It takes a village, apparently. A consumer advocacy group is petitioning the Food and Drug Administration to put warning labels on soft drinks to raise awareness that an excess of sugar-filled pop can lead to obesity and tooth decay. I guess nobody has a mother anymore. Stay tuned for more biased reporting.
The complaints of CPSI joins a movement of several other organizations pushing for stricter advertising guidelines that would limit, for example, product placement in children’s television programming.
The government reported that along with doubling teenage obesity rates since 1970, teenage boys consume an average of two 12-ounce cans of soda a day. Teenage girls drink 1.33 cans a day.
“Soda pop used to be an occasional treat. Now it’s an everyday beverage,” CSPI executive director Michael Jacobson said.
CSPI says that while soft drinks are the biggest source of calories in the American diet, they offer no nutritional value for ingesting all those calories.
Jacobson went on to admit that warning labels with suggested messages such as, “Drinking too much non-diet soda may contribute to weight gain,” or “Drink fewer non-diet soft drinks to help prevent tooth decay,” wouldn’t immediately solve the obesity problem but would be useful as a reminder for adults and children.
Jacobson hopes the warnings will “push the public to a healthier diet as aggressively as the soft drink industry, the fast food industry and others push people in the other direction.”
As expected, the petition has been met with immediate opposition and criticism. The food and beverage organization argues that labels aren’t needed as nutritional information is already on the beverages.
“Individuals, not the government, are in the best position to make the food and beverage choices that are right for them,” said Susan Neeley, head of the American Beverage Association (ABA).
The Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) and The Center for Individual Freedom (CIF) both ran ads against CPSI in various national newspapers, like the Washington Post and the Washington Times.
“CSPI bases its policy suggestions on the premise that people cannot make good food and beverage decisions without government intervention in the form of bans, taxes, lawsuits and restrictions,” said an ad placed by the CCF.
The CIF ads weren’t quite as polite.
”This is nothing but another freedom-sucking proposal from CSPI,” read the CIF’s ad.
”The nutrition nannies are at it again,” using ”junk science, scare tactics, sensationalism, sound bites, doom and gloom prophecies, sanctimony, [and] self-righteousness.”
The Center for Unimportant Jason Opinions (CUJO) says that even if warning labels were put on soft drinks, everybody would ignore them and drink regualar soft drinks anyway. Even if the insistence upon government-mandated labeling and restrictions on product placement aren’t unnecessary, overreaching, and disturbing abuses of government power (which they are), the judgment about what goes into a child’s body rests entirely with parents, who should be steel-willed and loving enough to ignore the pleas of their children for this sugary thing and that sugary thing in the interest of the child’s health, whether he/she likes it or not.
