Constitutional Law, Courts, Free Speech, Justice, Lawyering, Society, Supreme Court

Bloomberg’s Sweet Revenge?

By Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger

soda_kidA recent study by Columbia University researchers may present a problem for civil libertarians basking in the defeat of Mayor Bloomberg’s Big Gulp ban. As many of us know, the NYC mayor proposed and then passed a health rule  prohibiting restaurants, mobile food carts, delis and concessions at movie theaters, stadiums and arenas from selling sugary drinks in cups or containers larger than 16 ounces. The New York State appellate division upheld Judge  Milton Tingling’s ruling that Bloomberg “eviscerated” the separation of powers doctrine by making an end run around  the City Council and presenting the measure to the NYC Board of Health. The city plans to appeal but it is now armed with an important study concerning the effects of sugar on children.

The new study, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, links sugar consumption with aggressive, and violent behavior in children as young as 5 years old. Researchers followed 3000 mother-child pairs from 20 large U.S. cities. from birth to age 5 years. The mother’s were asked to self-report their child’s consumption of soda and then to answer a series of behavioral questions.  The results were stunning. Children who consumed as little as four servings of sugary soft drinks per day were twice as likely to engage in “aggressive violent behaviors – such as destroying other people’s belongings, starting physical fights and verbally attacking other children. ” In addition, the sugar dosed kids had trouble concentrating and became more socially withdrawn than kids who didn’t imbibe. But even one serving of soda triggered behavioral problems in the young children:

“There was a dose response,” said Shakira Suglia, study author and associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University. “With every increase in soda consumption, we saw an increase in behavior problems. It was significant for kids who consumed as few as one serving of soda per day.”

The researchers pointed out that Americans buy more soda per capita than any other people in the world. They also said that  other contributing factors like parenting styles, exposure to violent programming, hard candy consumption,  and socio-economic factors were controlled yet the same correlation persisted raising the specter of “Sugar Rage”  in young children. The study does have drawbacks since researchers relied on parents to self-report and couldn’t say precisely the size of the dose or the type of soda offered, but the deleterious effects of sugar and sugar substitutes are well-known in the medical community especially when it comes to kid consumers.

“Despite the multitude of studies exposing the negative effects of soda consumption, Americans continue to buy and drink more soda than those in any other country,” said Marlo Mittler, registered dietician from Cohen Children’s Medical Center of New York, and not affiliated with the study. “In an effort to reduce the effects on a child’s possible negative behavior, it is suggested to eliminate or avoid any soda consumption.”

If the studies are true and sugar represents a clear hazard to children’s health and behavior should it be treated like other child unfriendly substances like alcohol and tobacco?  State supreme courts around the nation and the United States Supreme Court (Lorillard v. Reilly, 533 U.S. 525 (2001))  have universally held that these drugs may be excluded from purchases by those under age 18 for health and safety reasons.  In Lorillard, the tobacco company didn’t even contest that the state had an important interest in preserving the health of minors by restricting sales of tobacco products.

What then of the Bloomberg ban on not the sugar but the method of delivery of the sugar? Shouldn’t the state have the right to restrict the amount of consumption of a known hazardous substance to children? Isn’t this state prerogative especially necessary when the harm isn’t just limited to the youthful consumer but to children in his immediate vicinity who might be harmed?  And if not, under what basis can we restrict the sale of tobacco and alcohol or any other harmful substance to minors? Does our freedom to consume hold sway over even children’s health and well-being of those they may come into contact with?

Interesting questions that the courts in New York will have to answer if the researchers at Columbia have stumbled onto something that will make the Tobacco Wars against Big Tobacco look like a pillow fight.

Read the study here.

Source: CNN; Journal Pediatrics

~Mark Esposito, Guest Blogger

77 thoughts on “Bloomberg’s Sweet Revenge?”

  1. Bob esq.,

    Slut? Really? What side of the bed did you get out of this morning? Dyspepsia can kill you.

  4. JH,

    “Bloomberg is a dictator waiting to happen.”

    Yep. And what’s so scary about him? He just doesn’t even try to pretend otherwise in his Napoleonic arrogance.

  6. I would be careful to legislate based upon one study that had the issues with self reporting and lack of some quality control and Mark pointed out.

    If it was one product the city state chose to ban there are others out there that have sugar inside. Are we next to ban candy bars or lolly pops? There comes a point where you can’t protect every child from everything “bad” out there. Which would be more unhealthy. A country that allows people to drink as much pop as they want or one that controls everything the people do?

  7. I don’t think anyone was arguing that sugar and corn sweeteners are good or even ok.

    The problem was that the law infringed on liberty, was likely to be ineffective due to all the loop holes, and ignored alternative effective methods to reduce consumption (eg there has been a revolution in the US diet in regard to fats due to widespread publication of information of the Framingham Heart Health and other studies).

    In regard to the emphasis on children, parents and schools are already responsible for what children consume, and what child consumes more than 32 oz in any case.

    Before you start considering legislation against sugar you might consider that there are already studies to suggest that artificial sweeteners are metabolized much like sugar and may be as detrimental to health.

