To get fed up with people with people like Jamie Oliver trying to coerce poor people via taxation.

[Booyaka]

I absolutely loathe Jamie Oliver anyway, but this crusade of his over sugar is driving me mad. I think something possibly needs to be done about sugar, but I don't think this is the way to do it. He did make a suggestion about prominently labelling total number of teaspoons of sugar in a product, which seemed quite sensible. But mainly he was pushing the tax angle.

Jamie Oliver's entire schtick seems to be that poor people can't be trusted to make the right decisions so they should instead be priced out to force them to make the decisions that he and his ilk believe that they should be making.

It bloody annoys me that they seem to think if you are wealthy and can afford them anyway you can be trusted to make the right decision anyway, but if you're poor you need to be coerced, and that coercion, of something as basic as what you eat and drink, is fine as long as you are poor. He did very much concentrate on handwringing about 'the deprived' too and how this tax would seemingly save them from themselves.

Apparently 1/3 of the products he sell in his restaurants are high sugar anyway, but he probably doesn't mind that, because he prices his tat so highly only middle class people can afford it and they're sensible enough to be trusted with sugar unlike the proles.

He probably doesn't realise, but a lot of people can't afford to take their kids to Tuscany or the Caribbean, Cornwall or even Skeg-bloody-ness. They can't buy their kids a lot of toys or give them days out. Is it really fair to give these people a financial kicking for giving their kids one of the few treats they can afford? Especially when many of them do so sensibly and in moderation.

Ok my corner shop sells choclate bars for 69p each or if you buy three it's £1.20 for three! This is an offshoot of Tesco (onestop). Apples, pears are sold singularly for 45p each.

If I had three kids and was poor and they all wanted a snack it would be cheaper to buy the chocolate.

Or I could even buy one of those four packs of Mars bars/twirls, etc for £1 and have a bar myself as well!

I don't think people ate as many sweets. They ate more sugar in different ways though - on cereal, in tea and coffee, in jam sandwiches, sugar sprinkled on bread, condensed milk sandwiches, even.
booyaka are you referring to the high incidence of diabetes T2 amongst South Asians in your last post? If so, that is due to a genetic predisposition, not diet. Actually the typical south Asian diet is a very efficient way of eating well on a low budget.

Stop

The evidence I've seen points to reducing levels of sugar consumption from a high in the 50s-70s.

And a lot of the stuff put out about obesity (where they claim obesity rates will double in the next 15 years and so on) are based on such flimsy extrapolated statistics they are a nonsense. In 2004 it was reported that doctors thought there would be 6 million people with diabetes in the UK, but by the time 2010 came round there were only 2.6 million. (Yes it's still a lot, but getting your prediction wrong by more than a factor of 2 is a pretty big error).

Don't take my word for it, have a look at this for example.

The health lobby in this country have consistently made false predictions and doom mongering about various lifestyle factors such as sugar and alcohol consumption. It has become a PR exercise rather than evidence based assessment and education. I'm not saying that sugar and alcohol is good, but the case against is constantly overstated. I don't like the attempts at manipulation and heavy handed solutions (tax).

ThatsDissappointing, it's all part of his general attitude and what sells his programmes. Looking down on people who may well have issues he is blissfully unaware of despite having a learning disability himself (dyslexia apparently)

I remember a clip where he and his missus were laughing and sneering because a little boy had been sick after eating Jamie's food. That could have been my DS, desperate to please but unable to follow through because of something he has no control over.

I'm probably taking it too personally.

what's

I think we can easily Google and get data to back up our arguments, and I can see/concede that we don't want to unfairly demonise sugar

But hand on heart, I think that its way too easy to buy poor food very cheaply these days. So...blame the carbs, the chemicals, the corn oil, the FAT!!! and this is NOT helping

Fake mars bars are about 50p for 6 in Aldi. I still only buy them once in a blue moon. That way the dcs are really excited if they get them and they are a proper 'treat'. The problem is if they become part of the normal week they lose the wow factor and people start to put on weight.

If he really wanted to make a difference he could attack the source, and advocate advertising bans and increased corporate responsibility. He's too much of a good little capitalist to do that of course ( he said of UKIP 'UKIP are stirring it up. Now they have stirred it up they have got my interest, and I will listen to them.'). It's easier to blame the poor, because he's too dim to see the full picture, or just chooses not to.

It's been a central plank of the British fiscal system since 1846 that food is not taxed - not even food which if taken to excess is harmful. That's why, credit where it is due, Heath insisted when we entered the Common Market, as it then was, and had to introduce VAT that food should be zero-rated.

In fact the only exception that I know of was when an earlier Conservative government in 1962 extended Purchase Tax to confectionery: old farts like me may remember that some chocolate bars went up from 6d to 7d and others were reduced in size. The dentists supported it but it was otherwise very unpopular and with the advent of VAT in 1973 it was quietly dropped.

No, Mr Oliver. Take your tax on sugar and put it where it won't see the light of the sun.

Why are the only snack options in these debates a chocolate bar vs an apple?
Both fairly expensive snacks. Why not a piece of toast, pitta bread, a piece of cheese, a handful of raisins & Cheerios. Much, much cheaper snack options.

