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Friday, March 29, 2024

But Mayor Michael Bloomberg is certainly trying.

Last week he proposed a ban on the sale of “any cup or bottle of sweetened drink larger than 16 fluid ounces — about the size of a medium coffee, and smaller than a common soda bottle,” according to an article by The New York Times.

The ban wouldn’t pertain to diet sodas, juice, drinks that are mostly dairy-based or anything alcoholic. It wouldn’t affect drinks sold in grocery or convenience stores, but it would affect places like delis, fast-food restaurants and sports arenas.

“New York City is not about wringing your hands; it’s about doing something,” Bloomberg said. “I think that’s what the public wants the mayor to do.”

According to a report from Reuters, Bloomberg said, “You can still be a beast. We’re not keeping you from eating fattening foods or drinking 32-ounce bottles of full-sugar drinks,” but rather “just telling you that this is detrimental to your health and making you understand that by portion size.”

He might think it’s what the public wants, but it’s not what large companies want. (I’m about to quote some tweets at you, and I’m kind of sorry about it.)

Friday morning, the official McDonald’s Twitter account said, “@MikeBloomberg We trust our customers to make the choices that are best for them.”

As former Newsweek social media editor Mark Coatney pointed out on his blog, companies like Philip Morris and Countrywide Financial also preach a similar message to that of McDonald’s, but that doesn’t make it any more correct.

A few hours later on Friday, the official Twitter account of the Coca-Cola Co. said, “Unlike @MikeBloomberg, @CocaColaCo thinks #NewYorkers can make their own choices about what they drink. #NYC deserves better. ^AB”

The “AB” at the end of that tweet, in case you were wondering, are the initials of Ashley Brown, the director for digital communications and social media at Coca-Cola. He’s just one of five users in charge of producing tweets for Coke.

Not for one second do I believe these companies are actually and legitimately concerned for their consumers’ right to make choices. They are only worrying about their bottom line: sales.

If people start to feel guilty because they have to buy more cups of soda (instead of just one soda in a large cup), then they will eventually stop buying so much out of shame. That means trouble for companies whose livelihood depends on people putting toxic substances into their bodies.

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“Bloomberg is right to focus on the problem, but really, the target here is not so much the consumer but the corporation,” said Ernie Smith, editor of ShortFormBlog, a news aggregate website at which I’m a staff writer. “If you limited the amount of corn syrup one could get from an average meal at Mickey D’s, rather than the portion size, you’d get much further.”

America’s obesity problem is basically proving that ignorance is truly bliss. The longer we ignore the problem, the less time we have to spend worrying about the fact that we’ve entirely brought this whole thing on ourselves.

So while large companies are arguing that Bloomberg’s ban isn’t the way to solve the public’s health issues, I’m not exactly sure if they’d ever completely agree with limiting consumption.

We don’t need cups of soda the size of buckets. We just need to be aware of the serving sizes of the poisons we put in our bodies.

Sami Main is a journalism senior at UF. Her column appears on Tuesdays. Contact her at opinions@alligator.org.

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