I Present to you Toronto: Just banned bottled water, now banning soda/pop

[Asher]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1577670/

Who banned my soda pop?

Some governments say citizens can't be trusted to make the right nutritional choices. So how far should they go in trying legislate better health?

Soda pop is the new tobacco. First banned in some school boards, soda pop and other sugar-laden drinks are now being legislated away by different levels of government in the next wave of social engineering programs. But if the state starts by substituting soya milk for Gatorade at your local arena, will it end with them telling you, you can't buy Pizza Pops?

The City of Toronto has decided that – on its own property, at least – choice is something its citizens are better off without. Hoping to prod its children into better eating habits, the city is planning to banish pop and energy drinks from vending machines in its community centres and arenas. Canada is not alone. The battle against sugar is being engaged on many levels throughout the United States. On the international level, the World Health Organization was pushing through a global strategy initiative this week.

While few will argue against targeting obesity, the public-health consensus is at odds with those who would rather make up their own minds. “To what extent do you start regulating the lives of people, so as not to hurt themselves?” asks Jack Mintz, the Palmer Chair in Public Policy at the School of Policy Studies at the University of Calgary.

Of course, as Dr. Mintz notes, public-health issues come back to hit the public purse when a country has socialized medicine. To his mind, the state should intervene in the health decisions of individuals only when they threaten the well-being of others. Beyond that, he says, attempting to change citizens' behaviour is a questionable endeavour.

“The question is, a) does the state really know that much better? and b) to what extent do we want to encourage individual responsibility, and people thinking for themselves?”

Toronto takes the lead

Nevertheless, the experiment is in play and public-health advocates across the country are watching Toronto's program with great interest.

If all goes according to plan, kids emerging from Toronto's locker rooms will be able to buy only 100-per-cent fruit juice, milk and soy-based products in 2014. (Even bottled water will be history, since the city is about to stop selling it on environmental grounds.) Most striking, though, is the plan's stringency. Toronto's bureaucrats argue that merely offering healthy choices in vending machines isn't enough – because people might make the wrong choice. And the cash-strapped city is prepared to lose tens of thousands of dollars in soft-drink revenues to make sure its good citizens don't.

“We know from our experience with vending machines that people are going to choose the soft drinks, even when you give [healthy] options,” says Brenda Patterson, the City Hall manager who is implementing the proposal. “People left to their own devices may continue to make a choice that is less healthy.”

Gatorade and Twinkies has been in politicians' crosshairs for decades.

Proposals for “fat taxes” on unhealthy products continue to be mooted at home and abroad, though an outcry forced Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty to retreat from the idea in 2004. Earlier this month, an Ipsos Descarie poll suggested that 77 per cent of Quebeckers would want a special tax on soft drinks, energy drinks and other sugary beverages.

Commissioned by the Coalition québécoise sur la problématique du poids (Coalition Poids), a group promoting weight-problem awareness, the survey found that 70 per cent of people in the rest of Canada also favour such a tax.

Ontario is rolling out new rules that would all but ban the sale of junk food in the province's schools in 2011. British Columbia did away with junk food in school vending machines in 2008. And the Squamish Nation banned ice-cream trucks from three communities on Vancouver's north shore in 2007.

And while the giant PepsiCo brand has pledged to phase pop out of schools by 2012 – globally! – a battle is brewing in Washington, D.C., over a proposed soft-drinks tax in the country's capital.

According to www.just-drinks.com, a coalition set up by the Washington Beverage Association has called on the industry to sign a petition opposing a proposed tax on sugar-sweetened drinks. If passed, the “1-cent-per-ounce” tax will increase prices on juice drinks, flavoured waters, sports drinks and teas.

“What's truly unfortunate is that this tax would be paid by the hard-working families of the district,” the coalition said.

Nanny State

“This is social engineering like you've never seen,” says Justin Sherwood, president of Refreshments Canada, the industry group that represents Coke and Pepsi.

Mr. Sherwood says that, starting in 2006, Coke and Pepsi voluntarily withdrew pop from elementary schools and replaced its high-school soda selections with “low- and no-calorie” drinks.

