Stop Defending Soda

In the war on obesity, the battle against soda has taken the fore. Here in NYC, Mayor Bloomberg is trying to ban Big Gulps and the like, which is a spin on his attempt to ban people from buying soda with food stamps that was (idiotically) blocked by the USDA last year. Now, in my home state of California, a report by a watchdog group called Eat Drink Politics is calling for government to release data regarding how much food stamp money is spent on sugary soft drinks. It seems like, in a budget-strapped state, a sharp move to try to curb spending on soda — and hopefully reap some health benefits (and savings) on the other end. But people hate blocking any access to the stuff.

Is soda a scapegoat? No, it’s an easy target. Soda — even if it doesn’t dissolve teeth — is still pretty frightfully bad for you. Let’s ignore all the squabbling about whether soda gives you cancer and look at it simply, from a caloric point of view. A can of Coke has 39 grams of sugar; a 20 ounce bottle of Mountain Dew has 77 grams. According to the nutrition labels, that’s 140 and 290 calories, respectively. (Blame the labels on the discrepancy regarding calories per unit of sugar.) So, if we’re shooting for around 2,000 calories a day in — likely less, if you’re trying to lose weight — drinking soda means sugar ends up taking up a whole lot of caloric space from more nutritional alternatives. And we drink a lot of it. Think that 20 ounces of Dew is a large portion? Teenage boys are averaging a whole quart of soda every day.

It’s hard to find any nutritional value in soda — I guess Tour de France riders slug it back, but during the tour they eat 9,000 calories a day and still lose weight — and it’s certainly not necessary for anyone to lead a happy, healthy life. We already ban food stamps from being used on booze and smokes, and it’s not like that has really prevented anyone from procuring them. But it’s a powerful statement to say that, look, your government doesn’t want to pay for things that will turn around and cause health problems and more expense. When the obesity epidemic is the biggest health problem facing our aging nation, how is it any different for state and local governments to say that they don’t want to support people sucking back sugary water anymore? It’s not.

We’re an incredibly fat nation, and we’re getting fatter. The CDC predicts that 42 percent of the country will be obese by 2030, and the country’s obesity rate has already tripled since 1960. Getting heavier forces us to change nearly everything we do to accomodate the extra bulk. Don’t believe me? Try this excellent intro from a Reuters story on for size:

U.S. hospitals are ripping out wall-mounted toilets and replacing them with floor models to better support obese patients. The Federal Transit Administration wants buses to be tested for the impact of heavier riders on steering and braking. Cars are burning nearly a billion gallons of gasoline more a year than if passengers weighed what they did in 1960. The nation’s rising rate of obesity has been well-chronicled. But businesses, governments and individuals are only now coming to grips with the costs of those extra pounds, many of which are even greater than believed only a few years ago: The additional medical spending due to obesity is double previous estimates and exceeds even those of smoking, a new study shows.

Being obese increases one’s risk for a laundry list of terrible ailments, but even as health costs spiral upward, ancillary costs of obesity are skyrocketing. The same Reuters report notes that “The most obese men take 5.9 more sick days a year; the most obese women, 9.4 days more. Obesity-related absenteeism costs employers as much as $6.4 billion a year, health economists led by Eric Finkelstein of Duke University calculated,” which leads author Sharon Begley to drop a rather damning line: “The startling economic costs of obesity, often borne by the non-obese, could become the epidemic’s second-hand smoke.”

Now, maybe you don’t give a flying shit about getting your diabetic foot lopped off or spending the bulk of your days in a Hoveround, and that’s your prerogative. Folks have long argued that it’s a free country, and you can do what you want with your body. Except it’s not.

Personal freedom in this country is protected only as far as it doesn’t unduly infringe on the liberties of others. And when healthcare costs continue to rise (thanks in part to an increasing pool of obese policy holders) to the point that healthcare is impossible to afford for others — like the legions of healthy young freelancers and underemployed out there that could help balance out the nation’s insurance pool — you’re damn right that your poor health is affecting other people. All those ailments are ridiculously expensive. Obesity drives health care costs up for everyone, and that doesn’t even account for the direct and peripheral costs of retrofitting the nation for wider rears.

Now, no one is going to claim that limiting soda distribution is going to cure the obesity crisis overnight. But it’s an emphatic statement that blame-heavy “personal responsibility” argument alone won’t solve the problem. When people argue that obesity is the product of a simple lack of self-control, they trivialize the problem. Think about it: If obesity is solely the result of laziness and bad choices, then we must be a nation of indolent bozos, and I don’t think anyone is willing to argue that. Vilifying obesity won’t solve the problem.

The issue is more complicated than that. Even as we drive more and walk less, our diets have gotten worse, and, as mentioned previously, healthcare costs have skyrocketed. Whether or not one gains weight is, at its core, a pretty basic equation: If you burn fewer calories than you ingest, your body will start storing some of those calories as fat. There’s no magic solution. But adding hundreds of calories a day to your intake in the form of soda — which is neither filling nor nutritious — only makes the task of maintaining a healthy weight harder.

The efficient way to tackle the weight problem would be to fight it from both ends: a combination of exercising more and eating less would require less commitment to each than either tack would alone. There’s a psychological boost to combining the two, as well: one study found that people were less likely to buy a can of soda if it was advertised as requiring 50 minutes of jogging to burn off than they were if it was described as having 250 calories. Look at it this way: If you’re trying to lose weight, do you want your jog to negate the soda you drank earlier, or do you actually want it to go towards results?

The answer seems simple in that hypothetical, but in reality it’s not so much. We’re a nation of extremes. Look at the ongoing debt fight in Washington. You’d think that a combination of spending cuts and increased tax revenue would require less painful extremes of either to make a difference. But partisan squabbling has left compromise pretty much completely off the table.

And so it goes in the fight against obesity. We need people to lose weight for the sake of our collective health and our healthcare costs. And if we, as a nation, drink less soda, a whole lot of those extra calories are taken off the table. People talk about personal choice, but is how many people are committed to actually eating more healthily and exercising more to make up for their Coke, slice of cake, fish and chips, or whatever? Our growing waistlines prove that many of us aren’t.

So what are we going to do about it, sit around, point our fingers about some unrealistic notion of personal responsibility and watch as our stomachs and insurance costs balloon? I sure as hell hope not. Shame on the people railing against blocking anti-soda food stamp initiatives. It’s high time that we all admitted that soda simply isn’t healthy, and that investing no thought into our food decisions is fucking wrecking our nation’s health and health care system. And the way for that realization to truly happen is for the government to say look, we’re not paying for this shit any more. And, yeah, soda’s just one part of the problem, but it’s an indefensible part. Until we take a stand against something, we’re only going to get fatter.

Follow Derek Mead on Twitter: @derektmead.

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