Richmond's soda tax campaigner

Carolyn Jones

Updated 11:09 p.m., Friday, October 12, 2012

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Omar Nassar, manager of the Richmond Food Center, says he will probably lose business if the soda tax passes. Photo: Brant Ward, The Chronicle / SF
Soda crackdowns are not new. Cities and states throughout the country have been passing laws regulating soda for the past few years. The most high-profile is the Big Gulp ban in New York City, which prohibits the sale of any soda larger than 16 ounces.

Sugar consumption grows

The number of overweight and obese Americans has more than doubled since 1976, mirroring a steady rise in sugar consumption, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Soda is the primary culprit: About a third of all the sugar Americans consume comes from soda, the CDC says.
Since 2002, children have been drinking more soda than milk, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. The average child in Richmond drinks two cans of soda per day, containing a total of about 20 packets of sugar, Ritterman said.
The sugar that comes from soda is particularly dangerous because it enters the bloodstream immediately, quickly converting to fat, instead of going through the digestive process, Ritterman said. Even Skittles are better for you than soda, he said.
In short, soda is slowly killing Richmond's kids, he said. They might not suffer heart attacks at age 15, but they might by age 40, he said.
"We kept waiting for something to happen on the state or federal level, but it hasn't," he said. "That left us with the option: Do we look out for our own children, or do we turn away and say we don't care if these kids are going to die young?"
Ritterman, a native New Yorker who wears his hair in a neat ponytail, has lived in Oakland and most recently Richmond the past 30 years. He has a daughter and a son, Dr. Miranda Weintraub, an epidemiologist at UC Berkeley, and Judah Ritterman, a Berkeley musician and songwriter, and a 14-month-old granddaughter.
For the most part, he practices what he preaches. He eats mostly vegetables, chicken and fish, exercises daily near his Point Richmond home and avoids sugar and flour. During a recent morning meeting at his office, he stuck to water while everyone else drank coffee.

'We have an obligation'

Ritterman is not daunted by the wrath of Coke and Pepsi. He's retired from his medical career and does not plan to run for re-election to the City Council, so he feels he has nothing to lose.
If anything, he's energized. After the Richmond City Council voted to put the tax on the ballot in May, El Monte in Southern California followed suit.
"It's like being the first ones to say cigarettes cause cancer," he said. "It's a challenge, but if we pass this, if we can start to reverse the childhood obesity epidemic, we will be nationally known. ... We have an obligation morally to do this."
Carolyn Jones is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: carolynjones@sfchronicle.com

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Richmond-s-soda-tax-campaigner-3944783.php#ixzz29ErlvqvS