Mayor Bloomberg proposes super-sized soda ban

We New Yorkers aren't just mindless libertarian drones who see any government intervention as a movement to stifle all that is freedom.

There is nothing wrong with having a large sugar soda or harmful to your health for that matter if you do not decide to make such drinks a common part of your diet and are in normal health.

Dear once more the city/mayor think that by interfering with being able to order a large drink that people will not go to the extra step of carrying around two smaller cups of soda or getting a refill and if that is not the thinking then there would be zero point over having such a ban in the first place.

This is to interfere with the wishes of adults in the hope that people will say the hell with it I am not going to be carrying around two cups to get the amount I desire so I will settle for half the amount I wished to buy.

"[Sugary drinks are] the largest single driver of the obesity epidemic," said New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley said. "It is the largest source of added sugars to our diet."

The math behind the ban is simple:

A 16-ounce Coke has 200 calories.

A 20-ounce Coke has 240 calories, or about 30 more than a Hershey bar.

If you drink a soda per day — as do 46 percent of Bronx residents, according to one recent Health Department survey — choosing the 16-ounce bottle rather than the 20-ounce would save you 14,600 calories a year, or the equivalent of 70 Hershey bars. That is enough to add about four pounds of fat to a person's body.
http://www.towleroad.com/2012/09/nyc-passes-big-gulp-ban.html

The average person makes more than 200 decisions about food every day, and most of the time isn't even aware of it. We may take a stand each morning when it comes to ordering a tall, nonfat, no-foam latte, but for the most part, we tend to consume what's put in front of us. When we eat out, everything from a restaurant's lighting to the menu design to the size of the plate or cup influences how much we eat and drink.

But when Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a ban on supersize soft drinks in New York last month, the restaurant and beverage industries argued that people are in control of what they consume. "We trust our customers to make the choices that are best for them," McDonald's tweeted.

Recently, Pierre Chandon, a French marketing professor and visiting Harvard Business School scholar, decided to test the idea that consumers know what's best for them. He asked 294 people to estimate - using photos of a 6.5-ounce bottle (the standard for decades), a 12-ounce can or a 12-ounce cup as benchmarks - how much liquid was in a range of cups, starting at 12 ounces all the way up to a 50-ounce "Double Gulp." While it sounds simple, respondents consistently guessed wrong, assuming that the larger cups held about 20 percent to 40 percent less liquid than they actually did. Dozens of other studies, using jelly beans, popcorn, ice cream and alcoholic drinks, have also shown that consumers can't be depended on to perceive serving sizes accurately.

The reason comes down to the fact that the human brain has a surprisingly tough time with geometry and often can't accurately gauge when an object has doubled or even tripled in size. It's even trickier when the object is a wide-mouth cup, larger on the top than the bottom. "We tend to underestimate the increase in the size of any object," said Professor Chandon, director of the Insead Social Science Research Center in Paris. "When you double the size of something, it really looks just 50 to 70 percent bigger, not twice as big."
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/21/how-can-a-big-gulp-look-so-small/

Too Big to Chug: How Our Sodas Got So Huge
Our love affair with soda has led to outrageously supersized drink sizes.
By Azeen Ghorayshi
Jun. 25, 2012


When McDonald's execs first struck up their lucrative business partnership with the Coca-Cola Company in 1955, they were thinking small—literally. At the time, the only size of the beverage available forpurchase was a measly 7-ounce cup. But by 1994, America's classic burger joint was offering a fountain drink size six times bigger.
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And that's not even the worst of it. Franchises like 7-Eleven, Arco, and the unfortunately named Midwestern chain Kum & Go have all offered drinks upwards of 85 ounces. (To put this in perspective, this is around three times the capacity of a normal human stomach.) Studies have shown that consumers have a hard time gauging sizes properly, so as fountain drinks continue to get bigger and bigger, it's less and less likely that we're able to make informed choices

