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Cake in the office should be viewed like passive smoking, says UK food regulator
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- Title
- Office cake culture is a health hazard, warns food regulator
- Authors
- Rachel Sylvester | Chris Smyth, Whitehall Editor | Kat Lay, Health Editor
- Published
- Jan 17 2023
- Word count
- 1888 words
So....this is where I think "nanny state" has a bit of a truth to it. I'm all for killing any and all marketing, inclusive of the junk food discussed. I'm pro warning labels and additional taxes for sugary goods.
But at a certain point it is on the individual to say no to temptation. Someone else bringing cake into the office does not give everyone else cancer by mere exposure.
I wouldn't even be opposed to people bringing in liquor to the office. Or chewing tobacco. Nobody is putting it my mouth, which makes it very distinct from blowing toxic fumes in the air.
But at this point the science is pretty clear that there are limits to individual's ability to resist temptation, and that willpower is a pool of energy that can (and will be, after a while working) tapped out. The individual person is indeed taking the action of putting the cake in their face, but the working environment and the availability of cake led them to that action. Would they have gone to the effort of acquiring and eating cake if it wasn't there in front of them? Maybe, but probably not. They would have eaten whatever else was there and easy to eat.
I don't want to say that the eater has zero responsibility for their actions, but the cake doesn't exist in a vacuum where everyone has infinite willpower. As such, the person who chooses to put unhealthy free food in that situation is putting others in a situation that causes incremental harm.
You are entirely correct.
However, I firmly believe it is not the state's job to be the infinite protector of all people against all things.
Slippery slope is a logical fallacy when not proven to be true, but to go from extra warnings and taxes on tobacco to alcohol to "no cake in the workplace" certainly is proving it to be true.
When it boils down to "What is it to be free?" for me the answer is "To have as much agency as possible without harming others."
If we want people to be able to avoid social temptation at work, maybe we make it easier for them to switch away from jobs if they find the social pressures insurmountable?
In my current environment, I must tolerate numerous problems because the alternative is a lack of healthcare and homelessness if I don't already have another job lined up.
Agreed and one can only imagine how much easier it would be for people to switch jobs if a government put in the same amount of effort to solve that as they would to enforce a workplace cake ban.
But given the very real cost to the state when it comes to the unhealthy eating habits of its citizens, I can see the argument to be made that, like smoking, unhealthy eating is an appropriate topic for regulation. Cake in the break room is a hard place to start, though.
If the state wants to intervene, it would be more reasonable to ban the manufacture of cake (and other sweets) for resale than to ban people from bringing cake to work.
And I don't think that's exactly reasonable either. And to be clear, this applies to many/most things where the use of said thing does not impact anyone but the direct user...not just cake.
Oh, yeah. Regulating the manufacturers to ensure "Products for X consumption must have Y limits on sugar" or whatever is potentially possible, regardless of the success of the initiative in achieving the goal. Preventing people from bringing sweets to work seems nigh-unenforceable.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the amount of times someone brings store-bought cake to work is nearly 0. From personal experience, people bring cake to work for a special occasion, and then it's always homemade, because it would cheapen the special occasion if it was simply store-bought.
In general I agree with you on that front, but I feel like having this discussion under this context is going to sour a lot of people's opinions and make them question what the damn liberals are up to again.
Gonna disagree on the first part, back when I was still in office land I don't think anyone would have thought further than "yay, cake" even if it was a supermarket tray bake or a box of cupcakes for an occasion. Not to mention doughnuts or whatever turning up just because. Hell, I've worked in two places that had free beer taps for anyone to use - great from my perspective, but I can sure see how people might find that even more challenging!
With you on the second part, and your comment lower down, though. It's an interesting hypothetical to discuss, but it's very hypothetical compared to the actual context:
I agree. And the science is quite clear indeed.
People will eat whatever is nearby and easily accessible. The biological impulse to eat, eat, eat was important for basically all of human history when food was scarce, starvation was abundant, and we needed every single calorie we came across. But now we live in a caloric cornucopian age, and our animal brains simply cannot evolutionarily match the excessive growth of our food cultural-industrial complex.
It's why stores always place individual-sized snacks by checkout lines. People will toss a candy bar or two into their basket and immediately unwrap and eat them on their way home. And it's why the easiest dietary change is to simply change your pantry. It's easy to eat healthy when your only easy options are healthy and it's a bitch to get off the couch and go to the store for chips.
I think there is a need for a nanny state to reorder our food cultural-industrial complex such that it's opt-in, not opt-out — to make the fight more even for our willpower. The past 40 years has been a long "Commodore Perry sails into Edo moment" except instead of choosing reform, we've been fighting back with little wooden boats and staffs against an overwhelming superior and ubiquitous adversary. And the average waistline continues to balloon and balloon..
But does the individual bringing the cake to the office not have a right to just, ya know, bring cake to the office too?
There's already laws restricting people's right to provide harmful substances to others. The right to provide cake doesn't seem particularly distinct.
Based on this comment I think we disagree on the fundamentals so heavily that we're not going to have a productive discussion. Every substance is harmful. It is always the dose that kills you.
I would agree with you, but this reads like you didn't really read what the article was about.
