DailyDirt: Warnings Are Not Hazardous To Your Health

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fri, Dec 11th 2015 5:00pm — Michael Ho

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]

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Filed Under: ban, diet, education, fat, food, food label, health, high blood pressure, policy, salt warning, sin tax, sugar

8 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 11 Dec 2015 @ 5:07pm

calories on menus...
putting calories on menus was proven to be ineffective for getting consumers to eat any healthier too......
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Anonymous Anonymous Coward, 11 Dec 2015 @ 6:39pm

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.
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Lawrence D’Oliveiro, 11 Dec 2015 @ 8:40pm

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.
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Dec 2015 @ 3:40am

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":

For many years the manufacturers of margarine and shortening relentlessly touted their laboratory-created products as healthier alternatives to the saturated-fat rich natural products they simulated, butter and lard. But the transfat they contained (previously categorized as "unsaturated") turned out to be far unhealthier than saturated fat. So, ironically, the people who made extra efforts to "eat healthy" were actually killing themselves, while the so-called "conspiracy kooks" who didn't trust Big Science had some major "I told you so" moments.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100726/02464710360/dailydirt-eat-this-dont-eat-that.shtm l#c21
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Glenn, 12 Dec 2015 @ 4:22am

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.
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Anonymous Coward, 12 Dec 2015 @ 7:02am

Sugar? I saw that last week (tonight)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MepXBJjsNxs
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Anonymous Coward, 15 Dec 2015 @ 3:44am

no GMO labelling though!
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nasch (profile), 15 Dec 2015 @ 8:09am

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.
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