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Causes and effects of obesity
Causes and effects of obesity
Causes and effects of obesity
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Personally, I would support a government tax on sugary foods, not fatty foods. Sugar is in the same category as cigarettes in my opinion. It is not a necessary part of the human diet, and in large amounts it causes harm to the human body. However, the sugar industry is huge in the United States. With that in mind, I find it difficult to truly envision such a tax will ever happen.
Refined sugar was not available to the masses until the early 1900s. At that time, everyone’s taste buds thought the sweet substance was the best thing on earth; demand, availability and consumption sky-rocketed. No one really considered what it was capable of doing to our bodies. Unfortunately, today’s food and drink market is flooded with sugar. Consumption
Jon Gabriel explains how sugar has become an addictive drug like nicotine, the only difference is that its legal. Once we become hooked on it we become habituated to its effects and need more and more to satisfy ourselves. As a result of the increase in marketing and the on going dependence on sugary foods and beverages, children are taking in more and more sugar and obtaining less and less nutrients. According to Gentry Lasater,
With such an obsession with sweet foods, there is an obvious desire for an explanation of how such a once unknown substance took center stage on everybody's snack, dessert, and candy list. That's where Sidney W. Mintz comes into play. He decided to write this book Sweetness and Power, and from the looks of all the sources he used to substantiate his ideas and data, it seems that he is not the first person to find the role that sugar plays in modern society important. By analyzing who Mintz's audience is meant to be, what goals he has in writing this book, what structure his book incorporates, what type, or types, of history he represents within the book, what kind of sources he uses, and what important information and conclusions he presents, we can come to better understand Mintz's views and research of the role of sugar in history, and how much it really affects our lives as we know them.
As a high calorie alimentation characterized by “perfect sweetness,” sugar was in high demand worldwide. The fourth document outlines the value of sugar in the workforce during the industrial revolution of the 1800s, helping workers with the transition from easy working hours on farms, to the taxing habits of
Abstract: The use of high fructose corn syrup as a sweetener in various food and drink products has drastically affected the American people in the last three decades. Dominating 55% of the sweetener market because of its industrial benefits, HFCS’s increased use has caused dramatic effects in its consumers, including upsetting normal hormonal functions, destroying vital organs, nerves, and throwing off the body’s mineral balance. As the use of HFCS increased, the rates of obesity, diabetes, and related health problems have escalated, resulting in a nationwide epidemic.
With all the sugar plantations in the New World there was now a plethora of sugar to go around. Sugar, usually a commodity only for the rich, was now “...so cheap that the common people could afford it” (Doc. 4). Humans are predisposed to crave sweetness, unlike salty, sour, and mixed tastes, which one must learn to like (Doc. 4). That is why from the 1600s to the 1800s sugar drove the economy, and consequently the Industrial Age (Doc. 4). This change in the abundance or sugar, and thereby its price affects us even today. Food would have an entirely different taste if sugar was an expensive luxury eaten
People do not often stop to think about why the world is how it is today and when people do, they tend to think about war, victory, defeat, and even their heritage, however many of them neglect to think about daily necessities that have influenced the outcomes of many different empires. One major impact on the rise and fall of multiple domains that is often overlooked is food, and in particular, sugar. Sugar has affected economies, the way of life, and industry all over the world. Sidney Mintz, author of Sweetness and Power, stops to discuss how sugar has been a basic building block that has developed and transformed Europe and America and how the world has changed the production and consumption of sugar from a luxury into a staple of our diet by ultimately altering eating habits and work patterns in modern times.
Another contrast between the article How Candy Conquered America and This Cupcake is Trying to Hurt You is how our health is affected by our sugar intake now and back in the 1800’s. According to the article, Too Much Can Make Us Sick (http://www.sugarscience.org/too-much-can-make-us-sick/), “Heart disease”. Diabetes. These chronic conditions are among the leading causes of death worldwide.
Governments would just be continuing to cause problems because another huge problem in America is there are already way too many people without jobs. When going to the store to get a soda, is there really much to think about when drinking sweetened goods has become a part of an everyday lifestyle. Why would someone suddenly put a tax on something which so many have loved and became addicted to. If there was a tax put on everything people have come to love there would be a huge tax for everything. Bittman does not think that putting a tax on sugar sweetened beverages would affect the jobs of people because he believes it would get made up by the selling of their other products. However it is important to realize that most places would not be passing this until 2018. Although, people really do need to realize what these sweetened products are doing and the reason why taxing for these goods is not looking so
It is sad. People from all races and backgrounds are obese. In a recent survey done at Henry Ford College, 43 percent of students were overweight. Whether it is because they do not follow a healthy diet or they inherited it from their parents. Being overweight is correlated with lacking exercise or physical activity and not watching what is on the plate. Obesity can cause many illnesses, including diabetes, which is very common. As the debate whether soda tax should take effect arises, critics say that the tax will help those with obesity-related illnesses. What about exercising and maintaining a healthy lifestyle? These two factors cannot be forgotten knowing they are the most important. Americans have consumed 12 percent of soda and become less active since 1970. A soda tax aims to stop consumers from buying soda to help those who are obese. This will not be effective. Therefore a soda tax will not be good public policy.
