Slushies ‘the sugar equivalent of crack cocaine’

CHEAP frozen sugary drinks are as addictive and bad for your health as “crack cocaine”.

Outraged health minister Steven Miles has put the food and beverage industry on no- tice, telling a national obesity summit that companies need to stop blaming individuals for being fat.

He said they needed to do more to address Australia’s growing obesity crisis or face further regulation.

“You have flooded our suburbs with dollar frozen drinks. Within 500m of my house, there are three outlets selling dollar frozen drinks,” he said.

“One has 37 different flavours. This is literally the sugar equivalent of flooding our sub- urbs with crack cocaine.”

Mr Miles, who has made tackling obesity a priority, called for a comprehensive national obesity policy “beyond blaming individuals”.

“While I accept that we all have some responsibility for our own health, I don’t see any evidence at all that in recent decades waves of people have woken up and decided to be fat,” he said. “Our society is doing that to them.”

Mr Miles said food and beverage industry representatives were exploiting people for profit.

Two thirds of Australian adults and a quarter of children aged 5-17 are overweight or obese. More than 1.2 million Queenslanders are classified as obese.