Your mother enjoys the rich smooth taste of Big Tobacco in her mouth!
Thats right 4 out of 5 Prostitutes with 4 or more childeren are more likely to smoke than any other adult in the U.S.

Happy Mother’s day!

Wow. We have so much food that we need to tax it, because we eat too much? There are people starving and your kid doesn’t want broccoli because it’s icky. There are people who would! We are fat because we are complacent. Please, let us behave like the rational beings we are supposed to be. 800 million people go to bed hungry and we gorge ourselves daily. Food is not a commodity, it’s a right. Everyone deserves a means to have sustainable, healthy food. Whether or not they eat it is up to them.

I would like to comment on the idea of taxing junk food and sugary “treats.” The commentator acknowledged that ultimately low income workers will bear the brunt of such sin taxes, much like the cigarette problem. However, to tax sugary foods at a higher rate smacks of “let them eat cake,” as only those with higher incomes will be able to afford high fructose corn syrup.

Taxing consumers for the corporations’ greed and folly-now that’s American. Cui Bono? The medical profession, our national shame, reaps the biggest windfall from obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer. Come on, people-these are your kids eating this processed crap. They’ll be lucky if they live to be fifty. Buy your food locally if possible. Check out Jim Hightower’s report on which stores and chain restaurants heavily support Republicans and boycott them. Eating out? Try a Sonic drive-in. Most of their campaign contributions go to Democrats.

I’d take this just a little further, if it wasn’t for the FDA, these businesses wouldn’t be able to get away with what they do.  They get this beautiful seal of approval from the government…which is little less than a green light to run wild.

The FDA, by its very existence, gives people a false sense of security. It cultivates a lazy and complacent population; people assume that a government stamp of approval means that food and drugs must be safe, and they don’t need to study them at all before consuming them.

Might not be a popular position, but here’s an interesting piece on the FDA:

Time to Get Rid of the FDA

Pending lawsuits to be brought by states—on behalf of citizens whose defense is that they didn’t know that excessive sugar makes people fat, and that excess fat is unhealthy—against food producers, I assume that, in line with slapping excessive taxes on tobacco products (particularly here in the state of California), excessive taxes will also be slapped on soda pop, sweet candy, donuts, Twinkies and the like. Since the same arguments that claim smokers will require more healthcare as they age apply in the case of junk-food consumers. Wonder what mom and dad would be willing to pay for a can of soda for Dick or Jane? $3.00 or $4.00 per? How about the same for one donut? Yep, adds up pretty quick. Ask any smoker how fast it adds up.

Course, as with taxes on tobacco products currently, taxes on certain foods would mean only the well heeled could afford to seriously indulge. But that’s only to be expected. A regressive sales/sin tax on certain foods would also serve that other purpose: forcing those who can least afford it to pay for shortfalls in state-government spending—from everything to paying ever-increasing number of prison guards (in turn the result of ever-increasing numbers of people going to prison for petty crimes—while members of murderous government go free, one might add) to construction of new prisons, along with construction of roads and highways, increases in legislators’ pay, and so on, and so on, and so on. All know the litany. It’s for this reason conservatives, especially Libertarians, are so in love with the idea of only sales taxes as means of providing general revenues to the states. As opposed to progressive taxes on personal and business incomes.

It’s been well-established that taxes on tobacco do not in fact, beyond 5% of total or so, go to healthcare provision for anyone at all—not smokers, not non-smokers, no one at all. The same would be true of revenues raised via taxes on junk food.

The general idea seems to be “get ‘em coming and going.” P.T. Barnum would be proud.

I expect Rob Reiner (champion of children’s health) to dream up yet another catchy referendum. This time one that will ask voters to approve a tax hike on certain foods.

Speaking of sales/sin taxes, how about a $10.00 tax on every movie ticket? Since sitting in dark rooms with mobs of other people can’t be healthy either. Nor can inhaling exhaust fumes while sitting in traffic be healthy. (We should all be using mass transit so as to lessen likelihood of inhaling smog.) So, why not another few bucks’ tax on every gallon of gasoline? Revenues raised by these other sales/sin taxes would also go to pay for healthcare for those who indulge in these other unhealthy practices. Or elsewhere, as noted.