I'll add that, I myself have problems with food addiction. I don't do office work, so this particular case hasn't happened to me; but I've had to ask friends "Please stop bringing so many snacks to our game nights" for example. Repeatedly, because it's a very difficult topic to talk about. If I say "Please don't offer me food, I have a problem with it", people don't understand it as easily as they understand "Please don't offer me drugs, I have a problem with them".
And thats well and good, and a sign of good friends is whether they respect you or not in the request. And that's ultimately how these things need handled: At a personal level on a localized basis.
It's a far cry from trying to implement such a thing in a governmental capacity. And as @aphoenix pointed out... it's an advocacy group pushing for policy support using smoking rhetoric and false equivalency.
Smoking in public spaces is a problematic societal problem in a sort of inverse to abortion rights. The freedom for a woman to have bodily autonomy must be compromised against the larger 'murder is bad' landscape. The freedom for an individual to smoke must be compromised against its non-concentual impact on others nearby.
Thus, I see it fit for a state to have laws about abortion and smoking at the individual level.
I struggled with smoking for many years. I get food addiction because sugar in particular is just as addicting. In the end, I must regulate my own behavior and avoid relapse when I get triggered (I can't go camping yet).
I'm all for awareness, and would certainly respect your no-snack wishes if we were ever hanging out together. But that's the sort of thing for peers to sort out...not some insanely abstracted state entity that doesn't really grok personal interaction.
I don't want to be super picky, but I don't think it's fair to say that @vord didn't read the article as it certainly talks about nanny states and how something like this could be made into law, starting here:
I would say that just about everything after that point is about "nanny state" sorts of things, including a poll about if Buy One Get One Free on snacks should be illegal, and how the PM has been treating things like this.
So bringing up the points seems like a really fair thing to do?
I don't know what to think of this article. It's clearly trying to make it look like some official stance when this is nothing more than a personal opinion.
The analogy isn't amazing since the primary danger of secondhand smoke is that it does real damage to your lungs from inhaling it, whereas a cake in view does not damage your retinas, but there probably could be more to be done culturally to discourage or stigmatize having high caloric treats in easy access in places you have to be like offices.
Mildly off-topic, but another potential societal-level (that is to say, certainly on an individual level a great deal of it is personal choice, but from a bird's eye view it's undeniable that merely telling people to eat healthy and exercise does not accomplish much, and the negative externalities on populations health and the overall healthcare system are becoming devastating) avenue to help the obesity issue is that there has been a whole slew of semaglutide based weight-loss drugs with clinically proven, and significant, results.
The main bottleneck there is supply - doctors in the US at least seem open to prescribing it but there just isn't enough to go around. Seems like something that's seriously underfunded.
Widespread drug treatment seems like absolutely the way to go, at least assuming the side effects at a population level aren’t a significant issue. In the last century, we’ve radically outpaced the previous 100,000 years of evolutionary adaptation when it comes to abundance. In the last forty years, we’ve aggressively doubled down on that as food manufacturers hacked our dopamine receptors more and more efficiently for profit.
On the former, I see absolutely no issue using the same scientific thinking that gave us abundance to tackle the negative side effects of that abundance, because we’re moving far too fast for nature to keep up otherwise. And on the latter, I can think of no more effective way to fix the misaligned marketing incentives than to help the population become more or less immune to that addictive engineering. Honestly the only better outcome I could imagine is if the myostatin blocker research had gone somewhere and we could use those extra calories to effectively become superheroes, but I’ll take not eating them at all as a close second!
The drug is also still under patent protection, meaning there are no low cost generics and won't be for a good while. Some of these patents do not expire until 2041.
Basically, this drug is super cool, too bad many won't be able to benefit from it until it's probably too late.
Interesting side note, if you’re ever interested in what manufacturers are really willing to sell a medication for, there’ll normally be a published document somewhere saying what the NHS pays for it. Same drug, same patent protections, no legal shenanigans - they just have major buying power and they negotiate hard.
In this case it’s about £75 ($90)/month, so more accessible to more people than you might think - and perhaps most importantly when it comes to getting the rich and powerful on board: nearly a 2:1 return on investment compared to what obesity is estimated to cost the US annually.
$90 is incredible and could change a lot of lives. Too bad the price in the US is about $1,000.
There's also the whole sordid history of snake oils, and former drugs boiling down to 'laxitive or aphetimine.'
I dunno, I distrust the 'take a pill' approach to solving what is ultimately an overconsumption issue. Much like Diet Coke, it removes the consequence without removing the desire, and thus why switching to Diet sodas don't help obesity much because they still foster the desire for sweetness.
The difference is that it's not snake oil, though. We finally have a real, clinically proven drug.
And I wouldn't say it "removes the consequence without removing the desire". How research into semaglutide drugs for weight loss began is that researchers realized that much of the benefits from bariatric surgery (which is also clinically proven to have large effects) was hormonal, and not from the physical shrinkage of the stomach. Semaglutides, which are used for diabetic treatments, produces a similar hormonal change to bariatric surgery.
As a result, what they do is shrink your appetite, essentially. So in this case it is targeting the desire, and directly reduces overconsumption!
There has been some success reported in patients being able to lean off of it. Basically, they used the drug to kickstart habits around smaller portion sizes, which is the long-term sustainable way to keep your weight down: eat less!
You can't get diabetes from second-hand cake.