> As an aside, Michelle Obama's campaign when Obama was in office was about improvement children's health. Her focus was going to be on nutrition (lunch food). Shortly thereafter Coke and Pepsi came in with "donations" and the whole thing became about exercise, no focus on nutrition.

This isn't accurate. There were changes to the school lunch program, and by most accounts they were pretty effective: https://sph.washington.edu/news-events/news/obama-era-school...

The main takeaway is that the changes were fairly expensive, so lots of schools didn't participate.

The rollback they did in 2020 is ridiculous.

My kids school lunch now is all packaged sugary crap. Corndogs, cinnamon buns for breakfast, Trix yogurt, etc. Even the milk is gross - lowest bidder swill that tastes like wax.

The hot food items are all oven-baked, in plastic wrappers. It’s essentially the same crap that you would see in a university vending machine.

You can’t ban everything…

Marijuanna and sugar and a million other potential vices like alcohol and video games should be available.

But we should teach kids discipline, critical thinking, and impulse control - rather than playing whack-a-mole with every vice that comes along.

Instead of banning things we can stop subsidizing it or just tax it.

Sweeteners are heavily subsidized in the US which is why they're in everything.

Process is much easier to change then changing people. Its why the government deducts taxes from you, instead of you paying at the end of the year (both because you'd spend it all, and you'd be pissed doing a bulk sum payment).

Likewise we have levers, should we be selling soda / pop with outrageous amounts of sugar in them without some sort of healthcare tax? I don't mind sugar being available, but right now its subsidized by our health care fees. My insurance is more expensive because of diabetes, heart disease, etc.

as we're a society increasingly made up of single parents with a poverty of energy and time. not to mention their own education on these matters.

Perhaps we should solve that problem then.

> Same goes for sugar.

Except that presumably includes the current generation, instead of everyone pre-millenial. There is certainly not any real consensus or meaningful action being taken in regards to sugar. It is as prevalent now as it ever was.

Its not nothing, but it's close;

https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiative...

Sugar is at least a substance that one can choose not to eat. Lead poisoning and pollution aren’t choices.

Sugar isn't really optional these days. It's snuck into so much of our processed food it's sickening.

Indeed. Added sugar and high fructose corn syrup is in everything. I have to go out of my way to find a brand of bread that doesn't have added high fructose corn syrup. It's ridiculous.

I havent bought bread in probably 4 Years now. Investing half an hour of work (distributed over the day) every other week for a 2kg Bread. Half of it goes in the freezer.

Also buying fresh vegtables and cooking instead of buying ready made dishes helps.

Yup, this is basically the only realistic way to avoid it, switch to types of food that cannot by their very nature have sugar added.

I would imagine most of those fresh vegetables have been domesticated/bred to increase sugars.

You're probably right, but that's still a lot better than manufactured foods. Also the funny thing with fruit and veg is that the opposite can happen, with the "Red Delicious" as the leading example, bred for looks and lost all the taste.

Even without human interference, fruit can actually be bad for you if you eat it at the wrong time and in the wrong quantities - fructose has the same effect as sugar - but now we are basically getting into nutrition more generally which is a tricky subject. Fruit still comes with many other nutritional benefits compared to sugary manufactured snacks, and even fibre that make it worth while (note that orange juice, as minimally as we are processing the fruit, still allows you to consume it in unnatural quantity and concentration, which can be very bad).

It is optional to eat those foods for the vast majority of people, but it isn't as convenient.

Not just inconvenient, but expensive and out of reach.

Not really. That's exactly when I had in mind when I said "vast majority of people". The biggest problem is access to a cooking fire and some sort of refrigeration you can rely on for most of the year.

It does require spending a little time cooking and probably to shop around rather than getting everything from a (possibly overpriced) supermarket depending on how much you can spend. So it's strictly an inconvenience, it requires stretching the argument really thin to view it otherwise.

I have a simple rule: If it has processed sugar in the ingredient list _anywhere_ I don't buy it.

If everyone did this, less processed sugar would be in our food supply. (corn syrups especially but also weird stuff like stevia, sneaky stuff like maltodextrin, etc..)

Unfortunately that runs into the issue of education, expense, and general preference. We're never going to remove it by relying on consumer choice.

Everything is a choice to some extent. You could have gone and lived in the middle of a forest to avoid the lead poisoning.

The problem is there are far too many pollutants for everyone to be able to educate themselves about every one, and take steps to avoid them. Instead, it's the role of government to decide in each case whether to allow, ban, tax, inform or restrict each type of pollutant.

