New York Judge Blocks Mayor Bloomberg’s Soda Ban

The New York Post reports:

A state judge on Monday stopped Mayor Bloomberg’s administration from banning New York City restaurants and other venues from selling large sugary drinks, a major defeat for the mayor who has made public a health initiatives a cornerstone of his tenure at city Hall.

The city is “enjoined and permanently restrained from implementing or enforcing the new regulations,” New York Supreme Court Judge Milton Tingling decided Monday.

The regulations are “fraught with arbitrary and capricious consequences,” the judge wrote. “The simple reading of the rule leads to the earlier acknowledged uneven enforcement even within a particular city block, much less the city as a whole….the loopholes in this rule effectively defeat the state purpose of the rule.”

Bloomberg said earlier today that the people who’ll get helped most by the city’s new soda restrictions will be the poor because they “don’t have the ability to take care of themselves as well” as the wealthy.

“If you go back to the ’20s, you see these pictures of the old robber barons with their big stomachs out to here. That was a sign of success,” Bloomberg said.

“Today those people are doing pilates and running in marathons and triathlons and if you look at where obesity is in the country, it tends to be in people at the lower end of the economic ladder (who) don’t have the ability to take care of themselves as well.

“If anybody will get helped by this it’s them, because they’ve got to focus on working harder and moving themselves up the economic ladder and being overweight doesn’t help you do that.”

Marc LaVorgna, the mayor’s spokesman, explained that Bloomberg was referring to the connection between obesity and disease.

“The obesity epidemic has led to massive increases in the prevalence of type 2 diabetes, which can result in blindness, kidney failure, amputations and more. One in three adult New Yorkers now either has diabetes or a condition known as pre-diabetes, a state where blood sugar is higher than normal but not high enough to be considered diabetes and the person is at risk for developing diabetes in the future,” said LaVorgna.

“Certainly harder to focus on your career, education or anything else if you are dealing with health issues.”

The mayor made his remarks as his health department released a study showing that nine of the 10 neighborhoods with the highest obesity rates were also the highest when it came to the consumption of sugary drinks.

No. 1 on the list was Bedford Stuyvesant/ Crown Heights in Brooklyn, where 46.9 percent of the residents said they drank one or more calorie-filled sodas a day. In those two neighborhoods, the obesity rate was 33.3 percent.

The Upper West Side was at the bottom of the list, with only 13.8 percent of residents saying that had gulped down one of more sugary sodas a day. The obesity rate there was 11.9 percent.

Starting tomorrow, restaurants and other food establishments won’t be allowed to sell sugary sodas in sizes larger than 16 ounces. Violators face fines of $200, starting in June.

Despite protests by store owners and some elected officials, Bloomberg predicted widespread acceptance of the new regulations.

“I think you’re not going to see a lot of push back here,” he said.