Fri, Aug-23-24, 07:08
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Senior Member
Posts: 2,177
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Plan: Atkins-ish (hypoglycemia)
Stats: 000/000/000
BF:
Progress: 50%
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What is an “unhealthy” food anyway? When the Danish fat tax was introduced, the dietary villain was saturated fat. A few years later it was sugar. Today it is “ultra-processed food”, a ludicrously broad category that includes everything from hummus to wholemeal bread (but not, oddly enough, sugar or fat themselves).
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This is the main problem with it - They keep moving the goal-posts because they can't seem to zero in on the real problem.
And apparently it doesn't do any good to change those goal posts anyway:
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The latest justification for taxing unhealthy food is that it will encourage the industry to change the ingredients in its products and build on the “success” of the sugar tax. But what success? Rates of childhood obesity have risen significantly since the sugar tax was introduced in 2018.
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But I would suggest that at least part of the problem is that they're simply barking up the wrong tree:
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Efforts to reformulate food have repeatedly failed because consumers don’t want to eat the new product and there is no sign of that changing. Anyone who has tried eating an artificially sweetened biscuit will understand.
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While I believe that sugar is part of the problem, it doesn't do much good to get rid of the sugar and replace it with some kind of artificial sweetener (usually a sugar alcohol) that will mostly be digested as a sugar.... in a "biscuit" that's mostly composed of a starchy substance (flour) which will be converted to glucose faster than the sugar they want to get rid of.
But herein lies a huge problem in setting "healthy food" policies: if they admit that the starchy portion of the "biscuit" is just as much of a problem as the sugar (and in reality sometimes a bigger problem than the sugar since even a sugar cookie recipe often has nearly twice as much flour as sugar) then they need to somehow try to justify pushing whole grain pastas, whole grain breads, whole grain crackers, etc, because those are still being considered the epitome of healthy food, despite the fact that out of the 43 g of carbs in a serving of whole wheat pasta, there's only 3 g fiber - which means that 40 g of that "healthy" whole grain pasta is going to be converted to glucose, causing a much greater rise in blood sugar than a couple of biscuits/cookies would ever do.
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