In an earlier letter to the city, Mr. Sherwood mused, “If the City feels so compelled to dramatically limit choices of consumers, where do you go next? Ban butter, ice cream, salad dressings, chocolate bars, pizza, cookies, cream and sugar in coffee, as well as doughnuts consumed on City property?”

“If kids want a pop, they'll cross the street, go to a plaza and buy a pop,” says Rob Ford, a city councillor who is running a populist campaign for mayor.

Others asked whether limiting choice is the best way to go. There's a temptation to impose well-meaning but ultimately hypocritical restrictions on children when a community-minded approach might work better, says David Jenkins, Canada Research Chair in Nutrition at the University of Toronto.

“We take them and beat them around the gymnasium and tell them that exercise is good for them. Meanwhile, we sit back at home on the couch with a six-pack and watch other people doing physical activity on TV.

“Kids then come home and see us doing that, and realize that school is an awful place. I think that's really part of the danger,” he says.

Still, you won't get public-health advocates or, really, very many others in positions of influence arguing against Toronto's approach. “I don't know any sociologist who would take a libertarian position on a health-promotion issue like this,” Lorne Tepperman, a U of T sociology professor, wrote in an e-mail. Dr. Tepperman is the author of the forthcoming The Sense of Sociability, which examines, among other things, whether individuals need government to save them from themselves. “Who would oppose milk and fruit juice, given the growing concerns about obesity among young (and not so young) people?”

Medical thinking has been shifting away from the individual, and toward the environment. Public-health advocates argue that individuals – especially children – can't be expected to make rational food choices when they're living in a media environment that is saturated with advertising and are subjected to intensive targeted marketing. That, they say, is something that can be fixed only through government interference.

“Taking a step in the right direction, like Toronto is proposing to do, is a great idea,” says David Lau, a professor of medicine at the University of Calgary and the president of the Canadian Obesity Network. “We have to bear in mind that, in the obesity epidemic, we shouldn't blame the individuals; we should blame the environment that's causing it.”

Indeed, on the same week that Toronto's city council sat down to consider the bureaucratic details of its drink-vending plan, delegates from the world's nations gathered in Geneva for a meeting of the World Health Organization's top decision-making body. On the agenda: a global plan to fight obesity by restricting the marketing of sugary drinks and fatty, salty foods to children.

“It took 50 years to put in place regulations with tobacco,” says Enrique Jacoby, an adviser on healthy eating and healthy living with the Pan-American Health Organization, a branch of the WHO. “It shouldn't take another 50 years to put in place regulations against obesity.”

If approved, the strategy would attempt to lay down global guidelines for marketing junk food to children, though the extent to which the regulations would be binding – as opposed to recommendations – has yet to be determined.

But kids may not need to be restricted so stringently. Indeed, the modern youth may already have a good grasp of the nutrition issues. Down at Toronto's Harbourfront Community Centre, teenagers gathered to play basketball gave an unequivocal take.

“Honestly, I think it's a good thing,” 18-year-old Sean Duffy says. “How many cups of sugar in each one? It's nuts. Take it off the market.”

“But fruit juice is just as bad for sugar,” one of his companions says.

The youngest one, a 13-year-old, chimes in, “But the sodium levels aren't as bad ...”

Toronto's proposal might not stop at city arenas and community centres. Adrian Heaps, a suburban councillor who brought a bag of sugar as a prop, moved to expand healthy vending rules to all city-owned facilities (and asked for a report on extending those guidelines to all “food” dispensed at those buildings). The city said no.

For Dr. Mintz, the line should be drawn where it comes to people doing harm to each other – not themselves. “I have no problem banning the use of cellphones in cars. The reason isn't the individual. It's the fact that the individual could put risks on other people.”

William Watson, a McGill University economics professor, was more puckish: “To be effective, you'd probably have to ban it totally, and enforce the ban, and police it so you don't get underground movements developing in terms of smuggling these things, or people making them in the basement by buying sugar and adding them to diet drinks.”

Moonshine soda pop. You can bet there'd be regulations on that.

I can't get out of this city fast enough.

PS: Yes, this means Gatorade and bottled water are banned for sale at hockey arenas. You can buy Milk and Apple Juice, though. Chug some of that between shifts.

[Kuciwalker]

Banning bottled water

[KrazyHorse]

Stop pretending to be a statist.

