The most-populous city in the U.S. has a liter-sized problem, according to the city’s mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Bloomberg’s ongoing campaign to fight obesity, which targets more than half of the adults in New York City, has gone from asking for salt restrictions to proposing a 2-year plan to ban using federally distributed food stamps on sugar-sweetened drinks, like soda.
The federal food stamp program, which has been around since the ’60s, currently bans using food stamps for cigarettes, alcohol and prepared foods, like deli and bakery sandwiches.
And while there is certainly some merit to thinking Bloomberg has no business doing your Dew or telling you where to spend your stamps, there is some merit to his effort.
Over the last 30 years, the consumption of sugary drinks, like soda, have more than doubled, and Bloomberg’s proposed 2-year ban on food stamps for the popular beverages aims to attack the connection between consuming high levels of sugar and the development of type-2 diabetes.
The climbing levels of obesity and the resulting health effects are certainly frightening for America’s future. But is banning the purchase of soda with food stamps really the biggest step that can be taken in this fight against convenience and indulgence? Probably not.
However, food stamps do serve a very specific purpose: to help people who have less than $2,000 or $3,000 dollars in their household afford basic sustenance, and that should be honored.
It may seem a little overbearing for the government to hand out money with strings attached, but it’s certainly fair to say that people who use food stamps are probably not prepared to finance the health issues that could be awaiting them at the end of their aluminum brick road. But maybe it would be more efficient to improve education about the negative effect of drinking sugary drinks — one 12-ounce soda contains 10 packets of sugar. And NYC health officials told The New York Times that drinking a can of soda a day could make someone gain 15 pounds in just a year.
A statistic published in Pediatrics two years ago found that one-sixth of a teenager’s calories come from sugary drinks, and the fall in milk has risen inversely to the popularity of sweet drinks.
There are more than 23 million obese children in the nation. If parents are not educated and put their kids on the hummingbird diet, who will teach their children? Certainly not Dr Pepper.
