at all. Yet half the ingredients are various sugars. Sometimes as cheeky as “sugarcane concentrate”
My immediate thought while reading the article was both "What counts as 'added' sugar?" and "Who is making this 'daily recommended amount of added sugars'?"
Of course, all of this information is already available via nutrition facts for most sold foods.
The root problem here doesn't seem to be the availability of information, I expect it to be more about the availability of time and effort to spend on priority of personal health. I don't think the issue is that people don't know that food isn't bad for them, it's that their health is lower priority than their immediate needs of feeding themselves and their families.
If anything, as you point out, this seems to be a better way for food manufacturers to bend the rules to avoid the logo and make something seem healthier than it is rather than giving more information to consumers. The _fact_ (X Grams of Sugar) is on the package but the logo indicates that the food contains more than x grams of "recommended" "added" sugars, two things that can be misunderstood and/or gamed.
> If anything, as you point out, this seems to be a better way for food manufacturers to bend the rules to avoid the logo and make something seem healthier than it is rather than giving more information to consumers
Drinks in particular are tricky here. Take apple juice for example. You can have 2 brands with vastly different sugar levels and neither has added sugar. Just different concentrations.
Consumers (especially kids) will generally prefer the sweeter brand. And it all sounds healthy because it’s marketed as pure fruits! It’s even true, the juice is pure fruit. Just in concentrations that are extremely unhealthy.
The stats say it has greatly decreased sugar consumption in soft drinks. From my point-of-view (someone who rarely drinks soft drinks) it seems that most soft drinks now mix artificial sweeteners and sugar, so effectively all soft drinks are now "diet" varieties.
It's really annoying. I also drink soft drinks very rarely but if I want, say, tonic water that doesn't taste like crap I need to splash out on a premium product. Other things (e.g. cranberry juice drink) are simply unavailable without artificial sweetener. Reduced salt snacks are also shite. It is hard to find a treat that is still actually a treat.
Sizes tend to be a lot smaller. One poster above said a large soda in the USA is almost one litre! In the UK it's roughly half that size at 500ml.
As the sugar level is directly proportionate to the overall volume, it can be quite surprising how much sugar there is when you aren't used to such massive servings.
> One poster above said a large soda in the USA is almost one litre!
There are two sizes of single-serving sodas sold commercially in the US.
A small one, a can, is 12 oz, 355 mL.
A large one is 20 oz, 591 mL.
To buy a 32-ounce soda, you'd have to do something very strange.
(There is another common commercial size, the two liter bottle of exactly 2000 mL. Those aren't intended to be bought and drunk; they're intended to be bought, taken home, and stored in your refrigerator over time.)
America needs better unsweetened beverage options. Japan and Taiwan (and probably other Asian countries too, I haven't been) have a crazy good selection of teas and tea-like drinks that taste great and have zero sugar. Unfortunately, to someone who drinks soda every day, those probably taste bitter and "nasty", it takes some time to recalibrate your tastebuds and appreciate their flavor. But the options need to exist in good quantities first before it can become a common choice, and I'm sure soda is more profitable so we're probably never getting out of this...
I'm convinced diet Coke is to blame for a lot of people in the US thinking no sugar drink = awful drink, preventing interest in looking into it further. Mostly because of the taste, but also because branding it as "diet" in the name was a bad marketing choice in the long run. God bless those that like the Diet variant more than normal Coke, but I swear more people think e.g. Dr Pepper Zero Sugar tastes better than Dr Pepper!
Once over the hump of assuming it's the sugar that makes soda tastes good, I think it opens up a lot higher chance of trying other sugar free drinks which can be even healthier (while still tasting amazing). At least it did for n=1.
Olipop might have pretty high distribution, I see them in normal supermarkets and places like Target and Costco now. I don't live in either of the places you mention.
However, Olipop has sugar alcohols as a sweetener, which give me gastrointestinal distress after only two cans. Soiling yourself is a good disincentive for drinking a lot of soda.
Ehh those are a crutch, I'm talking zero sugar at all. It doesn't have to be bougie or artisanal, just a good variety of tea at affordable prices would be a good start. Making it "fancy" and expensive just defeats the purpose.
Agreed. Here in the US if they say "sugar free" there is usually some other sugar replacement. I don't need dried mango's with added sugar or sweetener, they are sweet enough as is. I'd love to see an unsweetened option. As someone who is trying to remove sugar from my diet anything sweet is almost too much for me.