Please don’t excuse Big Tobacco from their killing ways, just because their marketing pattern is now being replicated by Big Food. There is enough outrage to go around that both industries must be held accountable for their targeting kids and young adults as the next generation of profits. When children, youth and adults learn that they control business profits with not only their individual purchases, but with their broad consumer power, will we be holding our own health and future truly in our hands. Don’t just buy—buy thoughtfully, Don’t just eat—eat thoughtfully. Few within the food industry and none of tobacco industry consider your health with their products nor their marketing—so you must take that consideration and action yourself. Adults and parents—please help young people to understand this!

Besides a healthy diet and plenty of exercise, kids (and adults) could further their physical and mental well being by turning off the TV.

The crap that is fed to you through your TV is poison to both body and mind.

Ivy,

How is it responsible to let corporations with vast resources and thus, power, constantly flood the media with with pro-crap food advertising.

They wouldn’t be doing it if it didn’t work.

Sad to say that a lot of people aren’t particularly sophisticated, and unless you are advocating the old “every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost” way of life then you must agree that something has to be done at a governmental level.

According to people like Bernanke, you’re just a ‘consumer’, no longer a voter, or citizen….
verbiage reveals a lot about mentality, on closer inspection…

Ads not only are amed at children, Cherios as a ceral to lower colorestal is not true, Oats from Oatmeal is what will lower your colorestal.

What passes for food in cold cereal is junk food, most Juice Cocktails are only 10% juice the rest is high frutose corn syrup and red food color, or whatever color will inhance the Juick Cocktails.

But since this is a consumer society and the high priest is corporations and since corporations buy our government they will be the new God, and corporation ceo’s get a lot of money, while they sell their employees down the river, the illegal people who take the jobs americans don’t want (ha) are just ceo’s who skirt the law, I mean if I.D. cards were scanned through a machine than someone would know they are fake, after I.D. cards are used for a purpose, and if Target can scan I.D. cards why not employees, because employees and that includes local government know when they hire illegals, if illegals spoke perfect English than maybe people can be fooled, but this illegal thing is just a smokescreen because the real jobs are being outsourced, so someone has to be a scapegoat.

Margartet from Vancouver, Washington

(satire warning)

Please return ALL unwanted junk food and global-trade poisoned pet food to:

Corporate Sell Out, Inc.
The Bush Family Ranch
Crawford, TX 76638

FOOTNOTE—- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Day Laborers Needed!

Ambitious, smiling, bronze faces that will work for peanuts needed to truck 1600 acres of wholesome nourishment to Mexico and beyond. It’s all part of Uncle Sam’s Mile-High Global Gratis Program.

Please apply in person at:

Global Corporate Sell Out, Inc.
The Bush Family Ranch
Crawford, TX, USA 76638

Complimentary pair of El Presidente cowboy boots with each hire. Best hurry though, only 1.2 million dollars worth of shit-kickers left!

Four years after the National Academy of Science—the nation’s preeminent authority—said of trans fat, ‘no amount is safe’ to eat, we are still daily stuffing our kids with this slow poison. For those of you growing steadily less confident of the pronouncements of the medical professions, look into http://www.westonaprice.org. It will change your life, and those of your loved ones.

