highwaystar101 said:
To be fair, he he does have a valid point. In many respects obese people (who eat too much) are worse than, say, smokers. Yet we limit and tackle smoking to quite a high degree. I'm in favour of taxing certain foods that are linked with obesity, and levying tax on those that aren't, to drive down the cost to the NHS and provide healthier lower cost meals. |
Eh, I don't know if that is necessarily the right approach - in most cases, businesses would probably choose to absorb the tax and keep the price the same - really, all that would be achieving is lower profits with the same prices. You could argue for minimum price legislation, but that messes with the markets too much - just doesn't sit right with me.
I think what the Government should do - far greater education about the issues with obesity - show graphic adverts like they do for smoking and reckless driving, and also show the effect that it has on the world's poorest, explain that its also costing the country billions in health care costs. What's more, push through far stricter legislation on food labelling.
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And, although my delivery perhaps wasn't the greatest in that post, SciFi boy, I do stand by what I said (I've had a bad day - and that causes me to be a bit callous in my tongue/fingers). The last bit about bullying the fat kid was tongue-in-cheek, but it's also right. A while back, twesterm made a thread literally going on about how much he hated smokers, how they smelt, etc.... if somebody was to do a post in similar vein about obesity - well, they'd probably receive a ban, or, at the very least a warning. I don't think it's fair.