I'm more concerned about added sugar in other foods. If you're trying to keep your sugar intake down, cutting sugary sodas seems pretty obvious to me, but remembering to be careful about bread or tomato paste or anything else you might eat because some brands or restaurants add a bunch of extra sugar is really a pain.
The good thing is, if your palate has gotten used to unsweetened beverages, you can easily tell when bread or a sauce has sugar in it when it shouldn't. Or maybe I'm weirdly sensitive to sugar, I dunno.
Crazy how you probably wouldn't get a slice of cheesecake factory cheesecake on the side of your Macdonald's meal; but never think twice about a medium soda that has the same amount of added sugar
Reminds me of that one post that goes "Whenever I see those comparisons of sugar between donuts and soda it just seems to me that donuts are healthier than I thought"
>> I'm surprised more hackers don't seek out quality espresso instead of these weird XTREME energy drinks.
I think you answered it though, lots of (younger) people do not like the taste of coffee, so you get the caffeine and the delivery mechanism is sweet & sugary.
Here's a free idea for anyone out there: Caffeinated Ketchup. It already turns up every flavor component to 11 so why not make it heavily caffeinated too!
> a large Starbucks caffinated milkshake (and that's what they are -- addictive milkshakes)
I got the impression (from some online browsing) that Starbucks has started offering coffeeless frozen drinks.
But I also got the impression that their drinks are more "crushed ice mixed with syrup" than "ice cream mixed with milk". How much milk/cream are you getting in one of these milkshakes?
thats because the "ier" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting. getting fat from all that sugar is the least of your concerns. it also ages you rapidly and makes you more likely to have ongoing systemic inflammation. I'm back in the states for the last two weeks and the difference between people here and when I was aboard is jarring.
I personally think it's gross the idea of licking something then setting it aside to lick it again later without washing it, but maybe you do wash it. Also maybe way too salty.
Why is this targeted at chains with 15+ locations? Is the soda in a single location mom&pop restaurant any less bad for you? No. Why is this not just a blanket rule for the city?
Small local laws like this tend to gain a lot less traction when they pile up to be a larger (relative) load on smaller, local-only businesses. Rather than not have anything pass, people prefer to pass something which still has 80% of the benefit but only 20% the resistance. Only targeting large chains, at least initially, is a way to move that needle over getting nothing out of principle.
If successful/popular, then it's much easier to pass full coverage later.
How is this onerous? You update the website your QR code points to. It's not like you have to print up new menus. If you still have menus, just print up a sheet of stickers that you smash onto the menu. Malicious compliance can be used
I could see how it might be helpful when people compare meals. For example, maybe a hamburger doesn't have added sugars, but a salad does (because the dressing is so sweet). A customer might order the burger instead, or order the salad but swap to a different dressing.
There have been some restaurant foods that I knew weren't healthy but didn't realize how unhealthy they were until I looked at recipes for how to make them myself.
Tiny label with a symbol most people will not immediately grok? Please...
Mexico has big labels saying things like "EXCESO DE GRASA" o "EXCESO DE AZÚCAR" which make it super clear what they're warning about. I used them to find the high-calorie snacks for hiking :)
It's interesting how they're passing this after the public failure of the soda ban, one would think they'd be looking into more productive areas of legislation. I don't drink sugar and generally don't go out, but this doesn't seem to be solving consumer problems
The big, real problems aren't really solvable on a city level. And opposition can quash any obvious solutions.
Unfortunately this does lead to a lot of small, weak rules being passed because elected officials have to "do something" in order to stay in the public eye to get reelected.
It's fake work. You do some social restriction (usually on food) that follows upper middle-class aesthetics, the media cheers, and dinner parties are supportive. Even better if you specifically target it towards the poor*, or food that only poor people eat.
This, for example, is targeted towards chains. If every restaurant you eat at has fewer than 15 locations, it doesn't exist. Where do upper-middle class people eat?
-----
[*] like the fake work that RFK, Jr. is doing trying to make it impossible to buy soda and snack foods on SNAP. Only positive press he's gotten from NYT etc.. Yes, make those poor people eat better! But somehow also fat acceptance.
I personally love the star ratings au/nz have on food.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_Star_Rating_System
It’s a raw calculation between 0 to 5 stars on how healthy the food is. It’s basically calories (with some bias to the type of calories) divided by fibre+protein. These days you don’t see products in supermarkets or chain restaurants without the stars shown on the front of the box. It’s become an expectation of customers. Even snacks like tim tams clearly show .5 stars on the front indicating they are high in calories for how filling they are.
