Jeff Ritterman , MD
I can remember my bike to pick up milk, bread, and Kent cigarettes for my mother (She paused and is alive and well on 92) from the local convenience store on the border of my suburb. It was the 1950s, and I had no idea that the American trade for the next 60 years would have become convenience stores mushroom and a majority.
The number of convenience stores, known rose as C stores in the grocery trade, significantly in the 1980s as coke, Pepsi and junk-food manufacturers embraced a strategy of catering to immediate consumption. Part of the strategy is to win the teenage market, by he shops near schools and individual drinks. The idea is, while these impressionable years develop brand loyalty and then have a life long customer.
The strategy has proved itself. Young people have significantly increased their liquid sugar intake and thus their rates of obesity and diabetes and their risks for heart disease. Seems nobody in the industry food or beverages are concerned that greater availability of soda and snacks on the tsunami has contributed to obesity.
Drinks and snacks are the best shelf space in these stores and most of the revenue. In "Salt, sugar, fat," Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Michael Moss claims "are for nutritionists, these stores to be overweight what are drug of dens of the crack epidemic."
Given the history of the C-stores as outlets for the beverage industry sugary concoctions and the increasing medical knowledge purposeful liquid sugar as a cause of obesity, diabetes and heart attack, it is likely that C stores under increasingly subject to public scrutiny and perhaps regulation is coming.
The shop-holders, who own and operate these stores fight to earn their living.
This shop holder on a collision course with the clear public health are clearly need to limit sugary beverage consumption significantly. It is possible to our teens from the negative health effects of sugary drink consumption to save, you destroy the livelihood of the shopkeeper partners? What kind of transformation of the partners would be necessary?
Maybe a good time to start planning is now a smooth glide path in the from the current system to the unhealthy and not persistent health and sustainability are first. Mexico has a soda tax, and a junk-food tax served in the adoption of the world. For the first time, people's health has invented the profits of large corporations.
Could we turn our local convenience stores outlets for locally grown products, eggs, poultry, meat and dairy products? During the second world war grew our victory gardens many produce locally consumed. What happens if we subsidized how far can local and organic are we going?
What ever the best way to clearly take our heads out of the sand and to address more for beginners, the matter is necessary and urgently needed economic change of our convenience stores and much.
This entry about the pass full-text RSS service - if your content and you read this it on a foreign website, consult the FAQ-at/content-only/faq.php # fivefilters.org publishers.
