DailyDirt: Warnings Are Not Hazardous To Your Health
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Cities have enacted laws against smoking, salt, sugar, trans fat… and it’s raising awareness of these unhealthy habits. But is it really effective at improving general health? Maybe not. It’s difficult to actually measure what effect these health warnings have when the result is essentially a decades-long experiment on participants that aren’t monitored that well. However, smoking is down, diabetes is no longer on the rise, and consumption of sugary soda is also down. (NB: It probably wasn’t warning labels alone that caused these trends.)
- NYC is starting to require a “salt warning” on restaurant menus for items that exceed 2,300 milligrams of sodium. While sodium intake can contribute to high blood pressure and complications, it’s not clear that targeting salt intake alone is a silver bullet for improving health. [url]
- Too much sugar isn’t healthy, and there’s a surprising amount of “added sugar” in packaged foods. The website sugarscience.org is dedicated to informing everyone about the possible health impact of too much sugar in a diet. [url]
- Food labels warning about trans fat might not actually make us measurably healthier. Eaters gonna eat. But education can’t hurt, right? [url]
After you’ve finished checking out those links, take a look at our holiday gift ideas for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.
Filed Under: ban, diet, education, fat, food, food label, health, high blood pressure, policy, salt warning, sin tax, sugar
Comments on “DailyDirt: Warnings Are Not Hazardous To Your Health”
calories on menus...
putting calories on menus was proven to be ineffective for getting consumers to eat any healthier too……
Warning
Car doors are dangerous! Don’t slam them on:
Your fingers
Hands
Other body parts
Friends
Neighbors
Relatives
Enemies
Acquaintances
Pets
Other warnings I have seen are about as useful. They tend to be more about attempting to limit liability than protecting people. What else does one expect with too many lawyers.
Fat Is Not As Fattening As Sugar
Sugar is easily absorbed directly into the bloodstream, fat is not. In fact, dairy fat is even less fattening, because the high calcium content inhibits your body’s ability to absorb it.
Trans fat was for decades promoted as a HEALTH FOOD!
“Food labels warning about trans fat might not actually make us measurably healthier. Eaters gonna eat. But education can’t hurt, right? [url]”
“Education” can sometimes be in vain. I’ll just repost something I said earlier this year, in Michael Ho’s “DailyDirt: Eat This, Don’t Eat That”:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100726/02464710360/dailydirt-eat-this-dont-eat-that.shtml#c21
Having too many laws is probably even more unhealthy than any of the things for which all of these laws have been passed. Basic human rights are violated, causing stress, resulting in early death.
Sugar? I saw that last week (tonight)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MepXBJjsNxs
no GMO labelling though!
High blood pressure
While sodium intake can contribute to high blood pressure and complications
Last I heard, the correlation between salt and high blood pressure was only that – a correlation. For decades, doctors had assumed a causal relationship where none had been shown.