What's being done is limiting serving sizes (at certain places).
You know, very few people would care if this were implemented as a straight tax. And yet that's basically what is being done anyway, except this is more effective. If someone wants to consume more sugar drinks then they can buy a second one. Most people won't, so it will be a sufficient deterrent. For those who really want to, they still have the freedom to drink as much as they want.
Most people getting outraged about this now will find after a few months that they don't care. There are studies showing that people eat or drink more when given a larger portion, solely because it's there in front of them. When you offer someone the "super duper jumbo-size" drink for "only 25 cents more", a lot of people will take a good deal and then they'll drink more. Don't offer the "super duper jumbo-size" drink and most people won't even notice.
While the 12-ounce can used to be the most common soda option, many stores now carry only the 20-ounce plastic bottle, which contains 2.5 servings of soda. When presented with these larger sizes, humans have a hard time regulating our intake or figuring out what a serving size is supposed to be. A 2004 study, published in Appetite, gave people potato chips packaged in bags that looked the same, but increased in size. As package size increased, so did consumption; subjects ate up to 37 percent more with the bigger bags. Furthermore, when they ate dinner later that day, they did not reduce their food consumption to compensate for increased snack calories—a recipe for weight gain.
We Americans love to get the most bang for our buck. When confronted with a 32-ounce drink for 99 cents versus a 44-ounce drink for ten cents more, the decision is easy. You’d have to be a sucker not to go big. But our ability to get the most out of our dollar doesn’t always serve us well. Value pricing, which gets us a lot more food or drink for just a little increase in price, makes sense from an economic standpoint, but is sabotage from a health standpoint. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that Americans consume around 10 percent more calories than they did in the 1970s. Given no change in physical activity, this equates to around 200 extra calories per day, or 20 pounds a year.
http://www.divinecaroline.com/22175/49492-portion-size-vs-now/2#ixzz26SOBZUSJ
(Oh and that was written in May 2008, so these aren't "the mayor's talking points"
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