That reminds me of an SCTV (or was it SNL, I don't remember) commercial where a lady complains to her coworker that she has a headache. The headache medicine is known to cause stomach problems, so she's supposed to take another medicine for that, which leads to a chain ending up with over a dozen medicines, and their possible side effects, just to cure the headache. If you look up the history of an issue that congress is trying to solve, it often looks like that commercial.

Sometimes I believe he's being hijacked by the extremists for other purposes. Pollan apparently has said not to immerse one's self in ridiculously excessive nutritional hype, but what we find is his diet statements being used for silly-to-sinister PC purposes as some kind of fuel for a contemporary food activism fad.

As I've said myself, which is lefty-sounding but tame, as well as old, by comparison: “Meat is a premium food — why not just [once more, in the West] view and treat it that way?” (I also don't have much objection to the euphemistic modern term “plant-based diet,” either, a term often used by those trying to avoid “vegeterian” or “vegan.”)

I find the PC irritations also irritating when it comes to things like urban gardening, green roofs, etc.. I've enjoyed gardening since I was a kid, and like seeing people in urban areas (especially such as in Detroit, which is losing population) recover unused land for gardening, healthy work that helps them feed themselves, but there's no excuse for Sixties regurgitation and pathological “small is beautiful, big, business, economies of scale, industry are evil” nonsense that would want our governments to try to induce or coerce us into favoring “local” production that is less efficient and more expensive, often less practical. That's just being silly, or worse. Same for food and what lies behind routine use of the dirty term “food policy” (“clothing policy,” “transportation policy,” “energy policy,” “speech policy,” “thought policy” or “behavior policy,” etc.).

Yes — and it's like suffering from side-effects from (too many, and bad) medications, and the “solution” sought is to add another medication (and its side effects).

Note that adding another tax and bureaucracy is even worse than the medication metaphor.

The corporate farms can now safely donate large sums of money to politicians to keep their subsidies intact, and indeed have survived both Democratic majorities and Republican majorities. That's why it's impossible to kill bad laws — the benefactors have more influence than the taxpayers.

Maybe we don't need to get rid of the department of agriculture, but I can't think of a single reason why anyone, liberal, moderate, libertarian, or conservative, would support farm subsidies in their current form.

The government should not put their noses into people's business like this.

If America is obese (and as a people, we ARE obese), then it's because of general laziness.
Cases in point:

* I can't find my remote, so I guess I have to watch Barney in Swahili.
* Where's the potato chips? I have to watch my fifth hour of television.

etc…etc….etc.

My family and I took all possible “fake” foods out of our diets. This included margarine, diet soda, and processed foods. Our exercise habits have not changed, and yet our cholesterol is down, our weight is stable, and our other CBC elements are normal where they weren't prior to this change.

HMMMMMM

The lesson I took from this was eat all natural foods (including sugar) in MODERATION!
Good health will follow.

Yale University researchers say that a study in mice shows that diets heavy in high-fructose corn syrup can lead to insulin resistance. Because the liver more readily metabolizes fructose into fat than it does glucose, high fructose consumption can lead to non-alcoholic fatty liver disorder, often a precursor to insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes.

It's also a special villian in driving obesity:

“Insulin also controls another hormone, leptin, so its release is necessary.

Leptin tells your body to stop eating when it’s full by signaling the brain to stop sending hunger signals. Since fructose doesn’t stimulate glucose levels and insulin release, there’s no increase in leptin levels or feeling of satiety. This can leave you ripe for unhealthy weight gain.”

Michael Pollan's writings on food seem to be more on the right track. Eat food, mostly plants, not too much. Though this smacks of the sort of PC, socialist social engineering DLS raves about, it seems that perhaps it would be good if we had some policies that at least leveled the playing field for those who actually grow food rather than industrial feedstocks and educated consumers/taxpayers/citizens about the impacts of diet (and exercise) on health. I'm all for market solutions to food, but information asymmetry seems to be rife (not to mention trusts all over the place).

We can't trust the right thing(s) to be taxed, at the right amount(s), as I noted before. Correct policy is impossible given how PC politics and related idiocy have corrupted government and other objects.

Meanwhile, noisome Newsom (a political freak who would be Governor of California if sufficient other freaks' votes and additional concocted votes total enough to win) actually is among the extremists who want to “proceed” with such repellent (to normal people) degeneracy.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/…

All that's missing is a “sin” tax on four-door vehicles there, too.

Tax is a four letter word in America, but sin taxes are the least objectionable to most people. Cigarette tax is a perfect example. Since smokers actually DO cost more in health care, it makes sense to tax them more. Likewise with out-of-control sugar consumption. We know it costs ALL of us more, so let's tax the ACTUAL thing that costs us more. I would level it specifically at HFCS, while eliminating the sugar import tariff. In addition to treating us to some diabetes relief, it would remove the foolish restriction against importing sugar cane for ethanol production, which has freed Brazil from the clutches of the oil cartel.

As for it “hurting poor people”, well nonsense. It is the gallons of Coke that are hurting them, not the COST of the soda. It would do them a world of good to drink some WATER.

I'll conclude (and yield the floor) by reviewing aloud that simplicity is desireable, and what's implied here is a tax on calories (or in inverse proportion to their nutritional content or value, or based on their “pluses and minuses” nutritionally), but that would of course raise the overall cost of living.

First of all, obesity as a current news item not a “crisis” [sic] and the current hyped PC-related nonsense (reminescent of anti-automobile and especially anti-SUV, anti-materialistic and anti-US-progress idiocy with misplaced bogus or mentally ill agitation about “gluttony”) merits no respect or serious consideration. Let's stick to the real problems — real obesity (and overweight conditions), high blood pressure (hypertension), diabetes (currently the object of ridiculous hype as well).

It wouldn't bother me to see, in an ideal, more intelligent world, not only things like alcohol (ethyl alcohol or ethanol, itself, directly, by weight) taxed or tobacco taxed were the specific costs that were associated with its use (not only direct health costs but other direct costs) correctly identified, so they could be recovered and paid for by the consumers of them. The same could be true not only for sugar and salt (sodium chloride — excess sodium is a health hazard, including its relation to hypertension, a chronic disease itself and source of other diseases, and a bigger problem than diabetes and possibly overweight conditions — not limited to true obesity), but also fat or saturated fat (even a “sliding scale” for taxes based on saturation amount or hydrogenation amount).

The problem is, current lefty politics and the nature of our government(s) make correct policy impossible.

Wow, how did I manage that? (Or did social conservatives?) [grin]

* * *

“What would the side effects be[,] DLS?”

Side effects are additional, not-always[-by-the-naive]-expected effects in addition to (or in place of) what is sought and expected (or hoped for).

Of the “sugar-sweetened beverage tax” or “demon high fructose corn syrup tax”? Higher prices, switches to other sweeteners, coming to depend on tax revenue that would likely fall eventually, are some examples.