really? so ban rice and wheat production? I'm pretty sure I can get fat on natural foods. There have been fat people long before Coke. Japanese Sumo get fat on chanko nabe. Nothing artificial about it.
That said, here we aren't talking carbohydrates, but rather sugar, as in sucrose or HCFS. The problem with sugar is that it contains fructose and the problem with fructose is that it gets metabolized completely in the liver, competing with other nutrients, like the poly-unsaturated fats from vegetable oils (ironically misnamed the "healthy fats"). And when the liver's glycogen store is full, that fructose gets deposited as fat, on the liver, on the pancreas, wherever it can. And a fatty liver or even worse, a fatty pancreas, is the best predictor of obesity or diabetes.
Interestingly medical professionals advise people to cut the fat from the diet in order to treat a fatty liver. It is true that it can help, however a much more effective strategy is to cut the sugar ;-)
N.B. the fructose we eats from fruits and sugary vegetables like carrots is in much lower quantities than the fructose we get from industrially processed foods. And processed food usually doesn't have fiber either, or if it does, it has the wrong kind of fiber. As usual "the dose makes the poison".
So yes, as a matter of fact beverages like Coca-Cola are toxic in a way that rice isn't.
Even whole grains?
I've seen a Beverage Marketing Corporation graph that shows a 1% decline in soft drinks, but a 4-5% increase in ready-to-drink tea, sports drinks, and energy drinks. The raw Excel data is sold for $3000, so I don't know what the absolute values are, but it seems likely the decline is soda is largely being offset by equivalently bad/sugary replacement drinks.