Memphis Barker demonstrates both his nasty authoritarian streak combined with rampant idiocy in his support for state control over what we put into our bodies. His insane article starts off with some crazed wibble about viral advertising using Beyoncé and Pepsi. He seems to think that this has some sort of artistic merit. Mr Barker, be assured that this is not the case – you are a legendary artist only in your own tiny mind.
Born in the 1850s, sugary fizzy drinks have become one of 2013’s problem topics. Around 1.5 billion adults are today considered overweight. Nearly a quarter of British men and women are obese.
The killer word here is “considered” (and, no, it isn’t a problem). There is no such thing as an obesity epidemic and the use of BMI is so flawed it is blatant quackery. My work takes me out and about – I meet hundreds of people throughout the year and rarely do I see someone who is obese. Yeah, sure, some are carrying a little extra weight, but obese? Frankly, I cannot recall the time I met anyone who fits that definition. But if you use BMI as your yardstick and fudge the figures, then pretty much anyone can be obese. Indeed, at five foot seven and weighing in at eleven stone, I could be deemed borderline with a BMI of 24.13 (above 25 is considered overweight). So, frankly, I’ll trust my own eyes rather than the propaganda being pumped out by politicians and cretinous journalists.
Soft drinks – which contain even less nutritional value than a Big Mac – stand accused by an increasingly vociferous lobby of fat-creation on an industrial scale.
And it is a pile of utter claptrap that anyone prepared to apply some critical thinking to will realise. However, we are talking about a journalist writing in the Independent, so critical thinking is not a quality to be expected – and, indeed, we are not disappointed. As Tim Worstall is apt to point out from time to time, a calorie is a calorie, is a calorie… And Barker is clearly barking.
One prime objector is Sustain, a farming charity, who earlier this week roused the support of 60 other public bodies and called on the UK Government to introduce a “sin tax” of 20p per litre on sugary drinks.
Okay, one at a time with this codswallop:
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Sustain is a Fake Charity. That is, it takes taxpayers’ money and lobbies government. It is not, therefore, a charity and it should be studiously ignored – and preferably relived of its
governmentour funding. -
I don’t give a flying fuck about the 60 other public bodies, as the same principle applies – they are vested interests and should therefore have no say in what we put into our bodies.
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Drinking sugary drinks is not sinful. Only an idiot would suggest that it is. Only an idiot would suggest a “sin” tax. You see, if you raise taxes high enough, other things start to happen – and it doesn’t mean that we will reduce our Coke intake – merely that we will source it elsewhere. It means that E. Leclercs in Calais will start to sell more sugary drinks.
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And, finally, just for the terminally hard of thinking; what we eat, drink, smoke or otherwise imbibe is a personal matter, and the UK government has no business being involved.
The demand has ruffled feathers.
Well, yes, see above. You know, it being none of anyone else’s business and all that.
Libertarians respond (in disgust) that nobody was ever fooled into thinking Dr Pepper a medical man, and so long as nobody else is harmed, people should be left to drink what they please.
Precisely. And we are absolutely correct in that assertion.
To their eyes intervention would constitute another example of snobby state nannying – one that would hit the poor (regular cola-drinkers) more than the rich (Appletiser at worst).
Again, this is absolutely true – it is state nannying. However, there is a “but” coming. There is always a “but” with these popinjays:
Skinny, temperate drinkers might agree. But looked at practically, as more than an abstract question of individual freedom, holes in the libertarian logic show up.
It doesn’t of course. The logic is perfectly sound, especially when you consider that the obesity epidemic is an artificial construct designed as a vehicle for the puritans to nag us about what we eat and drink.
By avoiding any attempt at regulation of the soft-drink industry, governments don’t simply back their citizens’ wisdom of beverage-choice, they grant corporations the freedom to profit massively from marketing drinks that damage public health – a freedom for which the NHS (a.k.a the taxpayer) must pick up the tab, paying £6bn a year to combat diet-related illnesses, according to Sustain.
There we go, a great steaming pile of doggy doo-doo. Let’s regulate, because regulation solves everything, doesn’t it? Well it does in the brain damaged world of Barking Barker and his cretinous cohorts at the Indy. And we can’t be having drinks companies making profits, that is evil and right wing after all. Oh, yes and we get the old “cost to the NHS” canard being wheeled out. Who, exactly pays for the NHS? Oh, yes, we do. The Cola and Pepsi drinkers. And, there is no evidence that drinking these beverages actually leads to a cost to the NHS – i.e. us who pay for it all anyway. There is no such thing as “public health”. There is my health, your health and other people’s health. Guess which one is any of yours, or government’s business? And as it is “according to Sustain” a fake charity that arse rapes our wallets to nanny, hector and nag us, it can be dismissed out of hand.
