this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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Uplifting News

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[–] [email protected] 140 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Imagine what would happen if we taxed capital gains properly 🐸

[–] [email protected] 26 points 10 months ago

Or other externalities

[–] [email protected] 67 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I wish Germany would bring its sugar tax that we abolished in 1973 back. To be fair a lot of people are agreeing it has to come back by now, so chances are good that we'll soon have one again.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (5 children)

I think with Lauterbach as minister we have quite good chances. I was honestly kind of surprised to read that they are attempting to ban supervised drinking. Didn't think the CSU of all parties would support that

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It worked so of course they didn't extend it to other things with more hidden sugars (things like pasta sauce, flavoured yoghurts etc)

[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)

gtfo of here with sugar in my pasta sauce. It makes no sense and tastes bad.

And boxed macaroni and cheese, hamburger helper, etc. NoW wItH AdDeD SuGAr! Get all the way out of here with that nonsense. Stopped eating it a while ago, but people depend on cheap easy meals.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (11 children)

I like sugar in some pastas it cuts the acidic down for me.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I add sugar when I make pasta sauces all the time, also to stews and stir fries. It's a nice dimension.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

If you're doing it yourself you've got control over how much you're adding. It's the pre made sauces they are the problem where they use it as a cheap way of masking how shit the tomatoes they're using are.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Great! Let’s do the States too!

[–] [email protected] 44 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Philadelphia has a "soda tax" that is effective, but the sugary beverage lobby has spent millions in attack ads and disinformation campaigns. I can't imagine the shit fit they would throw if it were attempted federally.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago

Don't forget the agricultural lobbies, which are huge but rarely talked about. They've lobbied for massive subsidies for corn and as a result corn syrup is cheap and used everywhere as a sweetener. A bill restricting it would never make it through the corporatist Congress.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Cook county tried it in Illinois a few years back, and it really made no sense.

It didn't apply to juices (even though juices are loaded with sugar) and it taxed sugar free sodas the same as their sugar sweetened versions. They charged 1 cent per ounce for the tax. It was repealed 4 months after initiating it.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

Even starting with HFCS would be a major positive impact

[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (2 children)

The comments here are incredible. Are we being botted by Big Sugar?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

A billion dollar industry would never do such a thing.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

That, and sugar is insanely addictive.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 10 months ago

back to brown ale, then, Timmy

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (1 children)

With my ADHD just cutting on sugar seems to be the best diet change in my life period. I mean, of course there's sugar in lots of things, but at least not putting it into tea and not eating Snickers improves everything.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Once you stop taking sugar in coffee and tea you'll also notice that both tast so much better without sugar. :)

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

Who would have thought?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (5 children)

bruh just ban all sugary drinks, it's not that hard

[–] [email protected] 54 points 10 months ago (3 children)

They do have their place- just that place isn't "something you can just drink every day without thinking about"

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Unpopular opinion: The really bad ones, not talking about orange juice here, should be treated similarly to energy drinks. Banned for under 16 and taxed high.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Orange Juice is not meaningfully better than most sugar heavy drinks.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I have this argument with my wife a lot. She says that because the OJ is natural sugar it's okay.

But the high-fructose corn syrup used in a cola is also natural sugar in the sense that it was grown on a farm. There even happens to be less of it in your average soda than in juice.

And I'm not really saying that you should drink soda instead of juice because it's healthier, but somehow fruit juice is one of those things people think is good for them.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (2 children)

I'd argue that natural non filtered orange juice is healthier because you drink it with all the fiber from the fruit, making the sugar absorption slower. A non filtered OJ is closer to eating a fruit than those industrial ones that finely filter everything to be just a colored sugary water.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Something I like in some of Europe is that food just has a rating on it. Not only are they stricter about food pretending to sound healthy it will just straight say this juice is a D.

In the US every company spends millions to make their sugar appear more healthy and it works.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 10 months ago (3 children)

There's nothing inherently wrong with sugary drinks. It's just how often you have them.

Some people don't like sugar free and sweeteners come with their own problems.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

There is something inherently wrong with them. It's liquefied nutrition that's been designed to create an addiction and provide nothing but calories. It's marketed as a companion to meals, or as sports drinks, or as a convenient "pick me up". It's marketed to children, to poor people without alternatives. They are inherently predatory and harmful to your health.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (3 children)

then you'll probably end up with a black market of sugary drinks, and people will go to great lengths to get it.

It's almost as if this happened before with something else

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

It's more nuanced than that. In the case of sugary drinks however, since they are really easy to make, you won't even need a black market.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (4 children)

It's people like you that we can't have nice things. oh some Germans in Germany has started genociding Jews out of existence, so that must mean that all Germans are evil Nazis. you only consider moderation when their is a obvious utility. like oh you don't need alcohol to survive, but because some people get addicted to alcohol. we must ban alcohol, so no one will get addicted ever again. we seriously need to learn moderation and nuance. we really need to collectively agree that I'm not your mom and neither is the government. Otherwise we will be asking ourselves, what is the point of enjoyment? People who are miserable breath just fine, and if you enjoy something too much you might get addicted.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

And the amount of aspartame has doubled

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Aspartame can lead to overeating. Some research also point to liver cancer.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Ok, now do sugar, and compare the statistical quality of the evidence too please

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (4 children)

As someone with an intolerance to artificial sweeteners, I'll never forgive Jamie Oliver for pushing the sugar tax, alongside his insistence on "improving" school meals that resulted in mass outsourcing of school food to the lowest bidder.

Kids aren't drinking less soft drinks than before, the drinks themselves have just replaced sugar with chemicals and byproducts that aren't particularly healthy themselves...

[–] [email protected] 19 points 10 months ago (3 children)

replaced sugar with chemicals

OH NO, NOT SCARY CHEMICALS!!!111

Sugar is a chemical, ya dolt. So is water. So are most of the components that make up you.

Man, education has really taken a nose dive...

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The point that should be taken from your comment is not that they replaced the sugar with something else because we dont yet know if the aspartame is better or worse than sugar, though we do k ow that sugar is bad in large quantities.

What should be noted is that the study found that sugar consumption has halved, which seems to be a no brainer as the majority of soft drinks either contain half the amount or no sugar. I belive in the UK at least pepsi has half the sugar and almost everything else has no sugar. Coke is the only one that still has the full sugar content it had before. But they sell coke zero at such a low price now and push it with alternative flavours that it is being consumed in higher quantities than ever.

The point being, yeah, the tax stopped drinks makers using sugar so the sugar consumption dropped.

Like i stopped using salt to season my food and i found that my salt intake lowered... wow. Thats crazy.

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