The New York Times, ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS, April 4, 2010

New York State’s health commissioner would be the first to admit he has soft drinks on the brain.

The commissioner, Dr. Richard F. Daines, was recently driving down Interstate 15 in Utah, his home state, when he came across four billboards in a row that beamed a subliminal message at him, and not the one the advertisers intended.

The first billboard said, “44 Ounce Soda, 99 Cents.” (“This is a carbonated beverage, meant to be consumed in your car,” he said, marveling at the thought of such a large serving.)

The next one said, “Any Size Soda, One Dollar.” (“Who would go in and order the petite size?” he said. “It’s just a signal to consume.”)

The third billboard trumpeted Utah’s first dedicated C-section wing with a slogan that might owe an apology to Garrison Keillor: “Where No C Is Average.” (“Presumably,” Dr. Daines said, “maternal obesity and diabetes are one of the reasons women are getting C-sections.”)

The fourth billboard said, “We Suck Fat. Smart Liposuction.”

“It kind of captures the whole thing,” Dr. Daines said, getting excited as he told the story in an interview in his Manhattan office. “We underprice this commodity that we overconsume — and I mean we, we all do it — we suffer the consequences, and then we try to buy our way back out of it, liposuction or something, bariatric surgery, some kind of pill for obesity.”

Which brings him to Gov. David A. Paterson’s proposed penny-an-ounce tax on sugared sodas.

Dr. Daines fits the part of the sin-tax crusader. Standing 6-foot-1, he is as lanky and folksy-sounding as Jimmy Stewart, a Spanish-speaking former Mormon missionary in Bolivia who practiced medicine in the South Bronx for 20 years.

Over the past few weeks, he has been traveling the state lobbying anyone who would listen about the scourge of obesity and championing the proposed excise tax as a possible cure that has the added benefit of plugging a giant hole in the state budget.

The state budget office estimates such a tax would raise $1 billion a year when fully in effect, and reduce consumption by 15 percent, an estimate based, Dr. Daines says, on industry price elasticity models. Earnings would go to stave off health services cuts, so the tax is supported by the health care workers’ union — 1199 S.E.I.U. — and the Greater New York Hospital Association.

Many have written off the soda tax as a lost cause, with neither the Senate nor the Assembly supporting it. Soda bottlers and many supermarkets and bodegas have mobilized to oppose the tax, saying it would cost jobs. Dr. Daines accuses politicians of caving to the soft-drink lobby, which makes regular campaign contributions.

“It scares the politicians away,” he said.

But he is gambling that the tax proposal might be revived during 11th-hour budget negotiations, when lawmakers are desperate.

Dr. Daines, meanwhile, has gone into polemical overdrive.

He dismisses as counterintuitive arguments by the soft-drink industry that the link between soda consumption and obesity has not been proved. “It’s obviously scientifically plausible that if you reduce consumption of excess calories, you reduce obesity,” he said.

He ridiculed what he called the “personal choice” argument that government should stay out of people’s kitchens, saying it was being promulgated by “AstroTurf false-flag operations” that are really supported by the soda industry.

“We know this elaborately with tobacco,” he said.

His passionate attacks on soda-tax opponents make one almost want to pity Nelson Eusebio, a supermarket owner in Queens who is chairman of New Yorkers Against Unfair Taxes, a coalition that is fighting the tax. Mr. Eusebio called Dr. Daines “out of touch with reality.”

“When it comes to obesity, to attack a single industry as wholeheartedly as he has is creating a lot of confusion for the public,” Mr. Eusebio said. “It’s leading the public to think that if they stop drinking soda, they won’t be obese anymore. Soda may be a contributor to obesity, but it’s not the sole contributor.”

Dr. Daines hates the term “fat tax,” often used by supporters and opponents alike, because it sounds accusatory. He prefers the more anodyne “beverage tax.”

