New York has recently been taking action to increase the public health. They banned smoking in public parks, although this article suggests it may not be very well enforced. The city has also required chain restaurants to display calorie counts on their menus since 2008. This applies to about 10% of the restaurants in the city, but it is a start. A more recent development in this public health improvement project has been to suggest that sodas (or "fizzy drinks" according to bbc) should not be purchasable with food stamps. The article is pretty crazy. Some teenagers that are interviewed suggest that soda is good for you (!!), but that may just be teenagers coming up with excuses. The woman they interview for the article describes food stamps as free money the government gives you and seems to think that her definition makes it reasonable for the government to allow the use of food stamps for sodas. I don't think the government should control what people buy, so long as it is sustaining (even if unhealthy), but her reasoning doesn't make sense. She also argues that the air is bad and they aren't trying to stop that which is not true, but that again is not a good argument. Basically I was shocked by the article describing the ban on fizzy drink purchases with food stamps, not because of the main story, the overall story was expected, but what each person said was pretty shocking, even though I generally agree with them. Maybe New York will solve the childhood obesity problem, we will see.
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