Between the marketing for children, the many "sugar holidays" (Valentines, Easter, Christmas, Halloween, etc), the widespread use of processed foods in children's diets, the fact that every single grocery store in America puts sugar products on loud display, and that some restaurants only serve sugar based drinks, I would argue that it is not possible for American children to avoid sugar.

An adult can choose to eat it or not (I'm ignoring the addictive nature of concentrated sugar), but our public health establishment has been foolishly stupid (combined with industry marketing) at making people think that fruit juice is natural or healthy. It's about as natural as cocaine is. Sure, it comes from a plant, but it gets refined and concentrated into levels that are unheard of in nature and toxic to the body.

Virtually my entire extended family are working class people, and they all were feeding their kids apple/orange juice on a regular basis without diluting it. When I showed my sister that she could literally do a 5% solution of apple juice in water, and it still tasted sweet, she was blown away. I'm pretty sure most members of the laptop class know that juice is bad for kids (gatorade too), but that message hasn't filtered to most of the population. And these kids are too young to know how toxic it is for them.

> public health establishment has been foolishly stupid (combined with industry marketing) at making people think that fruit juice is natural or healthy.

Can you cite specific examples of the public health establishment pushing juice as healthy? I got a minor in nutrition over a decade ago and back then, public health officials were very quick to call out the juice industry for its predatory tactics on kids and false equivalencies. This doesn't match my experience in university at all.

You're exactly right. Public health in general has not pushed juice, but what I should have stated is they have been complicit in not condemning it and pushing for prominent labeling on juice. They've sat back and allowed it to be marketed aggressively, to a point where the mayor of NYC exempted fruit juices from the proposal for a sugar tax. The general public thinks juice is healthy. That's easily remedied with public health messaging, but we all know why it hasn't: farmers/USDA/lobbyists.

Gatorade ? Gatorade can't be bad. It has electrolytes!

Sugar is bad, but it's only one part of the picture:

"Evidence-informed dietary priorities include increased fruits, nonstarchy vegetables, nuts, legumes, fish, vegetable oils, yogurt, and minimally processed whole grains; and fewer red meats, processed (e.g., sodium-preserved) meats, and foods rich in refined grains, starch, added sugars, salt, and trans fat."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4814348/

It's absolutely amazing how much we shovel sugar into our kids even at school, then wonder why they can't pay attention.

Sugar is our generation's tobacco for sure.

> Sugar is our generation's tobacco for sure.

This might seem far fetched, but I think it's pretty accurate.

When tobacco was at it's height most people didn't really think it was bad for you - which gradually turned into a denialistic "yeah but it's not that bad" - it took a long time for society to come to terms with just how harmful it is.

The quantity of sugar in every day food has increased dramatically over time, and our attitude to it has been similar to the denialistic phase for tobbaco - "yeah it might hurt my waistline a little bit but it tastes too good" - Making people think if they aren't fat then it's ok, when really the consequences are far worse, sugar is pretty much poison for our bodies, it's bad for every single part of it (melts teeth, causes gum disease which poisons your bloodstream, ages skin, causes inflammation, causes heart disease, causes diabetes, affects the immune system, messes with cognition, makes you more hungry by sharply switching off ketosis, and finally displaces nutritional food making your body even more susceptible to aforementioned ailments).

I wish I understood this better when I was growing up. Thankfully I had a parent who never encouraged sugary food, and put in the effort to cook good meals... but many people don't and are at the mercy of what super markets sell, which is increasingly extremely sugary food.

If there is a single leading harmful substance that is as prevalent as leaded petrol was - i think it's probably sugar (in the west at least).

One major aspect that makes sugar a category of its own is that there is a safe dose, and the safe dose isn't small. It's very easy to count how much you consume and not all cultures suffer from overconsumption.

Same for industrial seed oils. We know it's dangerous.

But monied interests and some vegetarians who think all things that come from plants must be good for you, prevent this from being shoved into near all packaged foods.

>As an aside, Michelle Obama's campaign when Obama was in office was about improvement children's health. Her focus was going to be on nutrition (lunch food). Shortly thereafter Coke and Pepsi came in with "donations" and the whole thing became about exercise, no focus on nutrition.

Well also, the right-wing culture war machine decided Michelle Obama was taking everyone's children's freedoms away.

> Coke and Pepsi came in with "donations" and the whole thing became about exercise

You know, I wouldn't mind this as long as the scale of the donation was big enough. If they donated $1000 per american to the US government, who could use it to reduce taxes or improve life for americans more than the sugar decreases quality of life through illness and poor health, that would be great.

But they didn't. I bet their donation was $100k or so, or less than 1 cent per american.