The bigger question for me: Why drink soda at all?

You can't outlaw foolishness, as my cube neighbor Jo-Ellen likes to say.

You've likely heard by now of Mayor Bloomberg's grand plan to ban the sale of sweetened drinks (read: soda) over 16 ounces. The reasons are obvious. Soda has zero nutritional value and is high calorie to boot. It's bad for your teeth. It's bad for your skin contributing to everything from acne to wrinkles. It's bad for your wasteline but if you regulary consume it, you probably don't have a wasteline to speak off so don't worry about it.

Drink this in: A 16 ounce serving of Coke is bad enough with just about 200 calories and 53 grams of sugar, that is, about 13 teaspoons of sugar. Go here to calcuate your own personal poison. In fact, soda is often referred to as liquid candy. Imagine doubling or tripling the size of that beverage. Talk about a big gulp. Hell, sugar or not, we collectively need to get a handle on our apparent collective need to consume everything in giant quantities.

So yeah, I think drinking soda is foolish and I am forever dumbfounded that people drink the stuff.

Back to the Big (fat) Apple. I appreciate that the Mayor wants to curb the obesity epidemic--one news article reported more than half of New Yorkers are overweight--but this ain't the way to go. There's only so much you can do to save people from themselves.

While Mayor Bloomberg is being widely ridiculed for his proposal, I had a feeling I knew of at least one entity that would applaud it and I was right. It's the Center for Science in the Public Interest, www.cspinet.org, which posted a statement on its website yesterday praising the plan. Note to self: renew subscription to nutrition action.

I also learned that there is a National Soda Summit taking place next week. One of the speakers is none other than a former Coca-Cola executive who will discuss "Big Soda's" marketing strategies. Marketing is how companies get you to buy something even if you don't want or, in this case certainly, need it.

Of course, I don't cover the nutrition industry, but I will be here at my desk covering an industry that helps treat Type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea and a host of other conditions often related to obesity.

Bottoms up!

Theresa Flaherty