What was made worse?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1038507/poland-share-of-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1197501/poland-monthly-c...
When most people argue against prohibition, they're not saying that making the bad thing available is great. They're saying that we can't effectively reduce the availability of things that people want, so when we attempt to do so, we end up with all of the negative externalities associated with prohibition without any of the actual prohibiting
This may be fine enough for weed, but what if harder drugs start being used 24% more? Even if they're in more pure form than from illegal sources, that doesn't sound like a net positive.
There's a whole lot of evidence that prohibition vs legalization each have negative effects and it is up to society to decide which is more appropriate in certain situations.
I doubt that food regulations are going to result in black market Doritos barons waging deadly turf wars in the streets. But I suspect it will result in food manufactures building a much worse product in response.
Another way of writing that headline is potentially "cannabis users 24% more likely to admit to using cannabis when in a state where it's legal", or even "marijuana legalization brings cannabis users from out of state".
Even if the study you're referring to does effectively control for those two factors- I would hesitate to apply those results to a harder drug like heroine. Marijuana education and legalization are happening at the same time. The information on Marijuana is pretty promising and education may incentivize it's use for some purposes. I do not believe the same about heroine- education would probably disincentivize it's use.
It's easy to say "Just eat better" when you're wealthy but the working poor in America don't have any great options outside of switching to base staple foods like rice and beans... and that's difficult to do when good seeming fast foods are offered in abundance.
On a societal level "evolution" seems to be pretty clearly indicating that America was wrong on this one.
Do not: Dictate or attempt to control what food consumers choose.
Exceptions: Tobacco, carcinogens, hallucinogens, narcotic substances, poisons... See "safety"
Obesity is killing a lot of folks before they grow old enough to develop Cancers.
Let's do this another way though.
What are the criteria for being added to your exceptions?
Regulation is a good thing - it helps citizens save their energy for their own lives, instead of having to reserve it for navigating an increasingly complex and profit-optimized society.
Look, there are a lot of religions out there that push feelings, take advantage of people and encourage false beliefs. We should help citizens save their energy for their own lives and regulate Buddhism as the required state religion. That way citizens don't have to navigate all these religions.
If you genuinely don't think the massive power imbalance between for-profit food providers and individual citizens should be regulated to prevent the use of addictive chemistry, do you also spend your time regularly arguing for all drugs to be legalized?
When a large portion of healthcare costs are public - then you might want to ban things with huge negative externalities in the form of future healthcare costs...
It's a little unfair to eat your cake and have the public pay for it later...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18254654/ "Because of differences in life expectancy, however, lifetime health expenditure was highest among healthy-living people and lowest for smokers. Obese individuals held an intermediate position."
"Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained. Obesity prevention may be an important and cost-effective way of improving public health, but it is not a cure for increasing health expenditures. "
The linked article was published in PLoS Medicine, a high impact-factor journal.
0) Dying fast is clearly not an objective - if it was... Why ask people to eat unhealthy things instead of just killing them directly?
1) If you die at 17 - you never pay taxes. Dying fast != cost effective.
2) Unhealthy people that die at 17 can still have more healthcare costs than healthy people that live to 109. Age of death has little to do with healthcare costs.
I lost 80 pounds eating Johnsonville Beddar Cheddar Sausages and sauerkraut every day for six months, definitely something that’s “too fatty”.
I was CTO for a healthcare network.
Weight loss was the primary focus for population health - because the data massively supports this.
SDOH [1], falls prevention and other stuff, while important, take a far backseat as far as overall health impact.
[1] https://health.gov/healthypeople/priority-areas/social-deter...
I didn't.
And yes, CVD is a huge issue. Obesity directly contributes to it, independent of other factors [1].
Which is why most population health stuff is targeted at weight loss.
From a population health standpoint, it has the biggest impact with well understood interventions.
FWIW, I helped deliver CMS certified DPP programs that were funded by private payers. Their data was clear on all this.
[1] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000973
No, thank you. Please don’t tell me what tasty things I’m allowed to create or consume.
Regulation of this type is just group punishment, but advocates believe it to be some kind of altruism.
“People are getting fat!” Okay, but I’m not, and honestly I eat tons of junk. Why punish everyone who likes tasty food? If you hate obesity so much, then outlaw obesity. That’s a stupid idea too, but at least it more closely aligns the regulation with the result you want.
