Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

edition.cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 197 posts

Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#61

Post by junipertea »

adrr wrote: post #24
srl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is like forcing motor cycle riders to wear helmets. Maybe this is a petty, pointless distinction, but I think they're quite different. Singapore banned the ads , not the actual consumption. Not wearing a helmet chiefly harms yourself, and it's hard to argue that it's immoral. Encouraging others not to wear a helmet, though... that seems pretty objectionable, just like ads for tobacco etc. (Of course there are…

Helmet laws and seat belt laws cut the supply of organs to those in need.

They also hopefully decreased the number people that need them

Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#62

Post by Mirioron »

furyg3 wrote: post #33
Mirioron wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost any kind of change starts small and then builds up. I don't see anything to indicate that banning ads isn't just the first step in the process. Cigarettes have become more and more restricted over time and they also started with banning ads. If this doesn't alarm you yet, then will you be alarmed once they start banning ads for meat?

This is a ‘slippery slope’ fallacy, and your example even demonstrates its unlikelihood. Cigarettes have been around for a very long time, and the act of smoking them long-term is basically terminal behavior (which we’ve also known about for quite a while). Many countries have banned advertising or limited it, but even in many ‘progressive’ countries (eg Germany) cigarette advertisement is still alive and well. And I…

>This is a ‘slippery slope’ fallacy, and your example even demonstrates its unlikelihood.

That's the point. Change happens either through a revolution or a "slippery slope". You can call it a fallacy all you want, but think about how successful political change happens. Almost every instance starts small and keeps pushing the boundaries until the political change has happened. This is how you change people's values, so calling it a fallacy as though that's supposed to invalidate it isn't enough.

>And I don’t know of a country where smoking is entirely banned.

It has just been made exceedingly expensive, just like alcohol. To the degree that the vast majority of the cost is in taxes.

Furthermore, this is a long process. Just because they haven't been banned yet doesn't mean that it's not going to happen in the future.

>And I don’t know of a country where smoking is entirely banned.

Bhutan and Turkmenistan have banned the sale of tobacco. The aims of some countries, such as Finland, is to become tobacco free.

Countries are also doing things such as banning flavorings of tobacco. So would your argument then be that it's not a slippery slope, because they aren't actually going to ban sugary drinks, they'll just ban sugary drinks with flavorings?

Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#63

Post by pimmen »

I had the pleasure of holding a talk at the same event as Saeid Esmaeilzadeh, a rockstar entrepreneur and chemist in Sweden, and one of the questions he got during his talk was how he could reconcile his drive to be an ethical businessman and supply stuff to the military. His response was pretty long but it made a comparison with the sugar industry (paraphrasing here, sorry Saeid if you're reading this and I got something wrong):

"I would never force my ethics on someone else, I will however criticize someone if they don't think their business model through on an ethical level. You should be able to live with what you're doing, personally, without deluding yourself or being in denial. I think Sweden, a democratic country, has an obligation to make sure that the troops we send for peace keeping purposes have the right gear to do the job. However, I would never, ever, supply stuff to the sugar industry. Even though we've found loads of stuff that could be applied to that field, I just couldn't live with myself. It serves absolutely no utility to humanity, it kills more people every year than war and you're primarily marketing stuff to children to form life long habits. It just doesn't square with my morals but I've met other, smart people who have thought long and hard about the sugar industry and came to the conclusion that it's an ethical industry. Whatever floats their boat, but I don't want to make money that way."

Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#64

Post by yodsanklai »

refurb wrote: post #21
mark_l_watson wrote: post #2

Usually I am for freedom to do anything you want as long as it does not impact other people. I am OK though with banning ads for sugary drinks because society pays a high medical cost for damage due to excess sugar addiction/use. This is like forcing motor cycle riders to wear helmets. BTW, I worked in Singapore for a while in 2016. Wonderful place! People just seemed happy there, from business people to laborers. If…

Should we stop people from doing high risk activities in general? Mountain climbing? Sky diving? Those impact society as well, and my medicinal expenses are higher when they get hurt.

> Should we stop people from doing high risk activities in general? Mountain climbing? Sky diving?

This is not comparable. We're not talking about banning sugary drink, but banning brainwashing people (including kids) to make them consume them.

Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#65

Post by [deleted] »

Mirioron wrote: post #26
Retric wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning advertising is very different from banning the products themselves. The intent of advertising is to increase consumption so the impact is more widespread than personal choices. It’s in effect a form of meme pollution.

Almost any kind of change starts small and then builds up. I don't see anything to indicate that banning ads isn't just the first step in the process. Cigarettes have become more and more restricted over time and they also started with banning ads. If this doesn't alarm you yet, then will you be alarmed once they start banning ads for meat?

[deleted]

Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#66

Post by king_panic »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #42
smackmybishop wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a point there that I don't think gets enough discussion: As healthcare becomes increasingly socialized, personal unhealthy choices become an attack on society at large. Why wouldn't we ban sugary drinks altogether? Motorcycle riding even with a helmet? Maybe get rid of pasta. It's not clear to me where we should stop, if medical costs to society are a valid justification for reducing personal freedom...

Personally I believe that this is the end state of socialized health care, and I'm afraid we'll see it implemented on a wide scale within the next 20 years. It'll likely start with a hate tax, which is already in affect in a handful of locations. The only real question to me is which will be banned 'for the good of society' first: sugar, or meat? Meat has the extra argument going around of having an impact on the cli…

The amount of misinformation surrounding human health is criminal. The restaurant/food industry and "healthcare" industry is a giant scam.

The system sells you the problem -- processed food, sugar, alcohol, snacking -- and then sells you the "solution" at exorbitant costs -- doctors appointments, drugs, surgeries. They get you coming and going.

The biggest problem is eating frequency, bar none. Humans are not meant to eat 24/7. When the body fasts, it's healing. People are figuring that out. Look up snake_diet_wizard on Instagram. He promotes prolonged fasting. The health and weight loss transformations are amazing. One hundred pounds of body fat lost are standard.

We heal when we fast.

Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#67

Post by jedimastert »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #59

They should also penalize gluten-containing products (and that's not just foods, e.g. shampoo may contain gluten too). Google zonulin, leaky gut, wheat belly and microbiome diet to find out why.

I get that you're being sarcastic, but can you expound on why? This isn't a ban on the sale of sugary drinks, just the advertisement of such.

Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#68

Post by jniedrauer »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #58
Someone1234 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK has a similar "traffic light" system[0] on their foods. I cannot speak to everyone, but for me seeing red salt makes me look again at other options. It is a gentle nudge but helps. By contrast US food labeling is an anti-pattern. "Serving size" seems arbitrary and makes it impossible to compare foods even directly next to one another on the shelf (plus they're intentionally unrealistic, like a single chocolate…

It would be so simple to fix the serving size issue, too: just force labels to list nutrition information for the whole thing as well as per serving!

Arbitrary serving sizes are kind of useless though. In an ideal world, most foods would list nutrition information in two units: per container, and per 100g. You'd be able to tell at a glance a) what you're buying, and b) how it compares to similar items. Unfortunately that will not happen in the United States any time soon.

Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#69

Post by levythe »

xhruso00 wrote: post #43

"In addition to an ad ban, the ministry announced that sugary drinks would also be required to display a color-coded, front-of-pack nutrition label to list nutritional quality and sugar content." I like Japanese/Taiwanese approach which list percentage of fruit juice (front-of-pack). And manufacturers can't cheat with substitutes like apple cause it doesn't count. This is way more useful for consumers to decide what…

Fruit juice is only marginally better. Most of the good stuff in fruit is removed when you just extract the juice.

Re: Singapore to become first country banning ads on sugary drinks

#70

Post by jacobush »

alkonaut wrote: post #46
srl wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is like forcing motor cycle riders to wear helmets. Maybe this is a petty, pointless distinction, but I think they're quite different. Singapore banned the ads , not the actual consumption. Not wearing a helmet chiefly harms yourself, and it's hard to argue that it's immoral. Encouraging others not to wear a helmet, though... that seems pretty objectionable, just like ads for tobacco etc. (Of course there are…

People being injured or killed harms other people. Especially in countries with some form of universal healthcare (i.e most of the developed world).

Maybe even more in the other countries. Loss of productivity and loved ones is also expensive, albeit harder to directly measure.
Post reply on HN