But diplomacy has not necessarily been his strong suit. After Staten Island lawmakers supported an antitax rally at the Coca-Cola sales and distribution center near the Goethals Bridge, Dr. Daines fired off a scolding press release that said, “Staten Island has the state’s second-highest obesity rate, as well as the second-highest consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages.”

“I am concerned for the health of Staten Islanders,” he added. “Sixty-five percent of Staten Island residents are overweight or obese, and 35 percent of them drink one or more cans of sugar-sweetened beverages like soda every day.”

Dr. Daines urged Staten Islanders to support their local soft-drink workers by drinking Diet Coke (which would not be taxed), adding, “I hope they also drink nutritious low-fat milk.”

Waxing passionate the other day, he managed to make soda purveyors sound almost like drug dealers.

“I raised my kids on Park Avenue,” he said. “You can walk at least from 60th Street to 96th Street on Park Avenue. You won’t see a single soda billboard, you won’t see a single fast-food outlet, and I don’t think you could buy a soda. Basically, a child raised in that corridor has a soda-free day after school.”

But walk 30 blocks north to Harlem, he said, and the picture is different. “This is cheap, it’s heavily advertised, it tastes really good,” he said. “And then we plunge kids into that environment, and we say, if you have a problem, you lack self-control.”

Mr. Eusebio, the tax opponent, recommended that Dr. Daines devote his time to promoting a “holistic diet” and educating young people about the benefits of exercise.

“Educating people helps them more than taxing them,” Mr. Eusebio said. “If taxation was a form of diet, New Yorkers would be the healthiest people on the planet because we are the most overtaxed people on the planet.”

New York Health Official Champions the Soda Tax – NYTimes.com.

The city’s other boroughs had overweight and obesity rates more closely in line with the statewide average of nearly 60 percent: 58.6 percent in Brooklyn, 57.7 percent on Staten Island and 57.6 percent in Queens.

These figures — contained in a report released on Tuesday by the office of Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, and based on 2003 data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System designed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — do not surprise experts. In recent years disparities in obesity rates have played an increasing role in debates on proposals to ban trans fats, increase the number of produce markets and make neighborhoods easier to walk in.

Andrew G. Rundle, an epidemiologist at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health and an authority on obesity, said that at the neighborhood level, socioeconomic and demographic factors were the strongest predictors of obesity rates.

For example, in 2005, the city’s health department reported that the prosperous swath of Manhattan from the Upper East Side down to Gramercy Park had the lowest obesity rate (less than 15 percent) in the city, while the city’s poorest neighborhoods — in central Brooklyn, the southern Bronx and Harlem — had the highest (up to 34 percent).

Dr. Rundle, who has written several papers on neighborhood environments and obesity, has found that even when adjusting for poverty and race, at least three factors are associated with lowering obesity: proximity to supermarkets and groceries where fresh produce is sold; proximity to parks; and access to public transportation, which reduces reliance on cars.

“There are ways urban planners can impact obesity, physical activity and diet,” Dr. Rundle said.

(Dr. Rundle found that the concentration of fast-food restaurants did not seem to have a particularly strong effect on obesity rates.)

Poor urban neighborhoods are not the only places where obesity flourishes. The county-by-county analysis in Ms. Gillibrand’s report showed the North Country region of the state had the highest rates. In three counties — Jefferson, Lewis and St. Lawrence — 67.7 percent of adults were overweight or obese.

via Manhattan’s Overweight Rate Is the Lowest in the State – NYTimes.com.

THE Great Downturn may have its first real status symbol.

NEW AMSTERDAM — Can the arrival of Dutch bicycles in New York free men to pedal to work in a Gucci suit?

It has plenty in common with recent extravagances. Like the Range Rover or the Sub-Zero fridge, it has a solid frame designed for function. Like a Louis Vuitton trunk, it has a chic design and a patina of history stretching back to the 19th century. And like a bottle of San Pellegrino, it evokes that genteel way of life that Europeans are always going on about.