It works well. A high protein and high fibre food can indeed have high calories and score well. But you know what? High protein and high fibre foods are extremely filling. So fair enough!
Obviously any such system is high level and misses all the micronutrients etc. but in general calories divided by fibre+protein provides a reasonable guide. One behavioural thing i’ve seen come out of this is parents allowing children to pick snacks and cereals themselves provided it’s 4+ stars. This usually leads to kids adding wheat bran cereals and muesli bars to the cart by their own choice. Kids love freedom and guidelines that it must be 4+ stars give that freedom without overly sugary crap being allowed. It’s also great for adults wanting to spot clearly unhealthy food for their own goals. Setting a guideline of only 4.5+ foods in the cart is so simple. You can still find good snacks, it’s just that they’ll undoubtedly be very filling too.
The EU has nutri-score which looks like this, but less information.
I quickly skimmed to the article you linked. I couldn't find anything as to whether it pertains to cooked or uncooked food?
For example, in the EU frozen pre-fried French fries have an A score (best), but that isn't correct, as no-one eats them like this. You fry them again in your home fryer.
Whereas smoked salmon is D or E because of the higher fat content, and the salt used for drying.
It's meant to be 'as prepared' but as the above notes there's trickiness in certain brands claiming "our guidelines say to prepare it with skim milk" while everyone adds ice cream.
Still while no system is perfect and there's a need to call out brands that claim it's prepared with skim milk when it's clearly not i still think it's pretty damn great.
As a non American some of these numbers are just mind boggling. Only putting the warning on drinks with more than 50g of added sugar, a 'medium' Dr Pepper with 67g of sugar and a large with 96g.
I'm a Canadian and we're equally obsessed with sugar, it's not just the Americans.
It's not just the Americans at all, in fact: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/sugar-con... // https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d...
I'm saying this as a general reminder: Sugar intake is a major issue globally.
I think they mean they find the allowances before you get warned about sugar shockingly high.
Sugar content is a function of serving size, of course.
The astonishing thing to me is that we can sell a 32 fl oz (950 mL) drink as "large", instead of "a week's supply of empty calories that you should never consume in one sitting".
I distinctly remember having my mind blown by fast food drink sizes when I visited the US. A "small" there felt like what we would call "large" here in Russia. Our small soda is usually 300 ml at most.
> fast food drink sizes
Food sizes too. I was regularly splitting a meal across two sittings (e.g. eating the other half of my lunch for dinner) when I was in the US.
That isn't enough information to learn anything.
Activity level matters a lot. Genetics matter a lot. There are a lot of late teen boys (teen boys are likely in sports at school, and hormones means they will use a lot of energy anyway) who need 6000 calories per day. There are a lot of adults only only need 1700 per day (they really should exercise more!). We can talk about the 2000 calories daily requirement, but that is a round number that is close enough for discussion but not really relevant to any individual.
What you grew up with matters - if your body is always low on calories it will compensate by growing less, so if you someone young gets calories they will tend to be larger (there is a lot of genetic variation between humans that makes hard to measure at levels smaller than national population over decades), in various ways and need more calories to maintain the same weight. It isn't clear if this shows up in anything other than body size though some suspect it does.
There is also the question about what people eat between meals. Some people eat big meals but never snack between meals. Some people don't eat much at a meal - but they always have snacks in between. There is a lot of variation. I know some people who get half their calories from soda (beer is another large source of calories for some people, but that starts to get into alcoholism).
There is probably more that you don't know about others and so be careful about drawing any conclusions.
You're missing the forest for the trees, and the point of OP.
That growing young male teen you reference (not sure why we need to focus on boys, here) would not in any circumstance choose a 500ml Coca Cola to satiate their "hormones". Nor word any trained dietican.
That's the point of this discussion. There is enough information to learn everything about a healthy balanced diet. Your point is not that; rather your point is that there are....different habits of animals. Yes, agreed.
Male teens have genetic differences from females or adults that mean they will normally need a lot more calories.
I agree that soda is not a good way to get those calories
> Only putting the warning on drinks with more than 50g of added sugar
Wait till you see all the tricks food producers use to avoid the added sugar label. “grape juice concentrate” is not an added sugar if the food is grapes flavored, for example.