In New York a combative Mayor Bloomberg has banned the sale of “supersize” drinks. Whether or not a tax is the right option we should seriously consider similar moves.
No, we should not. Bloomberg is a nasty, authoritarian charlatan and we most certainly should not be emulating his regime. What we eat, drink, smoke or otherwise imbibe into our bodies is none of the government’s business (did I say that already?), so government has no place poking its nose in.
And if public opinion still needs a nudge in the right direction, copyright is hereby granted to anybody rich and artistically serious enough to film “The Beyoncé Burp”.
Go fuck yourself with a length of razor wire you sanctimonious, self-righteous, nannying, puritan prick. As Chris Snowdon reminds us; Sugar is not evil, but hysterical, authoritarian journalists are. We can add Memphis (Barking) Barker to that list.
Given the level of irrational hysteria displayed, the inevitable question arises …
What are these people (like Barker) ON?
What are they eating & drinking that makes them like this -because it MUST be something they ate or drank, mustn’t it – by their own “logic”……
Too much Pepsi, perhaps?
I seemed to have missed when they started the degree course in “Lobbying and propaganda as a tool: How to make a career out of removing people’s freedoms”.
As for the “cost to the NHS”, I left a comment on this elsewhere, which I’ll copy and paste here, as I’m too lazy to re-write it:
“…£6 billion – the putative cost of ‘diet-related diseases’ to the NHS…” So because of that, they want to tax soft drinks. One wonders what the annual cost to the NHS is for Sport & Recreation related injuries. Considerable, I would imagine.
So what course of action should they take with sports injuries? Tax them? Refuse to treat them on the grounds that they are essentially self-inflicted injuries (as they would like to do to smokers)? After all, no-one needs to do sport; they know the risks, it’s a lifestyle choice. So why should we have to pay for their irresponsible actions?
Where do you stop with this idiocy?
That’s just it; they don’t. The monster is never sated, there will always be something else to devour, until it starts eating its own tail.
XX Refuse to treat them on the grounds that they are essentially self-inflicted injuries XX
Now THAT is an interesting question.
I will always hold, that bikers (Motorbike… not these “I am making myself look stupid by waving my legs up and down” machines (Pedal bikes)) were the first to get this shite. Read “Helmet law”.
Later, but not much, came the reports from M.A.G (Motorcycle action group, for the “cagers”) that insurance companys were classing motorcycle riding along with such things as mountain climbing, caving, and such.
This means that YES, they DO treat it as “self inflicted”. OR at least, due to “Precedence”, the possibility exists.
“Refuse to treat” Not yet. Insurance? For a LOOOONNNGGG time!
“Go fuck yourself with a length of razor wire you sanctimonious, self-righteous, nannying, puritan prick.”
That read like sweet poetry
Heh!
Must admit, my favourite, and blowing my own trumpet, is; “Go fuck yourself sideways with a dried walruss prick wrapped in NATO wire!”
(NO walrusses were harmed in this comment! 😆 )
VERY nicely stated Longrider!
– MJM
Triple Bravo there Longrider my good man from across the pond. I read all of your posts religiously but this one takes the cake. I was laughing my fool head off and pumping the air with my fist at the same time.
Tell you what I’d like to do to this Memphis Barker character. First, hook him up to a hyperbaric chamber attached to one of my cigarettes, if he survives that; waterboard him with extra high fructose laden Coca-Cola in place of the water (I’m boycotting Pepsi for the way they treat their smoking employees), if he survives that; pillory him in the public square with one-hundred Big Mac’s with extra cheese (hold the lettuce and tomato).
Of course I’m just fantasizing here, relax all of you hypersensitive lefties out there in sustainable La-La Land.
Bit of a waste of Big Macs, what?
Perhaps Mr. Barker is unaware that soft drinks *are* regulated. There’s a reason why they’re obliged to print all that “Nutrition Information” stuff on the side of each can. It sure as hell wasn’t something the drinks companies fell over themselves to provide.
The “problem” here, as in so many areas, is *education*. If you want to reduce “obesity” – the validity of BMI aside – it is far better to do so by explaining how these soft drinks became popular.
