Screw putting a total sugar label on soft drinks – TAX THEM!

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
13
1

Hey Sugar, how’d you get so fly?

Consumer advocates have stopped being staunch on demanding a sugar tax on sugary drinks and are pushing for a watered down ‘label’...

We’re eating too much sugar and it’s making us sick, advocates calling for compulsory labelling of added sugars in food and drinks say.

Consumer New Zealand and the New Zealand Dental Association (NZDA) are asking the Government to back new rules for the labelling of added sugars ahead of a food regulation forum held in Australia later this week.

The issue will be discussed at the Australia and New Zealand Ministerial Forum on Food Regulation on November 24.

Consumer NZ chief executive Sue Chetwin said regulations didn’t require manufacturers to show the amount of added sugars in their products, making it difficult for consumers to know how much was in their food.

…after this weeks shock report on how the Sugar industry hid a report connecting sugar to cancer, I say fuck that!

An old study is now shedding new light on the sugar industry’s controversial past, and its secrets are being revealed in a new paper.

The 1960s study, which suggests a link between a high-sugar diet and high blood cholesterol levels and cancer in rats, was sponsored by the sugar industry, according to the perspective paper published in the journal PLOS Biology on Tuesday.
Yet the study itself was never published and has been forgotten until now.
“All we know is that the plug got pulled and nothing got published,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and a co-author of the new paper.
…Big Sugar are just like Big Tobacco and Big Oil. They know their product kills but they have all done everything they can to hide that truth. Big Tobacco spent decades hiding that cigarettes cause cancer and big oil have hidden many reports linking their industry to climate change, now we see Big Sugar playing the same denial tricks.
It’s time  to tax Big Sugar.

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13 COMMENTS

  1. Agreed martyn,.

    Add ‘big pharma’ too!!!!

    …”big sugar are just like big tobacco and big oil. They know their product kills but they have all done everything they can to hide that truth”.

  2. The elephant in the room is that ALL carbohydrates are effectively sugar. There is tangibly NO DIFFERENCE between eating straight sugar as opposed to eating bread, pasta, potatoes, cereal, rice etc. This 100% verifiable fact is something that almost no-one wants to acknowledge. Any glucose meter (which can be had for $50 or so) will irrefutably prove to even the most sceptical that your blood sugar spikes in EXACTLY the same manner from eating sugar as eating fast complex carbohydrates (two slices of bread causes the same blood sugar levels as SIX teaspoons of straight sugar) . Unfortunately the food industry has made us all addicted to carbohydrates which form the very foundation/staple of Western diets. Cheap carbs, not sugar per se, have caused this obesity epidemic.

    http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(17)32252-3/fulltext?elsca1=tlpr
    http://www.wheatbellyblog.com/2014/03/diabetes-australia-bungles-dietary-advice/

  3. Yep tax the sugar as well as labelling it. Why are all the cheap groceries full of sugar? It’s killing the people who have the least money and putting huge strains on the health system.

    In some areas a significant amount of chronically ill people suffer from obesity and diabetes which as well as reducing quality of life becomes a massive burden on loved ones and society. It’s about time there is a war on those diseases because we are becoming one of the obese nations in the world like the USA.

  4. Yellow foods those carbs – and they are EVERYWHERE. Cafes, fast food joints, takeaways.
    NZ needs to take a GOOD look at whats been offered up. Hearing you nitrium.

  6. Just my $0.02, adding tax on top of a bottle of $0.99 Green fizzy will have no effect. Even 100% tax to make it $1.98 will mean nothing to the sugar addicted customer. Just another “poor person tax” really.
    Let’s start by dropping GST on all produce grown in NZ.
    1kg of Apples is often $3.99 that’s around $0.60 for 1 average sized apple.
    Some customers are viewing the sugary bottle of Green fizzy as the more economic way to go

  7. Martyn;

    Why tax a toxic product when we should be demanding an end to the processes that make it so.

    Like smoking, it does not stop someone who is already addicted.

