However, I do find that actual data does influence my behavior. I’ve been particularly surprised at how much calorie information published on restaurant menus impacts my decisions.
So, rather than a general warning that will be so widely published that it’ll be ignored, give me more data. If you can make the data visual, even better.
For example, you’ll note on food labels that the sugar is represented in grams, but there’s no associated percentage like there is for the other items on the label. When you show me that this bottle of Coke contains double what I should consume for an entire day I think that will help me and will also incentivize manufactures to think more about the sugar content they add.
Values for the general public should be in the units the general public uses for those things.
Then it's rendered useless for at a glance. The only thing that seems to survive as intended is the colour coding.
A bar of chocolate might have a "portion size" of 8 squares, but give daily amounts and percentage thereof based on 4 or 2 squares. Presumably so they can avoid having to state that a portion is 235% of some recommended daily amount.
Some portion sizes are ridiculous - like half a can or bottle where most would drink all. The "traffic light" sizes are equally ridiculous, but very often different. Both are often different to the amount most regular folks would eat or drink.
We dont really understand proper nutrition yet. Recommendations are constantly changing, what used to be good is now bad, and vice versa. Companies just need to continue telling us what is in our food, and let us do our best.
Adding a percentage based statistic wont help because daily intake stats are wide guesses at best, and most people dont care anyway.
The most effective way to teach nutrition is by cooking. When people can see what is going into their food, they naturally use less. Also, try changing your diet a bit, and feel how it effects your mood. Other than that, if someone wants to make bad decisions, thats their choice. There is no need for these aggressive campaigns against sugar like the sugar line proposed above.
If the calorie info makes you choose a salad over a plate of fried food covered in grease it is 100% doing its job.
Admitadly I may have a bias as i am not overweight, and my interest is in being healthy rather than loosing weight.
Still I have found that it gives you enough of a heuristic to be effective when you do pay close attention. (Source: I lost 100 lbs over 18 months)
It may have been one of Jason Fung's youtube videos - he is an MD and big proponent of intermittent fasting. (As a side not intermittent fasting has been used to reverse type 2 diabetes. Lack of insulin sensitivity would seems to be a big problem).
I did find this reference to a more qualitative but I think still useful study: https://www.foodnavigator-latam.com/Article/2019/02/20/Chile...
These articles, from what I consider some reputable sources cite the study (in Spanish), which original version I could not find:
http://www.economiaynegocios.cl/noticias/noticias.asp?id=549...
https://inta.cl/estudio-muestra-que-la-ley-de-etiquetados-es...
http://www.uchile.cl/noticias/149365/ley-de-etiquetado-baja-...
Agreed, it's easy to become desensitized. That said, I would have otherwise not been aware of the issue at all! So the labels do help (me) with general awareness. And although I can't always avoid it, I'm now on the lookout for furniture made without these types of chemicals. I would have been clueless sans warning.
Big box restaurants here have to post calorie counts on their menus, and while I still can't believe my favourite burger combo is over 2400 calories (lunch), and I can't resist most of the time, it's got me thinking. Like maybe once per week, and then go for something not so heavy on the calories.
A counter point article I just read - graphic health warnings on cigarette packages losing their impact, study shows: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/graphic-health-warnings...
But they did / still do have an impact.
Like acrylamide, which has landed every restaurant a prop 65 warning because it is present in literally all baked goods and also coffee.
Imagine a warning label: this product known to cause global warming in a test environment ....
If we 'trusted' all prop 65 warnings, nobody would ever enter a building, as all of them have that warning tag on them somewhere.
It seems very likely that the warnings will work to some extent based on existing packaging. Anything that can be considered "healthy", even for the most dubious and small health claims, has it written on the front in big bold letters. That would imply that what goes on the packet does influence the consumer. It's possible that positive messaging has a greater impact than negative messaging, but that's something that would need studying.
Considering how messed up American eating habits are I have no idea how they could be changed.
Putting warnings on things and measuring the change would be a great place to start.
From what I see people see the warnings and calories counts and they know that these foods are not good. But they really don’t seem to know how to eat right. I hear stuff like “You don’t get enough protein from vegetarian food” or they think eating be an appetizer plus a full dinner is healthy as long as it’s organic. Or they eat baked potato chips instead of fried. The perception of what the body needs is so far from reality that it will be really hard to change.
"Not for sale in California" is basically a marketable feature when it comes to any chemical that you expect to be nasty and bad for your health in the first place (like paints and cleaning products).
