Health labels hard to swallow

While there's no doubt the death of anyone at the young age of 30 is a tragic event, in the case of Natasha Marie Harris, it's important to keep a sense of perspective around the publicity following the inquest into her death.

During the inquest it was revealed Ms Harris' main cause of death was cardiac arrhythmia, however, she also had a lack of potassium in her blood, considered likely to relate to excessive consumption of soft drink.

Ms Harris reportedly consumed about 7.5 litres of Coca-Cola every day.

Predictably enough, there have been calls for health warning labels to be placed on the soft drink. There's also a suggestion all soft drinks and unhealthy foods should be marked red under a "traffic light" food labelling system.

There's no harm in the idea, but if people think this is going to make large-scale inroads into the amount of potentially harmful foods consumed by adults, they're fooling themselves.

At the age of 30, Ms Harris must have surely known that consuming that amount of Coca-Cola every day would only be negative for her health - yet she chose to continue.

Her family are the ones calling for health warnings to be placed on Coca-Cola - but where were they when she was consistently downing the soft drink? Surely they also knew the risk she was taking.

It's not just soft drink either. All over the world, millions of people who are well aware of the risks of an unhealthy diet regularly consume takeaway food in large quantities.

Knowing something is unhealthy clearly does not work as a disincentive for the bulk of the population when it comes to deciding whether to consume it or not. Labelling it as such will, therefore, unfortunately make no discernable difference either.

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