New Zealand Conservative

A new cigarette tax came into force 1 January , building on the progressive taxes already imposed. That makes cigarettes $22 a pack (per 25). Smoking is now an addiction presumably only the rich and the criminal can contemplate. Perhaps smokers are considering swapping to P or Heroin or crack cocaine. They may well be a more economical addiction, and help take the mind of the craving for smokes. Who knows? Meanwhile, flushed with the success of the smoking tax, the call for a tax on sugar is looking sweeter each day. In the 2000AD comic series, the cities of the future were regulated by Judges with the power to convict on the spot.  I remember a scene where Judge Dredd breaks into an apartment to find an elderly couple having a cup of tea. It all looked pretty normal, until Dredd tasted the contents of the sugar bowl. Was the evil white substance cocaine? Nope, sugar. But sugar was a banned substance in the future, so the couple were hauled off for a stretch in the ...

Over paid (by you) upper middle class twits continue to push their obsessions Dads' lazy eating habits are partly to blame for childhood obesity in New Zealand, a leading paediatric health researcher says. Professor Barry Taylor hopes his latest research will get to the bottom of the alarmingly increasing rate of childhood obesity . About 20 per cent of New Zealand children are regarded as overweight, with a further 10 per cent considered obese. Taylor, head of paediatrics at the Dunedin School of Medicine, is investigating methods to prevent rapid weight gain in early childhood. He's got a 2.3 million grant to fund his latest research but he has already decided that blue top milk should not be given to children. "I'll often find that the father has insisted on having [full fat] blue-label milk because they don't like the [low fat] green-label. Even though it's been recommended for many years after the age of two that you should not drink blue milk ...

I like butter, I like bacon. So do most people. Some people are unhealthy, some people are over weight or obese. In the minds of collectivists and those who have a weight problem these people obviously eat to much bacon and butter and therefore, the so reasoning goes, everybody should eat less butter and bacon. And the way to make people eat less butter and bacon and more of approved foods like tofu (urk) is to apply a tax to it so as to make it more expensive for everybody. This actually only affects the poor who are more easily pushed around but Governments are pathologically addicted to raising taxes - more revenue to mispend. Denmark, a dairying country has obliged with a fat tax . How long before this vile idea spreads and arrives on our shores?

Tanya Tagaq Who looks mighty fine just the way she was made So I'm grumpy today, haunted by my earlier post when I come upon a presser titled "Liggins Institute " Losing the war against obesity ". And in our part of the world obesity is an obsession of the ruling class. Being protected in their nice environs with comfortable incomes they remain oblivious to the reality that most people buy the food they can afford, not the food the ivory tower believes they should be eating and who also believe that they should be controlling by policy and regulation. Anyway this press release is about a paper urging developing nations to tackle their up coming " obesity epidemic ". The authors recognize obesity is multi-factoral but of course there is this Economic transition towards affluence gives many developing countries greater access to refined foods which offer lower nutritional value but are cheaper than high quality fresh foods. At which point I get extrem...

What on earth do they teach in journalism school? Exhibit Study: Eating disorders increases risk of death . I've got some bad news for the nong who wrote this headline and the story which repeats the assertion quantifying the risk to fivefold of that of those without such disorders, your risk of death is neither increased nor decreased by having an eating disorder, it being a certainty that you will die. What an eating disorder may do is bring forward the date at which this occurs. Of course we are more often told we are too fat rather than too thin and this to is likely to bring forward the time of our demise. Caught between a rock and a hard place, with nothing certain but death and taxes as old Ben Franklin once wryly observed, building upon an observation of Danial Defoe's. Now mix this in the sad fact that many in the so called "fashion industry" are in fact gay males who go for models with, shall we say boyish figures 1 , rather than fully fleshed f...

Ronald McDonald, the iconic mascot of McDonalds is under fire - from the usual suspects. They want McDonalds to "retire" Ronald McDonald as part of their campaign to stop McDonalds marketing aimed at children. This particular campaign has been put together by a group calling itself "Corporate Accountability International". There is no doubt eating too much McDonalds will make you obese but there is also no doubt that eating too much weetbix will also make you obese - and I'll bet that obese kids in this country, over whom much handwringing is done, eat far more weetbix than McDonalds because cheap as McDonalds is weetbix is even cheaper, much much cheaper in fact and is a staple food of very many of the poor. And it is generally the kids of the poor who are obese. Make no mistake about it - these campaigns against McDonalds are not really about obese kids, they are attacks on a successful business operating in a free enterprise capitalist society. And i...