Increasingly marketed-as-healthier foods don’t include any sugar at all. Yet half the ingredients are various sugars. Sometimes as cheeky as “sugarcane concentrate”
My immediate thought while reading the article was both "What counts as 'added' sugar?" and "Who is making this 'daily recommended amount of added sugars'?"
Of course, all of this information is already available via nutrition facts for most sold foods.
The root problem here doesn't seem to be the availability of information, I expect it to be more about the availability of time and effort to spend on priority of personal health. I don't think the issue is that people don't know that food isn't bad for them, it's that their health is lower priority than their immediate needs of feeding themselves and their families.
If anything, as you point out, this seems to be a better way for food manufacturers to bend the rules to avoid the logo and make something seem healthier than it is rather than giving more information to consumers. The _fact_ (X Grams of Sugar) is on the package but the logo indicates that the food contains more than x grams of "recommended" "added" sugars, two things that can be misunderstood and/or gamed.
> If anything, as you point out, this seems to be a better way for food manufacturers to bend the rules to avoid the logo and make something seem healthier than it is rather than giving more information to consumers
Drinks in particular are tricky here. Take apple juice for example. You can have 2 brands with vastly different sugar levels and neither has added sugar. Just different concentrations.
Consumers (especially kids) will generally prefer the sweeter brand. And it all sounds healthy because it’s marketed as pure fruits! It’s even true, the juice is pure fruit. Just in concentrations that are extremely unhealthy.
Treat yourself to a sonic shake with your sonic fast food meal instead.
Only 146g of sugar, 26g of saturated fat and 1100 calories.
https://foods.fatsecret.com/calories-nutrition/sonic/banana-...
Oh, does soda not exist in your country?
In the UK there is a "sugar tax" on soft drinks: https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainer/sugar-ta...
The stats say it has greatly decreased sugar consumption in soft drinks. From my point-of-view (someone who rarely drinks soft drinks) it seems that most soft drinks now mix artificial sweeteners and sugar, so effectively all soft drinks are now "diet" varieties.
It's really annoying. I also drink soft drinks very rarely but if I want, say, tonic water that doesn't taste like crap I need to splash out on a premium product. Other things (e.g. cranberry juice drink) are simply unavailable without artificial sweetener. Reduced salt snacks are also shite. It is hard to find a treat that is still actually a treat.
Sizes tend to be a lot smaller. One poster above said a large soda in the USA is almost one litre! In the UK it's roughly half that size at 500ml.
As the sugar level is directly proportionate to the overall volume, it can be quite surprising how much sugar there is when you aren't used to such massive servings.
I get a 32 ounce fountain drink in the US sometimes, which is roughly a liter. It is usually 22 ounces of ice and 10 ounces of beverage.
> One poster above said a large soda in the USA is almost one litre!
There are two sizes of single-serving sodas sold commercially in the US.
A small one, a can, is 12 oz, 355 mL.
A large one is 20 oz, 591 mL.
To buy a 32-ounce soda, you'd have to do something very strange.
(There is another common commercial size, the two liter bottle of exactly 2000 mL. Those aren't intended to be bought and drunk; they're intended to be bought, taken home, and stored in your refrigerator over time.)
The gist of their comment is:
The largest coke you can order at McDonald's in the US is 380 calories (100g sugar) (not sure what size because it's not obvious from their website).
The largest coke you can order at McDonald's in Portugal (where I happen to be) is 197 calories (49g sugar).
- https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/product/coca-cola-large.h...
- https://www.mcdonalds.pt/produtos/mcmenu/bebidas/coca-cola-5...
To get a 32-oz soda, wouldn't you just have to go to a gas station?
You can't buy two 20oz sodas at a gas station in the UK?
America needs better unsweetened beverage options. Japan and Taiwan (and probably other Asian countries too, I haven't been) have a crazy good selection of teas and tea-like drinks that taste great and have zero sugar. Unfortunately, to someone who drinks soda every day, those probably taste bitter and "nasty", it takes some time to recalibrate your tastebuds and appreciate their flavor. But the options need to exist in good quantities first before it can become a common choice, and I'm sure soda is more profitable so we're probably never getting out of this...
I'm convinced diet Coke is to blame for a lot of people in the US thinking no sugar drink = awful drink, preventing interest in looking into it further. Mostly because of the taste, but also because branding it as "diet" in the name was a bad marketing choice in the long run. God bless those that like the Diet variant more than normal Coke, but I swear more people think e.g. Dr Pepper Zero Sugar tastes better than Dr Pepper!