But how did this problem get so big in the first place? Here's a look at how super sizes became the status quo.
■1767: Joseph Priestley invents carbonated water after suspending a bowl of water above a beer vat. In 1772 Priestley publishes a paper on his findings entitled "Directions for Impregnating Water with Fixed Air."
■1819: Samuel Fahnenstock files a patent for the first ever soda fountain.
■1886: John S. Pemberton, a pharmacist in Atlanta, invents Coca-Cola. That year, he sells an average of nine drinks a day—today, the Coca-Cola Company sells around 1.7 billion beverages daily.
■1955: McDonald's forms an official partnership with Coca-Cola, offering just a single 7-ounce size fountain drink (PDF).
■1955: The Coca-Cola Company introduces the first king-size bottles in the United States. In addition to the standard 6.5-ounce bottles, shoppers can now buy Coke in 10-, 12-, 16-, and 26-ounce bottles.
■1980: 7-Eleven starts selling the 32-ounce Big Gulp. Ads run the slogan, "7-Eleven's Big Gulp gives you another kind of freedom: freedom of choice."
■1986: 7-Eleven follows up its success with a 44-ounce Super Big Gulp fountain drink.
■1988: McDonald's launches its Super Summer Size meals, available for a limited time only.
■1989: 7-Eleven rolls out the Double Gulp, a staggering 64 ounces of soda.
■1993: McDonald's launches another summer Super Size exclusive, this time called Dino Size as a tie-in to the film release of Jurassic Park. "Catch 'em quick—before they're extinct!"
■1994: Mickey D's gives Super Size meals a permanent spot on its menu. The fries are three times the size of the original 1950s serving, while the drink is six times bigger than its predecessor.
■1995: Wendy's introduces its version of super sizing with the 42-ounce Great Biggie, described as a "river of icy cold enjoyment."

■2001: Burger King introduces "King size" fries and 42-ounce sodas as part of its new Value Meals.
■2003: In the first suit of its kind, Pelman vs. McDonald's Corp. alleges that the fast-food chain knowingly failed to warn consumers that its products lead to obesity, and that it deceptively marketed food products "that were physically and psychologically addictive." The plaintiffs are two girls aged 19 and 14, who weigh 270 and 170 pounds, respectively. The Manhattan District Court judge tosses the case, citing individual responsibility. This spurs a new class of litigation dubbed "McLawsuits."
■2004: Spurred by the Pelman case, Morgan Spurlock films Super Size Me. Spurlock eats and drinks at McDonald's three times a day for a 30-day period, making sure to order everything on the menu at least once. He gains 25 pounds and develops serious health issues.
■2004: Due to intensifying public scrutiny over fast food chains, McDonald's drops the 42-ounce Super Size fountain drink as part of its new "healthy lifestyle initiative."

■2006: Wendy's does away with its Biggie and Great Biggie portions, but in name only—instead, the 32 and 42 ounce drinks are the new medium and large.
■2006: 7-Eleven releases its Team Gulp, a gallon jug for soda.
■2007: After a huge public-relations sweep (and a resulting quadrupling of stock prices), McDonald's again offers a summertime-only promotional jumbo drink. Staying away from the Super Size trademark, the new 42-ounce drink is called the Hugo.
■2011: KFC introduces a drink so big that it has a bucket handle to carry it. In what can only be a cruel joke on humankind, for every Mega Jug purchased, KFC promises it will donate $1 to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
■May 2012: Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, proposes a ban on sugary drinks exceeding 16 ounces. Days later, the Center for Consumer Freedom, a nonprofit backed by the fast-food industry, buys a full page ad in the Sunday New York Times: "New Yorkers need a Mayor, not a Nanny."
■September 2012: A second group, heavily bankrolled by the food and beverage industry, says it has collected some 240,000 pledges of support for its campaign to defeat Bloomberg's proposed ban on oversize sodas. Nevertheless, the New York City board of health votes 8-0 (with one abstention) to uphold it. "NYC’s new sugary drink policy is the single biggest step any gov't has taken to curb obesity," Bloomberg tweeted after the vote. "It will help save lives."

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2012/06/supersize-biggest-sodas-mcdonalds-big-gulp-chart

You keep talking about "large" sizes--this initiative is aimed at restricting super-sized, and mega-sized individual portions, not what anyone would reasonably consider "large".

This isn't really a law, and it isn't really a soda ban. It's a Board of Health regulation, and it only affects those food service vendors already subject to Board of Health regulations. And the reason for the regulation is a matter of public health.

Second it is a ban on the serving size that you can buy

Second the matter is not public health it is big mother kind of government first small step into taking over our lives.

Regulations at all level of government are worst then laws as they had the same force as law but is not enacted by people that the voters can normally directly fired.

You don't live in NYC so you don't get the local news. A lot of people don't support the policy NOT because it's government restriction against choice. In fact, in many ask the public interviews here on local media (TV and radio), people are rejecting the policy because its seriously flawed and unworkable. They are however appreciative of the attempt to control the obesity epidemic via the soda size message....
We New Yorkers aren't just mindless libertarian drones who see any government intervention as a movement to stifle all that is freedom.