by Murray Carpenter at Business Insider
Sugary sodas cause deadly diseases. A new book details how Coca-Cola worked for decades to discredit the science.
Decades of health campaigns and scientific research about the risks of sugary soft drinks are a big reason that Americans have been drinking less soda since consumption peaked around 2000. A January paper in Nature Medicine found that in 2020, 2.2 million new cases of type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million new cases of cardiovascular disease worldwide were attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages. But many of us still have not gotten the memo — the average American today drinks about 12 ounces of sugary sodas a day. For each person who doesn’t drink any soda, there’s someone chugging 24 ounces every day.
Why are we still drinking so much of a beverage that makes people sick?
Eight years ago, two pastors sued Coca-Cola, by far the country’s most popular soda company, and the American Beverage Association over “their deceptive marketing, labeling, and sale of Coca-Cola’s sugar-sweetened beverages.” The complaint, filed in Washington, DC, alleged that Coca-Cola knew about the science linking sugar-sweetened beverages to chronic diseases but obscured those links through aggressive public relations campaigns. Some thought that the suit would finally tip the balance of public opinion against Coke — the same way a court case in 2007 over misleading marketing on OxyContin’s addictiveness shifted the tide against Purdue Pharma. But as I cover in my new book, “Sweet and Deadly,” every jab by health advocates has been deftly parried by Coke and its allies.
Like the tobacco companies, Coke has spent millions spinning science to hide soda’s health costs from the public and downplay the risks of sugar. In fact, Coke has been at this game longer than the tobacco industry. When the Tobacco Industry Research Committee started launching disinformation campaigns in 1954, it imported its staff and strategies lock, stock, and barrel from the Sugar Research Foundation, a nonprofit funded partly by Coke. The soda companies were pioneers of the PR strategy now known as the tobacco playbook.
For decades,…
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