[Al B. Sure!]

City Council here in Philly rejected the Mayor's soda tax a few days ago. As a result, two Police Academy classes have been canceled, the firefighting dept. will be curtailed, and public libraries are moving to be open only 4 days a week.

Soda tax if it means we get to keep cops, firefighters, and libraries.

http://www.philly.com/dailynews/loca...#axzz0ojmqkD5P

But Council did not act on the sugar-sweetened-beverage tax, which Nutter was lobbying for at 3/4-cent per ounce. That tax would raise an estimated $30 million annually, but just $14 million in the coming budget year

Nutter yesterday said he would cancel two Police Academy classes of about 260 recruits total, eliminate 40 firefighter jobs and two fire companies, and go to four-day-a-week service at the 52 branch libraries. The 339 jobs on the chopping block are a mix of filled and unfilled positions.

[Al B. Sure!]

I also have not drank soda (or coffee for that matter) since high school. I'm a very big proponent of cutting back soda consumption and am disgusted by the anti-soda tax movement which seems to be headed by the Coca Cola and Pepsico corporations which only want to contribute to American ill health.

However, I worry about the potential precedence that this nutritional sin tax would set, especially with regards to the government's usual misunderstanding of nutritional issues; I would hate to see vegetarians get influential and meat get taxed more heavily.

As for bottled water, I've railed against it for a while now, after finding about the huge environmental catastrophe that is a result of possibly the most inefficient consumption in human history considering that water can be had through public pipes for far less money and far less environmental impact.

http://www.earthpolicy.org/index.php.../2006/update51

It's far more expensive than water and unless you buy in bulk, it's more expensive than oil:

Although in the industrial world bottled water is often no healthier than tap water, it can cost up to 10,000 times more. At as much as $2.50 per liter ($10 per gallon), bottled water costs more than gasoline.

It needs to be shipped around:

In contrast to tap water, which is distributed through an energy-efficient infrastructure, transporting bottled water long distances involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels. Nearly a quarter of all bottled water crosses national borders to reach consumers, transported by boat, train, and truck. In 2004, for example, Nord Water of Finland bottled and shipped 1.4 million bottles of Finnish tap water 4,300 kilometers (2,700 miles) from its bottling plant in Helsinki to Saudi Arabia... While some 94 percent of the bottled water sold in the United States is produced domestically, Americans also import water shipped some 9,000 kilometers from Fiji and other faraway places to satisfy the demand for chic and exotic bottled water.

Production process is a waste and bad for environment:

Fossil fuels are also used in the packaging of water. The most commonly used plastic for making water bottles is polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which is derived from crude oil. Making bottles to meet Americans’ demand for bottled water requires more than 17 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel more than 1 million U.S. cars for a year.* Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year.

Disposal is problem, especially cost of shipment to dispose:

After the water has been consumed, the plastic bottle must be disposed of. According to the Container Recycling Institute, 86 percent of plastic water bottles used in the United States become garbage or litter. Incinerating used bottles produces toxic byproducts such as chlorine gas and ash containing heavy metals. Buried water bottles can take up to 1,000 years to biodegrade. Almost 40 percent of the PET bottles that were deposited for recycling in the United States in 2004 were actually exported, sometimes to as far away as China—adding to the resources used by this product.

http://www.earthpolicy.org/index.php.../2007/update68

Adding in the Pacific Institute’s estimates for the energy used for pumping and processing, transportation, and refrigeration, brings the annual fossil fuel footprint of bottled water consumption in the United States to over 50 million barrels of oil equivalent—enough to run 3 million cars for one year. If everyone drank as much bottled water as Americans do, the world would need the equivalent of more than 1 billion barrels of oil to produce close to 650 billion individual bottles.

[BeBro]

Selling water to people

[Guynemer]

Wait.

They're banning pop from the schools and arenas, etc., on the grounds of its sugar content, but they're keeping the juice?

[Cort Haus]

I've always thought that bottled water was an exceptionally stupid thing if there is good tap water available. Unfortunately, consumer stupidity knows no bounds, leading the state to come bounding in with authoritative controls.

As for attacking sugar-based drinks - well, who needs Stalin-ism when western democracies seek to control people's lives in this way?

