The mayor is proposing a tax of $1.35 on a 2-liter bottle of soda.

First of all if pop is being taxed then diet shoube as well. Studies have shown it fucks with your metabolism and leads to weight gain.

But fuck this tax in general! In a city with some of the richest people the best we can think of to pay for social services is to taxes products that poor and middle class buy in large amounts? Fuck this regressive bs. I have my problems with CM Sawant (cough her campaign against Clinton, i.e. Putting her political interests over whats best for the city, cough) but she's the only one at city hall that has any vision when it comes to fixing our broken tax system.

making diet soda exempt is incentivizing behavior. don't want to pay the tax? don't drink corn syrup.

of course, artificial sweetener has its own drawbacks.

How can a substance with zero calories magically turn into weight gain?

Weight gain and loss is a direct result of calories consumed and calories burned. If a substance has zero calories, it is impossible for it to add calories by its very definition.

All that said... Sales taxes of any kind are regressive. Tax income, not sodapop--diet or otherwise.

Was anyone else confused with the "tug ran into a barge" explanation for the diesel spill? Running into other boats is the actual purpose of a tug boat. It's what they do all day. So how did this barge/tug interaction end up causing a spill?

@3 multiple studies show diet pop is linked to weight gain

http://time.com/3746047/diet-soda-weight…

@6 you are wrong. Multiple peer reviewed studies show this. Believe what you want but the science says otherwise.

@7 the body isn't that simple. The oversimplified answer is when your body drinks no cal but sweetened food it thinks it should have energy to burn. When it finds out it doesn't it goes into panic mood where it ups your cravings for high cal food.

Two examples of not learning from advice and previous experience:

- That the mayor didn't learn from our previous failed latte tax and NYC's failed soda tax.
- That even after a night's sleep, Sydney didn't heed comments and is sticking to her guns with "several inches off" on the Bertha story.

@11: Indeed - it's not about calories as it is about behavior, as the studies you cite describe.

@12 - You might as well argue that eating sugar cannot make you fat because sugars and fats are chemically different.

@12:

Please let us know when you publish a peer-reviewed study on the subject, then we'll consider your "expert" opinion.

Leave the president alone quit chasing. Him and who he chooses he is a competent business man let's get
our country great again and let's get
To business. Even a greatest business man in the world can do business right with pitch forks sticking in his back. I'm a republican and I'm poor have been all my life and I worked for everything I ever got. Everyone thinks they can do a better job then if that's the case why didn't you run for president? Think about it all I have to say God Bless America I'm American Indian and Arcadian French and I stand for Israel.

https://fb.com/l/9suQnDJciprXfT

@4 A progressive income tax isn't going to prevent people from drinking sugar until they are dead. A soda tax is first about addressing a health care emergency, like with tobacco. No more, no less.

@20, no, sugar cannot make you fat. Sugar and fat are physically distinct.

@ 18,

With those insightful, rapid-fire brain farts, you could be the next screametary of edumacation after DeVoid gets shitcanned. Submit your resume today!

@21 I am not sure that I would be for a sugar tax. People are manipulated by industry into drinking great quantities of soda that will eventually kill them, which is why taxing this particular product as a disincentive makes sense rather than taxing all sugar containing products. Tobacco is somewhat different from sugar insofar it is known to be addictive so taxing all occurrences of it appears logical. Is this what you were getting at?

Wow, that soda tax article is a textbook example of concern trolling.

Lots of confusion here. It's true that no-calorie food doesn't add calories to one's diet (duh) but it is also true that many people who consume large amounts of diet-foods suffer from some of the metabolic disorders as people who consume large amounts of sugar-laden foods.

Partly this is because there are feed-backs in our satiation/hunger responses as some folks said (14, for example) partly it's because one of the reasons why people eat no-cal foods is because they have artificial sweeteners in them, so of which fool our bodies into thinking they are getting sugar so insulin and glucagon responses are similar to those who've consumed sugar.

Some have pointed to the studies that bear this out. There's a long way to go to understanding what exactly is happening but it excess consumption of food and metabolic effects can result in people who drink only "diet" drinks gaining weight.

@14 Your claim; "...the "calories in / calories out" model of metabolism and weight gain is not true" is itself not true. Calories in/calories out *does* have a direct effect on weight gain/loss; it's fundamental thermodynamics and biophysiology. But it is very complicated, with huge variations between people and there can be huge variation within even one person's response too, depending on a large number of factors including age, diet, health, sex, etc. But it always does come down to calories in/calories out. It's just very hard, sometimes, to gauge it accurately enough to lose and keep off weight.

If this is all good, I assume putting a hefty sin tax on single-serve beers is cool too. Talk about actually doing something to positively affect the city!

