Coca-Cola paid scientists to downplay how sweet drinks fueled the obesity crisis
dailymail.co.uk
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I’d suggest doing the tourist trap in Atlanta if you find yourself there. You’ll learn than if you have ever experienced a moment of happiness, it was due to Coke. The idea that the company would find a way to convince people that guzzling corn syrup was not that bad is completely unsurprising.
It's kind of with everything else... people are addicted (I certainly still am, after decades of sugar abuse). Then there's a whole culture around that addiction and our natural craving for easy calories (fuck evolution, really).
As with all of those issues (religion, ideology, conspiracy theories) you need to "nudge" people in the right direction so they can "discover" the issues themselves. Facts don't help nearly as much as one might hope and a lot of it is correlation obfuscated by wishful thinking and genetic variability ("but my cousin Joe always drinks a coke a day and still isn't fat!").
Ever tried to convice a smoker of non-smoking? An anti-vaxxer of his narccisistic ignorance? It's always the same pattern.
And usually (micro)nutriments have trade-offs : good for somethings bad for others.
Look at the different kind of diet, they are all based on different researches and can be extremely different while all are using 'valid' research data. The main idea behind them is usually to have 'good' proportions between macronutrients (each diet define a different proportion) while keeping the number of kcal in the range you want to reach your objectives.
For a first rule of thumb that I would use: abusing in any direction is bad. Sugar is ok in 'small' quantities, fat, etc also. However reality is way more messy :)
I did not believe sugar was the problem until randomly decided to have a try while I was trying to lose some weight. Tried to eat less walk/run around 8km per day for around a year, it helped a little. I did manage to lose more or less 10kg. Unfortunately, problems with the project and had to work over time and thus stopped running, eat lots of junk food for roughly a month, during which time drunk lots of Coke and when it was over, I found my self picked up 15kg. Then I decided to try something new, stopped drinking Coke and eat less carbs in diets by eating more meat and vegs. And the result was much better than I thought: I lost almost 20kg in less than 3 months and the exercise I took actually dropped a little bit.
For everything the key is to be reasonable with quantity.
It's fine to enjoy Coca-Cola. It's best to be reasonable with quantity.
140 calories for a can of Coke is pretty modest; I just ate a third of a lemon meringue containing 500 calories - most supermarket food is calorific muck, cheap to manufacture yet tasty enough.
Tests on athletes (some now decades old) show even moderate sucrose consumption reduces athletic performance and health.
I know many of these people, and they’re not actually against science at all — they just believe that the “science” being preached at them is simply political fodder or, at the very least, is intentionally biased to fit a narrative.
Ideally, they’d be able to mentally allow for different authorities / scientific foundations to exist, and 1 bad Apple shouldn’t ruin the whole bunch. Unfortunately, “scientists == corrupt” is an easier (and more provocative) conclusion when stuff like this happens.
I agree that corporate lobbying and academic corruption has certainly eroded that trust.
I'm not an antivax climate denier or anything but a single study or a single scientist isn't going to convince me of anything. I just tend to remain unconvinced a bit longer than most.
The important thing to me is to recognize that I'm not an expert in most things and to remain open to having my mind changed in those things.
If the society needs rockets in its arms' race against a foreign foe then said society suddenly "forgets" that the scientists involved are bad by definition (Von Braun was a Nazi, it doesn't get any more "bad" than that, his rockets had killed innocent British civilians) and it starts using their work for its societal needs. When some scientists start growing a spine and start realising the moral conundrum of their trade they're either treated as crazy or as communists (see Oppenheimer).
It's quite obvious that obesity is caused by a bad diet. People should watch their diet. The rest is just politics: politicians don't want to blame people and companies don't want to be used as scapegoats.
We also need to accept that the vast majority of people are neither victims nor stupid. People do make choices knowing that they are not good for their health. I think that at least some of the anti-experts trend we see is a reaction against being told what to do on the ground that people cannot decide for themselves.
Before, fats were demonized. Now it’s carbs and sugars. Who knows what “good” diet will constitute in the future.
That's what addiction is and soft drinks definitely fall into that.
Of course, 'some' people will always do something. This is not an argument because if we go that way we ought to ban everything.