Context is everything here too: in the 1850s, the first urban metro (London’s own “Metropolitan Railway”) had yet to be invented. There were no cars. The horse and cart ruled the streets of the cities. If you were working class, you *walked* to work. Many thought nothing of walking 10-20 miles a *day*. A shift might be as long as 18 hours. (There were no unions.) A child of eight years of age might be spending his days down a mine, or up a chimney – both boys and girls. And all this was considered perfectly acceptable.
Electrically powered labour-saving devices didn’t exist either. To do something as simple as the washing up, the housewife (or maid, if you were wealthy enough) had to fetch buckets of water from the nearest water pump, bring it into the scullery, heat the water up if needed, and only then did she get to wash the dishes. It could easily take over an hour just to get the breakfast things done. And doing the laundry was a choice of either taking it to the equivalent of a laundrette (again, you had to have money to afford this), or the labour-intensive heating of water in a large tub in front of the fire, soaping up the clothes, rubbing up and down a washboard for ages, then running through a mangle, and hanging it all out to dry. It could take the best part of an entire day.
It’s no wonder that coloured sugar-water drinks that gave you a hit of energy and calories became so popular given the physically demanding lifestyles of most working people of the time.
(People often wonder why ‘thin’ became the fashionable shape for women. It’s because most *working* women were often doing just as much physical labour as the men. Slimness and softness – i.e. looking helpless and weak – was a sign of being rich enough to have plenty of hired help do all that work for you, so the heaviest, hardest work you had to do was lift a book off a shelf. This also strongly hinted at a large dowry from the, presumably loaded, father-in-law.)
Last time I checked, Queen Victoria and her contemporaries have been dead for some time, and science has given us the radio, the internet, the London Underground, YouTube, cars, dishwashers, hot and cold running water, central heating, and washing machines. What was true in the 1850s is no longer true today, so Mr. Barker’s implication that soft drinks were born of a desire to make a profit out of ‘fat’ people is utter bollocks. There is no reason to ban anything.
There is, however, a good reason for making suitable tweaks to ensure they we all the *necessary information* in order to make an *informed choice*. It’s the latter part that’s often missing from this debate. The assumption is clearly that we’re all knuckle-dragging morons. This is “education by punishment” – whacking us all with a stick. It’s a symptom of a failure in our education systems, not a solution. The *correct* solution might be to stop pissing about ramming random dates of long-dead kings and queens into our kids’ heads and, instead, use history classes to provide meaningful education that might actually be useful outside of an episode of University Challenge or QI.
The ‘fat’ issue is childishly simple and very easy to explain:
Calories in > Calories used = weight gain
Calories in < Calories used = weight loss
Calories in = Calories used = just fine
As other people have pointed out, the source of each calorie is mostly irrelevant. Steak, cornflakes, egg nog, or taramasalata: it all gets turned into glucose by your body. It's that glucose that is then 'burned' by your body as fuel, so you don't have bits of chicken and egg drifting around in your blood. So all that really matters is "Calories In" vs. "Calories Used".
There is one more thing: it seems it's only the "protein" group that switches off the brain's "I'm hungry! Must eat!" mode. The others don't affect it much; if you often find yourself feeling bloated, try adding more protein to your diet. (Ironically, this piece of information was the result of research into the "Atkins Diet", which worked, but not for the reasons the late Dr. Atkins asserted: the high protein content simply meant its adherents were eating less, taking in fewer calories.)
That's really all you need to know to work out whether to drink that can of brown sugary water. Have you had enough calories to get you through the day? No? Will the contents of the can suffice without overdoing it? Yes? Then drink up.
Now, I could have padded all this out to 600 pages and given it a fad diet name, but any "diet" book that clearly needs to go on a diet itself is an oxymoron. You don't need to know how a car's engine actually works in order to drive; you don't need to know all about enzymes, hormones and "good" bacteria to know how to live. Those three calorie formulae are all most of us need to know. Everything else is detail.
I have no problem with moderation and requiring that *all the necessary information* be made available to customers of such drinks. I do have a problem with outright bans, nannying and hectoring. We named ourselves "Homo Sapiens Sapiens" for a reason. We're not *supposed* to be stupid.
(Also: why does this form have *two* "Notify me of follow-up comments by email" checkboxes?)
We named ourselves “Homo Sapiens Sapiens” for a reason. We’re not *supposed* to be stupid.
I’m more often inclined to ask “How can one be part of a species styling itself ‘Sapien’ when so few demonstrably are?”
I prefer ‘Simius Narrans’ or ‘storytelling ape’.
I have no idea…