Spot on. All of the issues Californians face and this is all they can accomplish? Another warning label? The largest economy in the US and this is it? What a shithole. Literally.
Not exactly Sophie's choice, I don't think.
I cannot understand your problem at all, except that a government agency has placed certain restrictions on a certain type of product packaging, which seems entirely non-controversial to me.
Are they happy the product they buy tells them they are going to have a gruesome medical condition?
And do you smoke? And do you advocate for the same imagery on products also associated to gruesome conditions but products you use, like computers, cars, food, buildings, government, etc?
Maybe it should only apply to companies which have engaged in fraudulent IFR.
How about having to put a picture of a pregnant woman being run over on the hood of every tesla, to remind about the murderous and gruesome reality of the manslaughters of the autoindustry?
The difference is not the product, its the popular sentiment that legitimizes a terrible overreach of state power.
The discussion of whether the use of state power to regulate products is appropriate is a potentially lengthy political discussion that isn't worth starting here.
No. Cigarettes have no positive purpose. They are 100% negative and a society is well served by discouraging their use.
Everything you listed has a positive purpose with the mere potential of being misused.
Uses it: don't punish
Doens't: punish
Similarly, you can usually plot people's feelings on cigarettes with:
Addicted: rationalizes their use
Not Addicted: doesn't rationalize their use
The fact that it is illegal for children is what is going to give them the most appeal.
http://www.econlib.org/archives/2013/04/proposition_65_1.htm...
It reminds me of the Real(TM) milk brand. They spent decades lobbying against organic dairy and specialty cheese producers, so the label is now synonymous with “processed fake crap”, at least in my mind.
I’m sure some reputable dairy producers in the US apply the Real logo to their product, but I don’t give their products a second glance at the store.
This is basically a type of pro health advertising. We have anti smoking advertising which has shown to be effective (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-19/australias-plain-pack...).
I think with a good advertisement strategy it can be very effective.
Many stores just have blanket warnings that most products they sell cause cancer and contain bpa.
They're actually getting better, but the government will probably take credit for that like usual.
It doesn’t really matter as long as things are improving. Go ahead and credit the free market if it makes you feel better.
People generally don't respond well to nagging.
The problem is that unnatural sweeteners produce a similar insulin response as sugar, and also disrupt gut biota. We need to restrict sweeteners overall.
As an addendum, if you're looking to lose fat, consume zero sugar: no sweets, no juice, no sweeteners, no added sugar in anything - is the most effective way to do it. You will have to inspect the labels of any processed food you buy though.
Reverting takes about 1 week.
My TLDR: It's super hard to avoid comfort food while in pain. Now that I've experienced this cause & effect a few times, I'm hoping to learn better strategies.
Has this been demonstrated in humans? I've heard this many times before but have been unable to find any human studies to support it, and the mice studies I've seen often use ludicrously high dosages of the sweeteners.
Here is a brief survey of studies showing the effect in humans:
imo a big problem with these kinds of studies is the huge number of confounding factors. They tend to be studies that select participants who report drinking diet soda and those who report not drinking it, without taking into the account the fundamental lifestyle differences between the two. This is also why I'm interested in specific, measurable things that are known to cause problems, such as insulin response.
It is very common for overweight people to replace sugary soda with diet soda without making any other lifestyle changes. It is unsurprising that this doesn't yield positive results over the long-term. People who report drinking no soda, diet or otherwise, are likely already leading healthier lifestyles than those who report drinking diet soda regularly. Without controlling for these factors properly all that's really being said is that "healthier lifestyles are better for controlling weight".
I agree that diet soda is probably worse than no soda, but I haven't seen any evidence to support the idea that diet soda is worse than sugary soda when consumed in otherwise identical diets.
The article you link doesn't say that. First, almost nothing in it even talks about real sugar. Second, it specifically starts with in the first paragraph "doesn’t prove that diet drinks and artificial sweeteners cause weight gain" and then goes on to have more paragraphs of speculation on correlation. But nothing mentioned in that article demonstrates a causal effect, and definitely not more than equivalent sugar. There's a lot of "may be" and "may cause" in there. Emphasis on may.
I've never read anything to contradict this. I have no idea what the state of the art is today.
Also, I do know it'd be a mistake to generalize insulin response across non-diabetic, type 1, and type 2 people.
To me these warnings are a way to say “we are doing something “ but I doubt they really have an effect.
Considering how messed up American eating habits are I have no idea how they could be changed.