CSotD: Demanding a spoonful of sugar from the Nanny
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Daryl Cagle coined the term "Yahtzee!" for those times when several editorial cartoonists come up with the same gag simultaneously, the most egregious example being the 30+ "Weeping Statues of Liberty" that popped up on editorial pages September 12, 2001.
Those, of course, came from a lack of wit, but there are more intriguing examples, and here are a couple of cartoons — which also happen to be Statue of Liberty gags — that are so close in execution that I actually scrolled back to see if the same panel had been accidentally inserted twice:
Great minds, eh?
And yet this isn't a case of great minds thinking alike, and, in fact, appears to be great minds thinking in quite opposite directions: Note that one Statue faces right while the other faces left.
Coincidence? Well, yeah.
But coincidentally appropriate.
As I parse things, Robert Ariail (above) is celebrating the court decision that overturned Bloomberg's ban on oversized sodas in NYC, while Rob Rogers (below) is mocking those who think it was a Great Moment in Democracy.
It's possible Ariail is also snickering — his Colossus is pretty collossal, after all — and I don't think he's putting this on a level with Brown vs the Board of Education or Roe vs Wade, but he does seem pleased that the court has confirmed the freedom to be all that you can be and more.
I've watched Bloomberg's big soda ban with interest, because he's got science firmly on his side, as well as a strong fiscal argument, but it seems like a draconian way to make people behave themselves, or at least one that is beyond the powers of a mayor.
In striking down the regulation, that's pretty much what the judge said: The city council might have the power, but the mayor and board of health do not, particularly since it creates a bizarre regulatory inconsistency between places governed by the city and places subject to state law.
I like Bloomberg's quote in that article: “People are dying every day. This is not a joke,” he said. “We’re talking about lives versus profits.”
But it is a joke, you see, Your Honor, because fat people are funny. Or don't you agree?
Apparently Signe Wilkinson doesn't think it's funny:
So, once again, it's one of those "keep your government hands off my Medicare" situations, where people preach freedom but want protection: They hate the "Nanny State" until they get a boo-boo, and then they want her to make it all better.
The problem with freedom is that it isn't free, and that doesn't mean we have to invade other countries.
It means that in places that allow you to ride a motorcycle without a helmet, we don't shrug and let you die when you bang your head on the asphalt and can't afford the resulting medical treatment, we don't make you lie in a corner if you can't afford a motorized wheelchair and we don't let your family starve when you can no longer hold a job.
And it sure seems like the same people who scream for their right to splatter their brains across the highway are the ones who want this concept of "personal responsibility" to apply until they need a spoonful of sugar from their loving nanny.
And, getting back to that, the science seems pretty strong on sugar and diabetes, and this study says that sugar intake is far more critical as a cause of adult-onset diabetes than obesity and exercise. They looked at data from 175 countries over 10 years and found a direct link between increases in sugar consumption and and increases in diabetes.
And, by the way, they didn't find a difference between sugar and corn syrup. Nor do scientists care if it's brown or white or turbinado or lovingly harvested by Tibetan monks or carved into the ancient traditional Celtic symbols of pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, and green clovers. Sugar is sugar.
One of the controversies that erupted in my reporting days came in 1989, when the National Resources Defense Council ramped up its efforts to ban alar, which was used to keep apples on the trees longer. As a business reporter in a major apple-producing region, this was big news.
What I discovered beyond the dueling press releases was that alar wasn't terribly harmful in reasonable amounts. But when I dug a little deeper, I found two factors that tilted me over to the NRDC's position, though I still objected to their use of celebrities in place of scientists:
1. Once parents find a food their infant will eat, they tend to focus on it so that it becomes a bizarre proportion of the baby's diet. Both apple juice and applesauce are major players in this phenomenon.
2. Babies have a different fat level that makes their processing of nutrients different than that of an adult. The tests in those days were based on the physiology of adult men (women now are sometimes considered). Many things that cycle harmlessly out of a man's body will build up in a baby's, particularly if they are fat-soluble rather than water-soluble.
This leads us back to sugar, the alar ban coming only two years after Beech-Nut was caught selling colored sugar water as apple juice for babies.
Nor are babies the only ones for whom the amount consumed is at issue.
The other day, someone posted a screed against Mountain Dew, which contains brominated vegetable oil, an emulsifier used in citrus-flavored beverages to keep the citrus oil from rising to the top.
Going beyond the hysteria of the posting itself, I discovered that the potential hazards of BVO were recognized when it was conditionally approved in the 1970s, but that the permitted levels assumed the relatively sane levels of soda consumption in those days: A treat, not a staple.
Loved the quote from this article: "Any normal level of consumption of BVO would not cause any health problems — except the risk of diabetes and obesity from drinking that much sugar water."
The amount of these drinks being pounded down has since changed, and people — particularly gamers — are turning up with adverse reactions after drinking four to eight liters of Dew in a day.
If that is what we are to consider "normal," then it's a race between BVO and sugar to see which can damage our kids most, first.
I'm betting on sugar, in part because, as this 2002 Zits suggests, even the coffee craze hasn't meant much change:
And also because, as this 2012 xkcd suggests, our capacity for rationalization on the topic is, well, pretty irrational:
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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