    The law deserved to go down.

    The study is welcome but only adds support to what many of already knew or suspected.

    With a name like mine you know I know what I am talking about.

  8. Bloomberg is a dictator waiting to happen. If adults were prohibited from doing every thing that would hurt children, we would all still be in our cribs. It is one thing to say that smokers cannot expose the rest of us to their toxic cigarette smoke it is entirely another to stop people from making decisions about how much sugar they will consume.

    Bloomberg only does these things to distract NYers from the fact that he has given away the City to his billionaire friends and stripped many in the City of their constitutional rights.

  10. The new study, published in the Journal of Pediatrics, links sugar consumption with aggressive, and violent behavior in children as young as 5 years old. Researchers followed 3000 mother-child pairs from 20 large U.S. cities. from birth to age 5 years. The mother’s were asked to self-report their child’s consumption of soda and then to answer a series of behavioral questions. The results were stunning. Children who consumed as little as four servings of sugary soft drinks per day were twice as likely to engage in “aggressive violent behaviors – such as destroying other people’s belongings, starting physical fights and verbally attacking other children. ”

    *****

    One might also want to take into account what kinds of mothers would allow their toddlers/young children to consume four servings of sugary soft drinks per day.

  11. RWL 1, August 18, 2013 at 7:03 pm

    If parents, young adults, and even our children knew the harmful effects of soda, especially Pepsi and Coke products, no law to ban it would be needed.
    …
    ============================
    Does the same go for leaded gasoline:

    When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bringing down crime and making the city safe again. It was a comfortable position for a former federal prosecutor with a tough-guy image, but it was more than mere posturing. Since 1960, rape rates had nearly quadrupled, murder had quintupled, and robbery had grown fourteenfold. New Yorkers felt like they lived in a city under siege.
    …
    Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the ’60s through the ’80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early ’90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.

    So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the ’40s and ’50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

    And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to “fill ‘er up with ethyl,” they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.

    (America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead). If the government can ban leaded gasoline why can’t it ban sodas if they damage the public health?

    What, you can take any of my constitutional rights except the right to soda?

    Just sayin’ … don’t taser me bro …

  13. The bottom line is that it’s not the business of the state to mandate what businesses can and cannot serve. Most people know that sugary drinks like soda is bad for you but they still drink them anyway. Thats the beauty of freedom. If you want a better understanding of that just go rewatch Demolition Man and listen to Dennis Learry’s character’s speech

  14. If parents, young adults, and even our children knew the harmful effects of soda, especially Pepsi and Coke products, no law to ban it would be needed. There is one study linking regular pepsi usage to pancreatic cancer (no cure for this form of cancer).

    I see parents giving 2 and 3 years old sodas as if drinking water was no longer availible.

    We need more studies on the harmful effects of sodas, and then, begin to educate the public on these effects.

    However, if we banned soads (or create an 18 year or older law), then are we going create a law for certain foods that cause allergic reactions? Peanut allergy? Milk? Egg? Wheat? Soy?

  15. rafflaw 1, August 18, 2013 at 6:53 pm

    Wow. Bob, Esq. a little too much sugar maybe? While I agree that this level of decision belongs in the hands of the parents, the study highlighted in Mark’s article does make one think that maybe we do need to educate those parents even more, to make sure they realize what excess sugar can do.
    ===========================
    Should the decision as to whether or not their kids can use leaded gasoline or not also be left to parents?

  16. Wow. Bob, Esq. a little too much sugar maybe? While I agree that this level of decision belongs in the hands of the parents, the study highlighted in Mark’s article does make one think that maybe we do need to educate those parents even more, to make sure they realize what excess sugar can do.

  17. Mark,

    You ignorant slut.

    There you go again pleading the case for giving the government more power than it was ever granted in any constitution.

    Comparing sugar to tobacco and alcohol? Sugar is now “a known hazardous substance”?? You are truly a shameless sophist.

    In light of your views of this topic and ‘the war on terror” you seem to share something in common with Bloomberg that OS brought up in another thread.

    To paraphrase Otteray Scribe: “[You are] an authoritarian personality with deep-seated need for control. … [You need] power and control to satisfy [your] psychological needs.”

    Make no mistake Mark, the state was never empowered to promulgate duties of virtue as duties of right. By crossing that line, you convert citizen of to “property of” the state.

  18. Well, so we revisit the debate about:

    If the government can forbid leaded gasoline, why can’t it forbid poisonous beverages?

    There is a new scientific report out that indicates a rise in violent crime nation wide is related to using leaded gasoline, then the banning of leaded gasoline, which was followed by a precipitous drop in violent crime.

    How is that so different from:

    “There was a dose response,” said Shakira Suglia, study author and associate professor of epidemiology at Columbia University. “With every increase in soda consumption, we saw an increase in behavior problems. It was significant for kids who consumed as few as one serving of soda per day.”

    Behavior problems caused by corporate substances banned.

    What up?

  20. Sign read at coffee shop:

    “Unattended children will be served espresso.”

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