Once over the hump of assuming it's the sugar that makes soda tastes good, I think it opens up a lot higher chance of trying other sugar free drinks which can be even healthier (while still tasting amazing). At least it did for n=1.
I think it's already happening. In bougie parts of the US (fancy parts of NYC and LA at least), artisanal lower sugar sodas are becoming ubiquitous.
E.g. https://drinkolipop.com/
Olipop might have pretty high distribution, I see them in normal supermarkets and places like Target and Costco now. I don't live in either of the places you mention.
However, Olipop has sugar alcohols as a sweetener, which give me gastrointestinal distress after only two cans. Soiling yourself is a good disincentive for drinking a lot of soda.
why are you drinking 2+ cans of soda a day? it's like eating 2+ slices of cheesecake on the regular.
shitting yourself cuz of drinking too much soda is a you problem mon ami
You apparently missed a lot of context here:
- these specialty sodas have less than a third of the calories as a normal soda and are touted as a healthy alternative
- fast food meals often include a large soda which is more than two cans worth
- people often drink even more soda in a day, especially diet soda
- the GI issues are specifically for these new specialty sodas, not normal ones
Ehh those are a crutch, I'm talking zero sugar at all. It doesn't have to be bougie or artisanal, just a good variety of tea at affordable prices would be a good start. Making it "fancy" and expensive just defeats the purpose.
Agreed. Here in the US if they say "sugar free" there is usually some other sugar replacement. I don't need dried mango's with added sugar or sweetener, they are sweet enough as is. I'd love to see an unsweetened option. As someone who is trying to remove sugar from my diet anything sweet is almost too much for me.
I'm more concerned about added sugar in other foods. If you're trying to keep your sugar intake down, cutting sugary sodas seems pretty obvious to me, but remembering to be careful about bread or tomato paste or anything else you might eat because some brands or restaurants add a bunch of extra sugar is really a pain.
The good thing is, if your palate has gotten used to unsweetened beverages, you can easily tell when bread or a sauce has sugar in it when it shouldn't. Or maybe I'm weirdly sensitive to sugar, I dunno.
Crazy how you probably wouldn't get a slice of cheesecake factory cheesecake on the side of your Macdonald's meal; but never think twice about a medium soda that has the same amount of added sugar
Reminds me of that one post that goes "Whenever I see those comparisons of sugar between donuts and soda it just seems to me that donuts are healthier than I thought"
At my healthiest weight used to get a quad espresso and an artisinal creme filled donut each morning at one point.
It got eyebrows, but it was also a third of the calories of a large Starbucks caffinated milkshake (and that's what they are -- addictive milkshakes).
Less liquid, less piss, more code, I'm surprised more hackers don't seek out quality espresso instead of these weird XTREME energy drinks.
Anyways yes, a donut is about 500 calories, a big soda or coffee with fillings is much much more.
>> I'm surprised more hackers don't seek out quality espresso instead of these weird XTREME energy drinks.
I think you answered it though, lots of (younger) people do not like the taste of coffee, so you get the caffeine and the delivery mechanism is sweet & sugary.
Here's a free idea for anyone out there: Caffeinated Ketchup. It already turns up every flavor component to 11 so why not make it heavily caffeinated too!
It might not be the best idea to add caffeine to unexpected foods.
The caffeinated lemonade from Panera has apparently killed people.
As part of their unlimited drinks promotion. Bad combo overall.
> a large Starbucks caffinated milkshake (and that's what they are -- addictive milkshakes)
I got the impression (from some online browsing) that Starbucks has started offering coffeeless frozen drinks.
But I also got the impression that their drinks are more "crushed ice mixed with syrup" than "ice cream mixed with milk". How much milk/cream are you getting in one of these milkshakes?
Me? I avoid the place like the plague.
thats because the "ier" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting. getting fat from all that sugar is the least of your concerns. it also ages you rapidly and makes you more likely to have ongoing systemic inflammation. I'm back in the states for the last two weeks and the difference between people here and when I was aboard is jarring.
This comment is a perfect example of why HN should stay away from nutrition science.
In what way? the association of high sugar and systemic inflammation is well known and documented.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9471313/
Inflamation is well known for increasing biomarkers associated with aging.
Also crazy that a lot of what people consider "coffee" is basically a large milkshake.