He's so annoying

So none of you think that if we increase the price of sugar significantly then less of it will be consumed?

It's a basic economic rule: increasing costs decreases consumption. It's been tried with alcohol and petrol - increased taxation to reduce consumption. My understanding is that on the whole it does have a positive impact on consumption (by reducing it I mean).

I wonder what restrictions people would like to see put on retailers or manufacturers to decrease the sale and consumption of sugar?

More artificial sweeteners in food?

It's a regressive tax, like VAT.

Minifingers, in Mexico it has only reduced calorie intake by 6 calories per day. So no I don't. If people don't want to eat healthy food they'll probably just replace it with fatty items or other unhealthy things. That goes even more so for JOs idea of just taxing soft drinks; people will just replace them with other sugary items.

As for him only attacking consumers - actually he's been vocal about the importance of decent school meals and the outrage of companies like Pizza Hut, Coke and KFC being allowed to peddle their crap in schools in the USA.

What do you expect him to do?

It is an outrage and a disaster that one child in three finishes primary school overweight in the UK, primarily because kids here eat about 3x the daily recommended intake of sugar.

It's also right that he should flag up that it's poor communities who are most affected by the obesity epidemic - because that's the hard truth. He's also not alone in this thinking. In Mexico where 32% of adults are obese and 14% adults have diabetes, they've put a 10% tax on fizzy drinks in an attempt to reduce consumption.

Somebody needs to say something and say it loud, and he's got the public ear.

After all, it's not rich people who'll be coming a cropper when the NHS collapses - it'll be poor people in communities with very high rates of obesity related ill health.

Booyaka - at a population level I bet it makes a difference to health outcomes, just as increasing alcohol taxation has.

They wanted a 20% tax by the way but it didn't happen because of industry pressure.

He's probably not making an awful lot of royalties any more on his Malteser and Ice-Cream pudding, so hey, why not?

"So no I don't. If people don't want to eat healthy food they'll probably just replace it with fatty items or other unhealthy things. That goes even more so for JOs idea of just taxing soft drinks; people will just replace them with other sugary items."

Fine. So what are your suggestions as to how to stop us sleepwalking into a diabetic nightmare caused by rampant obesity in the population?

Health education hasn't worked.

Free school meals don't seem to work.

Food labelling doesn't seem to work.

Free dietary advice through the GP doesn't seem to work.

The country is awash with cheap, cheap, cheap sugary food. In every retail outlet - bags of sweets and sugary drinks everywhere, and regardless of all the government advice people are stuffing themselves and their children with it and getting fat and sick.

In a country with a system of socialised medicine it really is a problem for all of us. The NHS won't survive in its current state if we have a large population of adults in their 60's and 70's with severe obesity related health conditions. Our current crop of 70 and 80 year olds have had much lower rates of obesity in adult life, and the NHS is still staggering under their needs. Chuck in a huge increase in diabetes (£1 in £10 is currently spent on diabetes related care in the NHS - this is set to soar) and really, we're fucked.

Something drastic needs to be done. Or maybe we should just accept that the NHS is doomed. :-(

CharityBarnum
Ok, so that sounds like he hasn't slated people with 'learning disabilities' or who are 'uneducated'

I suspect what you interpreted as him and his wife as 'sneering' at a child might be interpretated differently by someone else. It sounds very unlikely that an editor would choose to have him on TV behaving like that even if it were true.

The TV comment was, at best, stupid but I am not convinced about the suggestion that he's an all round awful person.

I say that as someone who finds him extremely irritating.

I'm a bit at the ferocity of some of the posts on this thread some of really nasty and personal and a lot are based on wild assumptions.

Sales of sugar laden soft drinks dropped 6% in Mexico following the introduction of the tax. How can that not be a good thing? What earthly reason is there to drink gallons of the stuff? It has zero nutritional value, nothing positive about it at all....surely anything that helps to furb overconsumption of it has to be positive?

I can't stand Him but he does have a point, little boy across the road just had several teeth out already and now has an infection in one, he has been up all night screaming in pain. Que a trip to the emergency dentist who prescribed a course of antibiotics and tell the parents another tooth will have to come out. The boy gets out of the car drinking a bottle of Ribena and eating a family size Dairy Milk bar, if these items were splashed with the amount of sugar they contain, would the penny drop with his parents ?. I really don't know, the kid is already three stone over weight and I don't know if it is ignorance or even a form of neglect.

Hackmum had it. I think we're probably looking at the problem the wrong way round. Why are people poor? Why are people forced to scrimp and count the pennies so that they can afford to eat? Much better to tackle poverty so that no-one goes hungry. But a much bigger project, sadly.

Yup. That. If people in poverty are much more likely to be obese (as Helena illustrated so well), and if the constant grind of a poor person's life is No, No, No, then we need to take a long hard look at society and start paying a proper living wage to everyone, whether they're on benefits or not.

I am broadly in favour of a tax on sugar, but I think there should be legislation in place to ensure that crappy frankenfood sugar substitutes aren't used either.