A little Essay on the Soda size ban

I support the soda ban because it makes people think about the amount of sugar they take in. By making people more aware of what they drink, diabetes rates, obesity rates, and obesity-related illness rates in New York will drop. The soda ban made by Mayor Bloomberg isn’t actually about banning any sodas. The soda ban is about banning sugary drinks that are over the size of sixteen ounces. The soda size ban doesn’t affect any store that isn’t city regulated; meaning that some stores can still serve drinks over sixteen ounces. Any drink that is fifty percent or more milk doesn’t apply to the rules. The same thing happens if the company doesn’t add the sugar and you do. For example, you can still get a twenty-one ounce coffee at Starbucks and then add the sugar.

New York’s population is staggeringly fat. According to wiki.answers.com, “About twenty-three percent of the population is obese and fifteen percent of the children’s population is obese.” According to “The Real Bears” by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, “When you are obese you have a chance of getting diabetes, which may result in amputation, or even death.” The soda ban will lower obesity rates because it will make people more aware of how much sugar they are consuming.

According to the slate.com article “Fuzzy and Fizzy” by Daniel Engber, “People regulate their caloric intake without thinking. If we eat more at one meal, we'll go lighter on the next. But for some reason (the mechanism is still unknown), drinks throw this compensatory mechanism out of whack.” In other words people don’t notice the calories in a large sugary drink. In “Goodbye, Big Soda: New York Becomes First City to Ban Large-Sized Soft Drinks,” by Alice Park, it states that “sugary drinks make up 43% of the added sugar in the average American diet.” Combine these two facts together and you understand why the obesity rates are rising. The ban will help this issue because it makes it less convenient to drink a large soda.

A lot of people in New York oppose the Soda ban because they think that this is a limit of their freedom and that should be free to choose what size soda they can drink. What they are misunderstanding is that they can still drink as much soda as they want. According to “Soda Ban Explained” by Casey Neisat, “preventing people from drinking what they want isn’t the goal of the ban.” So people can still buy more than one soda, and there are plenty of ways you can get a drink larger than 16 oz. The point of the ban is to make people think about how much sugar they take in.

In conclusion, the soda size ban will help people realize how much sugar they are drinking. As studies show, people will unwarily drink a larger soda as if was a smaller one; this makes them consume a larger amount of sugar without arealizing it. The ban doesn’t prohibit you from buying a soda; it will only limit the size in which a soda can be sold. The soda size ban will also make people think before they buy. The Soda ban will help our obesity rates drop because it help people change their soda drinking habits.