Two thirds of Americans are overweight and one food additive has been called the number one cause of obesity because it makes people crave carbohydrates. It’s been linked to 92 illnesses yet this additive is still in our food chain because it’s a multi-billion dollar business. It’s in virtualy every sweet low-fat & no-fat product, has been linked to depression & even teen suicide, juvenile diabetes, and a host of other nasty ailments. It’s labeled as a neurotoxic poison. Despita a Senator speaking against it on the Senate floor in the early 1970’s nothing has changed, and people have been led to believe it is safe. What is it? Google search…ASPARTAME…and form your own opinion about whether you want it in your body or whether you should be outraged at the duplicity between government & big business.
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I’ve been warning of the dangers of various genocidal vehicles such as junk/processed food in Canada for years and my articulate assertions fall on mostly deaf ears because as people with intellectual honesty know, junk food is a drug which doesn’t allow its users to adopt any kind of meanful critical thinking.
I’ve also alerted Canadians in the forums provided by Canada’s “national” newspaper, the Globe and Mail, to the genocidal nature of America’s military/industrial complex in their quest for global hegemony with little positive feedback.
I must commend TAO Walker for his clear vision of the big picture here. Those of us who choose not to ignore the ramifications of the US spreading toxic depleted uranium (DU) throughout Iraq fully expect the stakes to be raised even higher. It’s past time to acknowledge that whatever your personal political beliefs are, we in the west have allowed these evil entities to wreak havoc on the rest of the planet, as well as right here at home in the form of toxic foods, medicines and fuel, by embracing consumerism…and the result of our actions ensures a very nasty karmic backlash.

In the meantime you can explain to the kids why and how you screwed up. How the pursuit of material prosperity clouded your judgement enough to allow our leaders to destroy the planet. I used to be quite consumed with materialism with my favourite passion being exotic cars. I’ve been riding a bike for 6 years since I gave up owning cars. I stopped eating meat and poultry 27 years ago and stooped taking pharmaceuticals and junk food 37 years ago.

Now all I need is a safe place to land until the atmosphere clears itself of radioactivity.

Personal responsibility is fine, however the forces at work tend to negate one’s best efforts in powerful ways.  Those advocating this instead of involving governmental power probably have not encountered the consequences yet. 

Big Food really is using consumers’ good will and milking them like cash cows.  We The People really ought to be looking at what can be done on the macro level, even while being more critical and studious in protecting ourselves individually.

Big Food’s cash cows turn into Big Medicine’s billing opportunities.  Bills that cause people to have to file personal bankruptcy because medical costs are spiraling out of control are not unconnected.  Profits are being made and they are so huge that everyone involved supports this fiercely.

The cover has to be ripped off of this, even though the admonition ringing loud throughout the land will be “ignore the little man behind the curtain.”

We have to open our eyes, and see the truth.
Then, we have to resolve to use our greatest power, through government, to find a way out of this state of affairs.

It won’t be easy.

Can’t find where the article advocates Governmental Control of Food. I guess it’s easier to setup strawmen than to seek a solution.

Simple answer, don’t let any food companies advertise their products for five years, and see if they mature into responsible producers with a social conscience.

Good luck!

But most parents think that Cheerios are good for you, that diet soda with sucralose is worse for you and the undiet high-fructose corn syrup is ‘more natural.’ and that Annie’s Organic Macaroni and Cheese could be more healthy than Kraft Cheese and Macaroni. They believe that OJ from concentrate is healthier than a soft drink.  Try an orange, which hasn’t has its nutritional value boiled and pasteurized out of it.  Our only source of information is the box or the wrapper, and we read “heart healthy” rather than sugar content.  The least popular research is the one that says “eat less, or simply “eat real food.”  Burger King is going to free range animals.  Who cares?  Eat less of it.

This one is actually easy to solve: don’t spend your hard earned money on junk food. Teach your kids to respect themselves and their bodies. This is the job of the parents, not the government. I desire less gov’t interference in my life, not more.

Shareholders require growth.  In Big Food, growth requires the sustainability of kids eating as often and as much as possible, and when these kids grow up, that they loyally buy the same products for their kids.  McDonald’s sick strategy is to create a feeling of trust as a child, and then as an adult, who will get a warm feeling while poisoning his kids there.

Tobacco companies focus on sustainability through marketing to Young Adult Smokers, 18-25.  The younger the consumer, the more years he will have to smoke your product before quitting or dying.  Different kind of sustainability than Big Food.  RJ Reynolds would be the most obvious example of this strategy in the US.