Well, come on. Have you tasted coffee? There's a reason its commercial form is all sugar and no coffee.
It's crazy how some people still eat McDonalds and drink soft drinks at all.
Or more. CF's nutritional info says their cheesecakes range from about 60 to 120 g of sugar per slice, plus 60 to 120 g of saturated fat.
McFlurry has entered the chat
Here I was thinking a spoon literally made out of sugar like the salt fork
Yeah-- same here. I assumed it was some kind of product to circumvent a regulation re: sugar content in menu items.
He’s back making that exact product now
I personally think it's gross the idea of licking something then setting it aside to lick it again later without washing it, but maybe you do wash it. Also maybe way too salty.
FWIW, both sugar and salt are used as preservatives to inhibit microbial growth.
So, it might actually be pretty clean, from that perspective.
> Chain restaurants that don’t comply with the new rules will be subject to $200 fines starting next year, the health department said.
How often will the $200 fine be assessed? Unless it's daily, it won't likely make a difference.
It should be like $20 per meal sold instead of $200.
Why is this targeted at chains with 15+ locations? Is the soda in a single location mom&pop restaurant any less bad for you? No. Why is this not just a blanket rule for the city?
Small local laws like this tend to gain a lot less traction when they pile up to be a larger (relative) load on smaller, local-only businesses. Rather than not have anything pass, people prefer to pass something which still has 80% of the benefit but only 20% the resistance. Only targeting large chains, at least initially, is a way to move that needle over getting nothing out of principle.
If successful/popular, then it's much easier to pass full coverage later.
For the same reason you only see calorie counts on restaurants with > x locations.
Since their menu is the same the study to get the calorie counts is not as costly per location.
a massively busy local chain may serve 10k people a week in NYC
a big chain like McD's may literally sling millions of burgers in a similar timeframe.
it's also a lot easier to enforce this with a single corporate entity then track down hundreds of one-off mom-and-pop locations.
Probably viewed as too onerous for small businesses to comply.
How is this onerous? You update the website your QR code points to. It's not like you have to print up new menus. If you still have menus, just print up a sheet of stickers that you smash onto the menu. Malicious compliance can be used
I remember reading this in 2012: https://globalyouth.wharton.upenn.edu/articles/big-gulp-new-...
I look forward to the counter-ad campaign from Big Gulp.
Maybe they should give you real tiny spoons to add the sugar yourself instead
They used to offer these spoons at McDonald's but they were used for booger sugar and became unpopular.
The menu image that list 140 cal for drinks, and then includes drinks with 0 cal, seems weird.
The amount of the fine made me laugh.
200$? What is that, a fine for ants?
this shouldn't exist at all. if people don't know that junk food is unhealthy, no amount of adding signage is going to correct that.
I could see how it might be helpful when people compare meals. For example, maybe a hamburger doesn't have added sugars, but a salad does (because the dressing is so sweet). A customer might order the burger instead, or order the salad but swap to a different dressing.
There have been some restaurant foods that I knew weren't healthy but didn't realize how unhealthy they were until I looked at recipes for how to make them myself.
Tiny label with a symbol most people will not immediately grok? Please...
Mexico has big labels saying things like "EXCESO DE GRASA" o "EXCESO DE AZÚCAR" which make it super clear what they're warning about. I used them to find the high-calorie snacks for hiking :)
Now can we get them for chemical / artificial sweeteners as well?
It's interesting how they're passing this after the public failure of the soda ban, one would think they'd be looking into more productive areas of legislation. I don't drink sugar and generally don't go out, but this doesn't seem to be solving consumer problems
The big, real problems aren't really solvable on a city level. And opposition can quash any obvious solutions.
Unfortunately this does lead to a lot of small, weak rules being passed because elected officials have to "do something" in order to stay in the public eye to get reelected.
We've got to protect our phony bologna jobs!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTmfwklFM-M
It's fake work. You do some social restriction (usually on food) that follows upper middle-class aesthetics, the media cheers, and dinner parties are supportive. Even better if you specifically target it towards the poor*, or food that only poor people eat.
This, for example, is targeted towards chains. If every restaurant you eat at has fewer than 15 locations, it doesn't exist. Where do upper-middle class people eat?
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[*] like the fake work that RFK, Jr. is doing trying to make it impossible to buy soda and snack foods on SNAP. Only positive press he's gotten from NYT etc.. Yes, make those poor people eat better! But somehow also fat acceptance.