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ADDITIONAL OCS AND VENDING ARTICLES
BY STUART DAW: OF COFFEE, FAT, SUGAR, AND HAPPINESSby Stuart Daw My favorite beverage is coffee, and my favorite foods are fat and sugar. Unfortunately there are forces in society that seem bound and determined to thwart the desire to slate my thirst and hunger for eating and drinking those things that I like and choose to enjoy. But just in this past month a few minor victories for human gastronomic preferences have been won, involving coffee, tea, water, and calories. The NBPA (National Beverage Products Association) convention in Atlantic City had not quite ended when I had to hop a plane for Montreal to give a speech at the CAMA show there. Things were made easier when half the time allocated for the talk was preempted by what might be called the Calorie Police, down from Ottawa to warn the convention attendees of the perilous condition of Canadian health caused by obesity, with the number one culprit being, you guessed it, the vending industry. The battleground was the school system, but the fight was not over the disgraceful level of education given our kids nowadays (who really wants the government educating our children anyway?), but the caloric level of food emanating from those naughty, impersonal, uncaring vending machines located right in the schools. Food fuels the growing bodies of our young who, through good eating habits and a regimen of vigorous exercise, can grow up to be happy, healthy little tax paying citizens. But demanding that kids actually exercise can be a drag. It’s much easier to simply mandate that all vending of anything with fat content or significant calories be terminated. Supposedly then the children can sit in a comatose, unfocussed daze throughout their school experience without becoming obese. Vending machines are to be crammed full of things such as raw carrots, celery, and watercress, the criterion seeming to be: that which the children hate to eat. Never mind that human beings possess a unique faculty among all animals, the ability to choose from alternative values. And we are supposed to ignore or even preempt the role of parents in guiding their children in how to make those choices. But now we have some good news for the people and bad news for busybody bureaucrats (not that bureaucrats aren’t people, but you know what I mean). It comes from the most comprehensive study to date on the incidence of death relating to body fat. Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association was the conclusion of the National Cancer Institute that “being thin increases the risk of death.” Conducted in the US and after eliminating the anorexic and “very obese” (under 8% of the population), those people who are very thin are apparently at equal risk of dying with those who are just fat. What a liberating revelation for mankind, and womankind too, to be politically correct, for women have been the target for most anti-obesity zealots. Straight lines, as championed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright in the design of his buildings were fine. But women are not buildings, and the curves of the “pleasingly plump” are surely preferable to the austerity of the stick-like bodies presently slinking down the world’s fashion runways. And regarding sugar, recent studies have reaffirmed that sugar does not make people, including school kids, hyperactive. On the contrary, excess intake of sugar can have the opposite effect, that of slowing one down. So we can blame something else for making our school children rowdy, not the sugar in food from vending machines. Now on to beverages: the April 22, 2005 airing of ABC’s 20/20 with John Stossel was devoted to debunking the popular societal shibboleths that had tea curing cancer, and 8 by 8 oz. daily glasses of water being mandatory for good health. With the exception of the psychosomatic effect and the wishful thinking of some tea imbibers, no connection could be found between tea and a cure for cancer. So it’s quite okay to switch back from tea to that preferred taste treat, coffee. Again on the same program, it was the debunking of water as being required beyond the need to satisfy one’s plain old thirst that I found most satisfying. For some time I have wondered as to exactly what the heck has been going on with water. Twenty years ago people were only rarely seen drinking water in public. Now people everywhere are sucking on water bottles as if just having been rescued from 10 days of waterlessness in the heat of the Sahara desert or from a session on Sigmund Freud’s couch. Even kindergarten children are having water bottles thrust into their little hands. But now at last sanity seems to be returning. As one leading scientist interviewed on the show pointed out, water comes into the human body in many forms – fruit, vegetables, and other foods, even the lowly slice of bread, contain water. Apart from someone pitching hay in the heat of summer, one glass of water per day will usually suffice. As the good scientist advised us, “Only drink water when you are thirsty.” And may I add, even in that circumstance, good coffee, being around 98.7% water, will do just fine (add ice if you must, but in that case make the coffee double strength of course). In the past whenever I have suggested coffee as a proper water substitute, I was either ridiculed or told that coffee would dehydrate the human body. No rational explanation as to how that could happen was ever advanced. But now the truth is out. Coffee does not dehydrate. This whole issue is a continuation of the decades-old attacks on coffee, all of which have been fully refuted. The whole obsession with water, admittedly fuelled by rare instances of bad municipal water systems, may at root be a far-out manifestation of environmentalism, a movement that is losing momentum because of it’s essential irrationality. As for the calorie police, the role of CAMA should be to do what every trade association is most required to do: take a strong moral stand against improper government interference in the free market. Don’t shrink as if guilty of some horrible crime perpetrated against children by the vending industry. Stand tall as society’s proud benefactors. Copyright 2005 Stuart Daw
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