This new It object is the glossy black Dutch bicycle, its design unchanged since World War II. Increasingly imported to the United States and starting to be seen on the streets of New York (and in the windows of at least one clothing store), it appears to have everything a good craze needs. That includes a hefty price tag — usually between $1,000 and $2,000 — and a charming back story about how the bikes have been an indispensable part of the picturesque Dutch cityscape for decades.

But can New York revert to New Amsterdam? Can the bicycle, the urban answer to the wild mustang, slow down and put fenders on? Can the urban cyclist, he of the ragtag renegade clothes or shiny spandex, grow up and put on a tie?

Serious obstacles stand in the way. Even as bicycle sales and ridership are up, even as the city becomes more bike friendly than ever, the extreme poles of bike culture are still in many ways hostile to biking as it is done in the Netherlands. There, where riding a bicycle to work in a suit and tie is as notable an act as drinking a cup of coffee, there is no bike culture — all culture includes the bike.

The civilized pedigree of the Dutch bike is matched by its old-fashioned design: it comes with fenders, chain guard, generator and rack — standard, as they say in Detroit. With a bike kitted out like that, a man can wear almost anything he likes to work and not worry about getting grimy — no kamikaze messenger-wear required. Luckily, the new look of men’s wear, with its slimmed-down, sporty shapes (even in suits), is tailor-made for a bicycle commute. And since Dutch bikes are ridden upright, not hunched over, and you move at a safe, slow gait, sweating is not the issue it is when you’re careening on a road bike.

So, with 170 miles of new bike lanes in New York, it makes sense that the Dutch Bike Co. in Seattle should be opening a branch in the city this summer, its third in the United States. Already, traditional bicycles with upright seats, fenders and chain guards — so-called city bikes — are the biggest growth area at stores like Bicycle Habitat in SoHo.

Yet even with bicycle commuting up in New York by 35 percent from 2007 to 2008, according to the New York City Department of Transportation, there are still impediments to its being widely embraced by the city. These range from the obvious — like, how do you lock your bike so it won’t be stolen 30 seconds later? — to more slippery issues of style. How should you dress to bike to work? Which bike has an acceptable level of manliness? These are tricky questions. As the parade of 10-speeds, mountain bikes and, more recently, fixed-gear designs knocked the upright, old-school bicycle off the road, accouterments like fenders and chain guards came to be seen — by men, at least — as eccentric. If a guy is going to get on a bike, he wants to imagine he’s Lance Armstrong, not Pee-wee Herman.

James Vicente, a court attorney at the Kings County Criminal Court in Brooklyn, knows the quandary. After a trip to Amsterdam five years ago, Mr. Vicente was inspired to ride to work in his suit and tie. (He converted his road bike to a fixed-gear bike, with detachable fenders.)

“I liked the perversity of it,” he said. “I liked saying: ‘Anyone can do this. It’s normal.’ I never ride with a helmet either, even when people are telling me I’m an idiot. Riding a bike should be normal, and you shouldn’t have to wear a funny Styrofoam hat.”

One day he collided with another rider, tearing a gash in his suit sleeve and another in his pride. Today his suits reside in an office closet, and he cycles to work in jeans and a polo shirt.

Would he have gotten in the accident on a Dutch bike? He laughed. “Probably not,” he said. “I was riding with no hands, and the guy came out of the bike lane. If I’d been on one of those, I would probably have been going in more of a straight line.”

THE city government is addressing bikers’ practical concerns as fast as it can. The Department of Transportation has installed bike shelters, and is reviewing ideas for a bike-share program like the one introduced in Paris two years ago. A 2007 study by the Department of City Planning found that the foremost obstacles people cited for not commuting by bicycle was the fear of theft and lack of secure parking, a problem that is being addressed through two proposals now before the City Council. One, scheduled to come to a vote this month, mandates that all new commercial and residential buildings provide dedicated bike storage. The second aims to open up bicycle access in older buildings, many of which have been historically unfriendly to it.

Dress Codes – How to Look Like a Grown-Up While Biking to Work – NYTimes.com.