The govt has already mislead us with their food triangle, which someone pointed out once was more of a way to keep farmers producing rather than make Americans healthy.  “Wonderbread helps build strong bodies 12 ways” or some crap like that.  Healthier to smoke a cigarette.

i own 30 cats and one dog. actually they own me. big food does kill. i am appalled to find that my basic belief that all pet food comes from the same mega-factory to be utterly true. i am amused that outrageously overpriced specialty foods are in fact the same crap as the cheap ones. another of my beliefs proven true. i have spent the last 2 weeks scouring grocery stores specials on human food,trying to keep my pets safe and fed. i am proud to say i don’t consume any kind of canned or processed food. as much as possible i eat things that i grow,no petroleum based fertilizers,no petroleum based insect control. i can’t imagine eating any of the junk that most people shove in their faces. as for letting your kids eat this crap,well, it’s your decision

The same interests Ms. Cocco suggests here are “....killing our kids for profit,” are hell-bent on killing the whole Earth, and all who sail in her, for motives much more venal and vicious even than mere “profit.”  The only real purpose of the profit mirage, anyhow, is to sucker more tame two-leggeds into idiotic complicity with the murderous scheme.

It’s utterly foolish to expect the same criminal enterprise that’s systematically poisoning the planet will have any qualms whatsoever about destroying the health, and ultimately the lives of American children whose parents are themselves too stupified by mostly self-administered drugs of one kind or another to even have a clue as to the sheer magnitude, and ruthless malevolence, of the forces arrayed against them here.  Slaphappily content to’ve been turned into “consumers,” Americans are now nearly helpless prey for both their own homegrown privateering classes and the “global” gangsters whose long-time rule-of-fear has, here in these latter days, metasticized into the real reign-of-terror that has always been its inevitable terminal configuration.

It remains fashionable among the politicians and punditry to push the notion that all these “modern” afflictions are nothing but unintended and therefore correctible “side-effects” of the civilization “process.”  Us Indians know that the essential nature of anything is always revealed in its actual effects on our living arrangement here….and never to be discerned, except by inference, in the camouflage of its “public relations.”

Our domesticated sisters and brothers are trapped in a virtual world of hurt here, still mostly unaware of the degraded condition they’ve been tricked into inflicting on theirselves, one another, and so many of our other relatives among the children of our Mother Earth.  So they go along ignorantly feeding each other into the machinery of suffering, death, and oblivion.

When they’re sick-and-tired of being sick and tired, us free wild natural human beings are here with some good medicine for them.  We even have something for what ails their die-hard tormentors.  It’s all in the Song-and-Dance of Life Herownself.

HokaHey!

Turn off the TV, period.  Ration time allowed for sedentary activities.  Encourage after-school sports of an inclusive nature.

Dear God, not again!  Marie Cocco, I understand your concern about the health of America’s children, but don’t advocate for government control of food!!  The government has it’s dirty hands in too many facets of business as it is.  What is needed is more concerned parents and, if their kids have to suffer for them to learn, then that’s not a fault of fast food; it’s the fault of the parents.  We need more personal responsibility in this country, not less.

Did you miss the news? There is a new study out that shows the mothers who are big meat eaters are causing their sons to have low sperm counts.  Because?  All the crap being given our livestock.  Add in genetically altered seeds, the chemicals dumped on our land and in our water.  Big Pharma and Big Ag are killing us.  Add in the preservatives, manufactured food, adulterated milk, etc.etc.etc.  We don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell!  You couldn’t eat pure real organic food if you tried.

What’s wrong with us that we never seem to be able to sort out the effects unbridled profiteering has on peoples’ health and welfare—until the damage has been done?  Is capitalism without social responsibility really all the good it’s cracked up to be?  I think we should all go back to a time when there was no such thing as “growth” & “progress” and people were stupid and provincial. It was a far better time, I think.

If a person doesn’t believe in marketing to kids, he/she doesn’t get very far in a corporate world that lives and dies by doing so.

I have to believe that the only trade-off in the executive suites of the huge companies that market junk foods is the fear of government legislation.