RE: Diet beverages

Some commenters are noting that diet beverages and artificial sweeteners themselves don't cause weight gain, but that they make people "crave" to eat more.

That may be true, but it still doesn't alter the fact that the artificial sweetener itself is not directly causing weight gain, yes?

Unless there's a study where people's diets are strictly enforced by researchers (e.g., not just observing a random selection of diet soda drinkers vs. non-diet soda drinkers), then I simply cannot believe that something with zero calories can cause weight gain. That would be like saying drinking too much water makes you fat.

@22,

Sugar is a carbohydrate. Carbohydrates have calories. Calories can make you fat.

Sugar most certainly can make people fat.

"Quarterback Colin Kaepernick will stand during the national anthem next season, sources told ESPN on Thursday."

HALLELUJIA!

This obviously means our wicked republic has finally reached a state of racial justice.

Or does it.....

"Kaepernick will opt out of his contract with the San Francisco 49ers this week and become a free agent next week, sources told ESPN."

hmmmmmm.....

@32,

Cool study, thanks for the link.

Yeah, aspartame pretty clearly alters their gut bacteria and causes weight gain in the high fat diet mice.

However... my beef with the study is that they gave the mice an ad libitum diet; they fed them as much as they wanted to eat. I'd like to see the same study replicated with a restricted diet. I'd bet there'd be no significant differences in weight gain between the four experimental groups. I suppose I could search for a study like that on my own but I'm an unmotivated lazy bastard.

In other words, again... aspartame (and probably all artificial sweeteners) don't cause weight gain by themselves, they simply make their hosts want to eat more. If someone can simply control themselves and not give in to their cravings, then diet sodas should be fine.

@30, 32 - sorry, I was being sarcastic towards GermanSausage, trying to make an argument that was equally ridiculous as the one he/she was making.

@33 so basically cars are 100% safe as long as you sit in them in your driveway.

If you choose to ignore thats its a system and just focus on one aspect of that system, then of course it sounds damn simple.

Actually lets have seattle implement a blog comment tax, maybe it would some good.

@19 a progressive tax would help fund a social system that makes it easier to live a healthy lifestyle.

The price of soda is artificially low because we greatly subsidize corn syrup with farm subsidies, to the point where it's almost free. The idea that taxing soda will hurt poor people assumes that we should be subsidizing (and making crazy cheap) a substance that causes diabetes and heart disease. Soda with an added tax is still cheaper than health care. Quibbling about whether diet soda should be included is simply noise, a distraction. That detail can be sorted out later with additional legislation, if needed.

"If someone can simply control themselves and not give in to their cravings"

Ah there it is. The fact is, you probably can't do this either. If you have practiced significant caloric restriction I tip my cap and withdraw my remark.

If you're not a weight-gainer, you may think that's because you decide how much to eat. It's not possible to judge what's on your plate so precisely -- since it only takes a slight % imbalance to gain 20 lb in a year, which you don't gain. You're relying on your body's feedback signals like everybody else is. Some people's are tuned more accurately than others. But we're almost all eating to whatever signals we get.

Remember that satiety signals aren't driven by calories absorbed from the intestine, that's too slow. It's an estimation of how many calories are *going* to be absorbed. That can be systematically wrong.

And look, really, why does it matter to us if it is possible for some people to under-eat their satiety signals? No public health intervention is going to get most people to do that. So what's the point? So those people can feel morally superior? Cool, but that doesn't do shit for public health. It's like if we find that people who can run a five-minute mile causally have lower heart disease rates. That's nice for them, but of very limited value to a public health person.

@35,

so basically cars are 100% safe as long as you sit in them in your driveway.

Yes.

@35 and 38,

Look, I'm not really arguing for or against artificial sweeteners, all I'm saying is, I dislike when research isn't presented accurately. Aspartame, by itself, is incapable of causing weight gain. It is chemically impossible. Period.

Aspartame is a mediator for causing weight gain. It makes you want to eat more, and eating more makes you gain weight.

If I walk into a candy store, and the sight of all the candy makes me crave to eat it, so I buy a bunch of candy and eat it and get fat, did the candy store make me gain weight? No. It was merely a vehicle by which another thing (the candy itself) actually caused weight gain.

Telling people that Aspartame alone causes weight gain is false and misleading. What if they hear that and think, "oh well, if artificially sweetened drinks AND sweetened drinks both make me gain weight, then I'll just drink the regularly sweetened ones?" We should tell them the truth, that artificial sweeteners are likely to cause them to crave eating. That's the truth. Let people make decisions based on the actual research findings, not a sloppy and incorrect shortcut of the findings.