[MrFun]

I've always thought that bottled water was an exceptionally stupid thing if there is good tap water available. Unfortunately, consumer stupidity knows know bounds, leading the state to come bounding in with authoritative controls.

As for attacking sugar-based drinks - well, who needs Stalin-ism when western democracies seek to control people's lives in this way?

"Knows know" - WTF dude?

[Cort Haus]

Typo fixed. Thanks, Fun

[Wiglaf]

I am convinced bottled water was invented by the same Jews who manage to market Best Buy extended warranties and installation services, and if that's wrong it's misinformed not anti-semitic.

[loinburger]

I am convinced bottled water was invented by the same Jews who manage to market Best Buy extended warranties and installation services, and if that's wrong it's misinformed not anti-semitic.

The other day the cashier was pissed at me for not wanting to buy a $40 warranty for my $80 microwave. "But what if it breaks???" "Then I'll buy a new one." "But that would cost $80!" "Yup." "Does not compute!" "Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot not even he could eat it?" And then hear head exploded.

[Hauldren Collider]

Banning bottled water

Banning idiot taxes

[Hauldren Collider]

When I worked at the grocery store, the top 5 things sold there were:

1. Bread and milk (Combined because they are almost ALWAYS bought together)
2. Alcohol
3. Cigarettes
4. Bottled water
5. Lottery tickets

It made me lose faith in humankind. But it increased my wages!

[DaShi]

Isn't there a maximum IQ to work in a grocery store?

[Hauldren Collider]

You really are retarded, DaShi.

[gribbler]

How is bottled water an "idiot tax"? Maybe some people like the taste.

[Hauldren Collider]

........

[gribbler]

Have you ever had bottled water? It doesn't taste the same as tap water.

[DaShi]

You really are retarded, DaShi.

You are too cute.

[Asher]

Wait.

They're banning pop from the schools and arenas, etc., on the grounds of its sugar content, but they're keeping the juice?

Yes.

[Asher]

How is bottled water an "idiot tax"? Maybe some people like the taste.

Banning of bottled water was on environmental grounds, not public health/stupidity (the bottles don't decompose well).

I don't drink bottled water myself, I use a Brita filter at home and I plan to buy a reverse osmosis machine when I buy my own place.

[Felch]

Bottled water doesn't taste any different, but it does have a convenience factor. And if you buy it in bulk, you can get 24 half liter bottles for a couple bucks. It's not as cheap as the tap, but it's a far cry from the $10/gal. price quoted by AS.

Albert's quote mentions that the oil used to make PET could power a million cars for a year. Is this accurate? I mean, do they really crack crude do generate more PET and less gasoline?

[Asher]

Each barrel of oil yields ~19G of gasoline.

If their source of 17M barrels of oil for PET a year just for bottled water is accurate (which I doubt, I don't know where to verify this though), that means that's 323M gallons of gasoline.

That would mean your average vehicle in the US uses 323 gallons of gas a year (1,222 litres). Some quick googling suggests this is fairly accurate.

[Asher]

This is how they got 17 million barrels:

According to the plastics manufacturing industry, it takes around 3.4 megajoules of energy to make a typical one-liter plastic bottle, cap, and packaging. Making enough plastic to bottle 31.2 billion liters of water required more than 106 billion megajoules of energy. Because a barrel of oil contains around 6 thousand megajoules, the Pacific Institute estimates that the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of oil were needed to produce these plastic bottles.

http://www.pacinst.org/topics/water_...nd_energy.html

[Kitschum]

Can you still get beer at hockey arenas in Toronto?

[Asher]

I don't think you can at the city-owned ones.

You can at the professional ones. Those aren't the arenas talked about here.

[Kuciwalker]

Banning idiot taxes

A tax on bottled water would be excellent economically.

[Asher]

Meanwhile, Ontario has banned Dan Aykryod's Vodka because of the SHAPE OF ITS BOTTLE.


http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/...rticle1573490/

This is in addition to Ontario not stocking Johnny Walker Green Label. It wouldn't be a big problem if THEY DID NOT HAVE A ****ING MONOPOLY ON LIQUOR DISTRIBUTION AND SALE in the province.

[Kuciwalker]

That's awesome.