    “Drinking high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), the main ingredient in most soft drinks throughout the world, increases your triglyceride levels and your LDL (bad) cholesterol. These effects only occurred in the study participants who drank fructose — not glucose.”

    “Consumption of beverages containing fructose rose 135 percent between 1977 and 2001. Food and beverage manufacturers began switching their sweeteners from sucrose (table sugar) to corn syrup in the 1970s when they discovered that HFCS was not only cheaper to make, it was also sweeter, a switch that has drastically altered the American diet.
    In 1966, sucrose made up 86 percent of sweeteners. Today, 55 percent of sweeteners used are made from corn.”
    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2007/07/24/how-high-fructose-corn-syrup-damages-your-body.aspx

    To make matters worse, glyphosate (Roundup) is used to desiccate the crops.

    Why is it that the WHO came out with a study in 2014 that forced them to
    announce that glyphosate causes cancer and there is no call to mitigate use?
    Why is it that certain crops (wheat,sugar beets) are still allowed to be sprayed
    10 days before harvest in a process called desiccation (dry) in light of the
    above research?

    “Along with wheat and oats, other crops that are commonly desiccated with glyphosate include:
    Lentils
    Peas
    Non-GMO soybeans
    Corn
    Flax
    Rye and Buckwheat
    Triticale
    Canola
    Millet
    Sugar beets
    Potatoes
    Sunflowers
    No one is keeping track of how many crops are being desiccated with glyphosate; those in the industry have described it as a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell policy.’

    “Health Canada has also announced it will update Roundup’s label directions to reduce human and environmental exposure.16 Glyphosate is most heavily applied on genetically engineered (GE) corn, soybeans, and sugar beets, but it’s also commonly used to desiccate conventional (non-GMO but non-organic) wheat and protect other conventional crops from weeds.

    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2015/05/05/glyphosate-residue-testing.aspx

    This is something the new Government, especially the Greens, should get their teeth into.

    If others around the world can move against Monsanto then so should NZ
    without delay.

    “Members in the European Parliament (MEPs) announced that Monsanto officials would no longer be able to meet MEPs, attend committee meetings or even use “digital resources” in Brussels or Strasbourg parliament premises, essentially banning them from parliament.1
    The blow came after the biotech giant refused to attend a hearing organized by environment and agriculture committees over allegations that Monsanto engaged in regulatory interference, by influencing studies into the safety of glyphosate, the active ingredient in their Roundup herbicide.”

    https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2017/10/10/biotech-company-banned-from-parliament.aspx

    “In an email, Monsanto regulatory affairs manager Dan Jenkins recounts a conversation he’d had with Rowland, in which Rowland said, “If I can kill this I should get a medal,”15 referring to the ATSDR investigation, which did not end up occurring. Meanwhile, former Reuters reporter Carey Gillam has written a revealing book on Monsanto’s long-term and continuing corruption of science, titled “Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer and the Corruption of Science.”
    She details the approximately 3,000 plaintiffs in the U.S. who believe exposure to glyphosate caused their, or a loved one’s, cancer, while Monsanto knew it was toxic and covered up the evidence. Court-ordered unsealed documents have revealed that Monsanto scientists ghost-wrote studies to clear glyphosate’s name and even hired a scientist to persuade the EPA to change its cancer classification decision on the chemical.16 “

    We now have diabetes, cancer and other debilitating diseases at epidemic proportions.

    With Monsanto now on the backfoot it is time to act now.

    And do something about the fructose. The science is all there.

    Cheers.

    • Thanks Ian for that.
      Isn’t Monsanto responsible for an artificial sweetener that is commonly used?

      I seem to.recall the sweetener getting approval from the FDA, when executives from the FDA and Monsanto had ‘sabbaticals’ in each other’s organisation.

      That is a concern for me, sugar cast as the devil and an accumulative neuro-toxin as the saviour.
      Moderation is the response.

      • I have replaced sugar with real honey in my real tea.

        ie, No tea bags. And feel a whole lot better for it.

        Cheers.

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