For years doctors have been saying that refined sugars are empty calories and consist of absolutely no vitamins or minerals that people need to survive. Dentists warn that sugary foods encourage tooth decay. Many people avoid sweet food because it can lead to obesity, heart problems, diabetes and cancer. These negative responses by people’s bodies are actually warnings. Maybe people eat sugar for other reasons than the sweet taste. The human body's negative responses to sugar may be a similar purpose to the reason kids feel pain when they are playing too roughly. People’s consumption of sweet foods might also serve as a sign of defiance against their bodies’ health limitations. What many people do not realize is that their tasty treats can affect their mind and emotions.
So far, implementing real life fat taxes has been a lot of trial and error. There have been very few fat taxes implemented in the world, and many have been unsuccessful. An example from Denmark shows how fat taxes fail as a result of improper administration. Denmark initiated the world’s first fat tax, and it has been used for the precedence of many studies. Their tax had an applied surcharge to foods containing 2.3 percent or more of saturated fat (Good Morning America 1). The tax was 16 kroner per kilogram or $2.90 per 2.2 pounds (Good Morning America 1). Even the final proposal for the Denmark fat tax was flawed because people believed the taxes on meat did not match up to the quality of meat
We are all familiar with sugar. It is sweet, delicious, and addictive; yet only a few of us know that it is deadly. When it comes to sugar, it seems like most people are in the mind frame knowing that it could be bad for our health, but only a few are really taking the moderate amounts. In fact, as a whole population, each and everyone of us are still eating about 500 extra calories per day from sugar. Yes, that seems like an exaggerated number judging from the tiny sweet crystals we sprinkle on our coffee, but it is not. Sugar is not only present in the form of sweets and flavourings, it is hidden in all the processed foods we eat. We have heard about the dangers of eating too much fat or salt, but we know very little about the harmful effects of consuming too much sugar. There still isn’t any warnings about sugar on our food labels, nor has there been any broadcasts on the serious damages it could do to our health. It has come to my concern during my research that few
Junk food is a favorite in this society. Fast food restaurants make it easier to grab food on the go. The greasier or sweeter food is the better. But junk food and sugary has caused many health problems. If there was a junk food tax, the government was target foods that contain partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, foods that the main source is salt, energy drinks, caffeinated beverages and foods, and soft drinks with high sugar content.(Todorova, Elena 1.1-1.4) I believe adding taxes to junk food could help the decrease many health problem, but I will do more research before I make a decision.
In the article “U.S. health advocates seek safe sugar limits for drinks” By Lisa Baertlein reports “Americans, on average, consume 18 to 23 teaspoons of added sugars each day, according to data from National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.” (Baertlein par. 8) It’s no surprise our country has a sweet tooth, you can tell because everything we consume has some sort of sugar in it or an artificial sweetener, which in most cases is worse. The typical American is consuming dangerous amounts of sugar at a costly price. Many deal with diseases such as diabetes, which has a direct correlation to sugar and the trouble, your body has breaking down the carbs with
This increase in production caused a change at the consumption end. When sugar was first being produced it was seen as a luxury product only accessible to the rich, but then as its production increased and there was a surge amount in the market place its uses changed. It went from being a specialized product used for medicinal, ritual, or for display purposes to a common everyday food substitute. Now the working class people began more than ever to consume large quantities of sugar as a substitute to their calorie lacking diet. The production of sugar in the British West Indies was not able to keep pace with the demands from the mother country. When the supply from the British West Indies increased so did England’s demand for the crop. It seemed like from the middle of the eighteen century onward the islands were never able to produce more sugar than what was consumed by the people in the mother country. “English sugar consumption increased about four-fold in the last four decades of the eighteenth century, 1700-40, and more than doubled again from 1741-45 to 1771-75 (Mintz 1985) . As the English began to incorporate more amounts of sugar into their daily diets they began to find multiple uses of the commodity. Sugar soon developed into a stable product in the lives of people. With the increased use of sugar in multiple forms of consumption it changed from its previous classification as a spice to its own separate category. The use of this newly popular commodity did not lose any popularity as the years passed. Britain became a leading exporter of sugar crops into the world market, with majority of the supply going to feed their own peoples ravenous appetite. In 1800 British consumption of sugar had increased some 2,500 percent in...