For one thing, I seriously doubt prohibition could ever be politically viable, but increased prices or reduced visibility and availability of processed high-calorie ready-to-eat foods might be in some situations. We've already seen some of this, like New York's soda tax or banning vending machines from public schools.
They, too, can be taken and handled with care and moderation, yet are outlawed (even if sometimes only at the "distribution/dealing" level)
Prohibition is often cited as a failure, but in terms of public health, it absolutely was not. On the whole, people did drink less and there were public health and social benefits. The organized crime was a separate issue, and so was self-control, as the will of the people to drink played a part in its downfall as well.
Our steps toward cigarette prohibition, on the other hand, seem unlikely to be walked back. There will still be illegal cigarettes and people who smoke them, but there will be less smoking, and that's a public health win.
So how can we control the food industry?
Since they are rational market participants, we can infer that self-control doesn't work at scale.
According to a 2019 review of research on sugar drink taxes, the taxes successfully reduced consumption of sugar drinks and reduced adverse health consequences.
I also think it's a scale thing. Selling grandma's cookies at the grocer? Fine. Megacorp optimized junk (and nothing else) sold at every 7/11 on the continent? Perhaps not so excusable.
It's excusable because it's just tasty food, which theoretically we are supposed not to eat too much. The problem is that this food became more tasty, convenient and sometimes cheaper (at least in time-value) than normally cooked food and we as a society don't even have enough time and knowledge to cook proper healthy food.
> (and nothing else)
Because it's cheap. There are many places where you can buy healthy food but it's more expensive.
(Yes, subsidies are necessary, national food security etc.; but a LOT is just from lobbying and corruption. Never gonna reduce them because of that, but we can dream.)
Even with that in mind, it's easy to say "why do we let megacorps do it"? Well, we don't, not necessarily. They just have the financial and legal resources to impose their will. A pigouvian tax is probably the easiest tool most levels of the US government has to restrict successful vices. Look at that link again. See how much money Coke, Pepsi, etc. were spending in Philadelphia and San Francisco to fight taxes that have solid legal standing. Localities taking action need to make sure they're bulletproof legally, or else the action will be reversed.
This isn't cynical and it isn't that correct. The issue isn't taste as much as it's a desire to have ultra shelf stable foods. Fresh foods taste delicious on their own, the problem with American foods is all the preservatives and the never-ending escalation to add more sugar, salt and fat to everything that is consumed.
Preventing this devolution via regulation is the rational and reasonable solution that's been taken pretty much everywhere outside of the US - only when viewed through a hyper-libretarian lens does it make sense to allow food quality to drop to such extremes so that processed food companies could make marginally more money.
Ultra processed food is not really tasty but a combination of sugar and fats make it easy to overeat without enjoying it. French, Mediterranean and Japanese cuisines on other hand have a lot of delicious dishes but in these regions obesity is much less of a problem in the US.
Generally I don't like a nanny state but IMHO sugar tax is something to be considered.
https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/article/explainer/... and most of the other links I'm seeing all point roughly to decent results. No panacea, but that is rather unfair for any policy.
> The 25% tax increases was associated with immediate (−0·745 percentage points; 95% CI −1·378 to −0·112) and sustained reductions in prevalence (monthly trend −0·023 percentage points; −0·044 to −0·003), which were driven by reductions in the prevalence of smoking of FMC. The prevalence of smoking of RYO increased between May, 2010, and November, 2013, after the 25% tax increase. At the start of the pre-announced annual 12·5% increases, we observed an immediate reduction in smoking (−0·997 percentage points; −1·632 to −0·362), followed by decreasing overall prevalence (monthly trend −0·044 percentage points; −0·063 to −0·026) due to ongoing decreases in the prevalence of FMC smoking and a cessation of increases in the prevalence of smoking of RYO.
I’m not sure what the price is now, something like $40 a box of 20? These days you hardly see anyone smoke normal cigarettes.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2...
So your statement that the tax is ineffective seems at best unfounded, and at worst, entirely false. It’s possible that there are other causes for the decrease, but you simply can’t say nothing has changed.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1038507/poland-share-of-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1197501/poland-monthly-c...
This looks like optimization problem. Food is optimized as to be more pleasant than other food on shelves, so that particular food is selected more. The problem started when we had food that was so optimized to be tasty that it became irresistible for many people (like me). Cynical solution - make laws to make food more bland.