Salt and pepper magnified.
You may have read about Brooklyn Assemblyman Felix Ortiz last week, for his proposal to ban salt in New York restaurants. After that idea didn’t go over so well, he issued a clarification that his legislation was to prohibit the use of salt as an additive to meals. Basing his concerns on reports from the World Health Organization and a study issued by the Annals of Internal Medicine, sodium intake in the United States is over double the recommended daily dose.
A study done by the World Health Organization showed that if everyone consumed half a teaspoon less per day, there would be between 54,000 and 99,000 fewer heart attacks each year and between 44,000 and 92,000 fewer deaths. This same study also showed that lowering the amount of salt people eat, even by small amounts, could reduce cases of heart disease, stroke and heart attacks as much as reductions in smoking, obesity, and cholesterol levels.
Fighting obesity has been a difficult task in the United States, leaving legislators faced with the unpleasant task of inventing ways to wean people off of fatty and salty foods. The latest such idea, proposed in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, would be to slap an 18% tax on pizza and pop to push the average weight of Americans down by 5 pounds per year.
The argument for this is based on the health costs associated with fighting obesity and heart disease:
The researchers, writing in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine on Monday, suggested taxing could be used as a weapon in the fight against obesity, which costs the United States an estimated $147 billion a year in health costs.
“While such policies will not solve the obesity epidemic in its entirety and may face considerable opposition from food manufacturers and sellers, they could prove an important strategy to address overconsumption, help reduce energy intake and potentially aid in weight loss and reduced rates of diabetes among U.S. adults,” wrote the team led by Kiyah Duffey of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Of course, I can think of some obvious flaws with this idea. People don’t generally consume pizza and pop because of the addiction to junk food, although salty pizza does have that effect on a lot of us. No, we consume pizza and pop because it’s cheaper than the alternatives that are offered, particularly when out of the house. As the Reuters article points out, if current government subsidies were shifted into production of “healthy foods”, it would lower the cost to the consumer, thereby allowing them to make their own health choices.
h/t IOTW
