Latvia bans Coca-Cola, Pepsi and sweets in schools

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Healthy food could be so much more effectively marketed to kids. The industry and the dieticians do all the complaining (and so they should) yet routinely fail to pick up of the cues of McDonald's, Coco-Cola, etc.

Kids don't shun healthy food it because it's healthy, but because they're not sure it tastes good. Good on 'em for the ban, at any rate, but changing public perceptions would pay larger dividends.

Agreed.
I’m a dietetics major myself and this is one of the big things professors are desperately trying to jam into our heads, regarding the profession. I took Nutrition Education over the summer and one of the major take home lesion is that dieticians are supposed to be the experts in nutrition education but were not, not by a long shot. The real experts in nutrition education are the fast food companies, mind you the lesion they are teaching you is a terrible one but that does not reduce the fact that the sophistication and effectiveness of their techniques far exceeds the ones we are using in the dietetics profession. Most people have an attitude that consist of that people eat at fast food places is because they “are fat and lazy and stupid” this is a gross over simplifcation, the reason people eat at fast food places is because the cooperation’s have removed every possible barrier they could to eating at their establishment. Dieticians on the other hand have in the past (and some continue to) pushed difficult to follow, ideological driven, (i.e. the main reason many R.D. don’t see fast food as a model for nutrition education is because it not based on one of the Ivory tower academically approved models of eating behavior) one size fits all diet plans or even more prevalent raw nutritional knowledge (often in language the audience can’t understand) without the any practical guidelines on how to follow them.

In short fast food places call it marketing and consumer research, dieticians call it nutrition education but at the end of day they are one of the same - and it quite obvious who’s better at it. Dieticians think that fast food places have a lot to learn from us dietetics folk, while they may have a little to learn from us, it is really dieticians that have a lot to learn from the fast food industry.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

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Well, they are making those new sodas with Splenda in them, but whatever.

Also, all of those problems for people with aspartame happen because they're allergic to it. That's why it has the "phenylketonuronics: contains phenylalanine" warning. Same reason why a snickers bar has a sign on it that says "Warning: contains peanuts." And the lab rats that got tumors were exposed to something like the sweetener in five hundred gallons worth of soda every day.

True but…the problem is we really don’t know what the long term effects of the stuff is more importantly we don’t know what the long term effect of this plus all the other artificial junk in our diet is. One of my dietetic professors has told us she much rather have her kids drink regular coke because she already knows the long term effects of sugar and caffeine aspartame she not so sure of. Don’t get me wrong Diet drinks do have their place: diabetics for example as a stepping stone, for those that simply won’t kick the cola habit etc. I'm just saying getting kids to dirk diet soda should be a compromise when all-else, fails never a goal. In this case I do think having diet coke instead of the regular kind is a good first but it’s too small of a step for me to really get happy about. At such a young age my focus would be and them not getting hooked on cola diet or other wise to begin with this involves removing all or better yet a good nutrition education program involving parent’s teachers, food staff etc.

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No but you have the right to buy a bottle from the vending machine, open it and drink the liquid that is in it.

And the school has the right to refuse to allow vending machines in their in the first place, the biggest problem with this is definitely money. Schools simply don’t want to give up the money they get from vending machines, cola companies company to get exclusive poring rights, the solution in these case is to try more nutrition education or instead suggest a mandatory ratio between healthy and un healthy snacks. The other problem is that some parents do believe that their kids have a right to drink soda in school which I find completely stupid because you don’t have any such right and secondly if you want your kid to have cola that badly just pack it for him in his lunch box it’s cheaper that way to.

There's nowhere I can't reach.