[shihching]

Paternalist liberal arguments versus beverage lobbies and PR firms will indeed ring hollow and have failed. Rather than merely advocate for curbs, and lose, I would like to see the Nestle type companies prosecuted for responsibility for the negative health outcomes, and then we adjudicate the relative responsibility of 'free' consumers purchasing products known to be toxic (as will likely be surfaced during discovery of internal lab tests alongside public health studies) compared to the selling corporations. As is, the Nestles, and their ownership entities, corner both cheap unhealthy and more costly healthier foods -- effectively playing the spread of the income and wit of their customers.

Few Republicans have the candor to accuse the poor of sloth outright, instead indirectly consigning them to the oblivion of work requirements and the cheap food products low wages can buy.

I do sympathize with the mothers I see on the L fobbing off screaming children with high fructose corn syrup -- and I seek a betterment of their condition, and my own, not by leaving them solely to their own devices, but by assigning responsibility to the more powerful actors here and seeking state restraint as the remedy with sufficient scale and force to succeed.

Advertising can conceal the entire toolbox of dissimulation, hence the coordinated efforts to undermine regulation limiting the hocking of known toxicities. The market drive to eat will find and create food within the bounds of law, as it does, to such horrifying effect in Brazil as the United States.