It's a fallacy to conflate both.
Claiming otherwise would require an explanation.
So do we say to society, “Coke would have you believe it’s calories vs. calories out. Run a mile. Drink a Coke. It’s all good. The truth, though, is that it is mostly about diet. However, Coke can say whatever it wants. It’s a free country. If you can’t figure it out, if Coke fights to shape news, medical publications, educational material, and every other way you could find the truth, well, sucks to be you.”?
Or do we say, “Coke misled you. They will be held responsible for their actions corporately and individually. Here is what literature not funded by motivated parties says. It says that if you drink a lot of Coke, whether you exercise or not, you will get fat. If you are ok with that, fine. If not, now you know.”?
Even if that was not obvious, which it is, it becomes so very quickly as you start putting on weight. Similarly, it is obvious and well-known that burning more calories means being able to eat more calories.
People know all that.
Those studies and the attempts at influencing results are mostly political. These studies are tools to influence policy. That's why you have plenty of studies paid for by plenty of pressure groups and which results magically serve the interests of these pressure groups (whatever the side of the argument, or the topic). If you want to have a law passed you need tools to help you. If you want to prevent that you also need tools.
Of course on scientific studies can be very important on many issues, but on this one really they are not to uncover anything Earth-shattering.
Is there a place for the occasional Coke in a healthy world? Absolutely. Life's short, enjoy a Coke once in a while. But does Coca-Cola (the company) need to advertise it literally everywhere while getting massive corporate welfare at the expense of the world's health? Probably not.
Humans are full of exploitable bugs/features.
Society can and should impose costs and penalties for the behavior that is costing everyone. Coca cola is not lobbying for individuals not realizing sugar is bad and stop buying their products, they're lobbying against a sugar tax, or if you don't like taxes, against the insurance companies having justification to implement a coca cola clause.
Marketing does not cause bad parenting.
But, again, politicians find it less risky to tell people (electors...) "Oh poor you, you're doing all you can and you're doing a great job but those companies undermine you with all those ads" rather than "You're a parent, take your responsibilities and do your job". And unfortunately some people buy that because it's also more comfortable than facing the music.
Whatever the people do to fight this, they should do it individually, and not consider any pesky freedom-infringing legislation (such as banning vending machines in schools, or soft drinks in school cafeterias, or a tax on soft drinks). Act alone - there's one of you, and one Coca-Cola. One versus one - fair, right?
It's Coca-Cola's fault not using morbidly obese people in their marketing campaigns and instead choosing physically fit, attractive people, those who realistically will not be drinking much Coca-Cola to get their gym bods because of the sugar it has.
A 375ml can of coke is 161 calories / 40g of sugar. Two 375ml cans a day is the equivalent of a small meal calorie wise with no nutritional benefit, only 80g of sugar.
People are essentially having multiple meals a day on top of their solid food by drinking soft drinks and unknowingly or through ignorance are in massive calorie surplus.
Anyone who goes to a gym and in good shape knows it's 80% food 20% time working out. Your food is more important than the workout.
It's not in Coca-Cola's interest to educate people advertising CocalCola as a very poor liquid meal consisting of only sugar.
It is frankly ridiculous to claim that in 2020 people are ignorant or misled.
I've lived in the southeastern US, various places in California, China and Europe. The type of consumption that is considered normal is so vastly different in all those places.
In the southeastern US, your whole environment is telling you that eating enormous meals, drinking sugary drinks, etc, is totally normal. If you are responsible, maybe you could cut back a little to "watch your health". But you are starting from an unhealthy default setting and you have to dig yourself out of a pit to get back to 'healthy'. This includes Atlanta, the home of Coke (where I went to college and lived several years).
In southern California or even more so in Europe, the norms are vastly different. Meals are much smaller and sugary drinks aren't assumed. Healthier options are available nearly everywhere.
But in Europe, things go much further than even the healthiest parts of the US. The very composition of basic foods is different - brand name foods are less sugary and contain less preservatives than the same brands in the US, staple foods like bread are less shelf stable but contain less additives, and so on. Things like Kraft Mac & Cheese, Snickers bars and Doritos chips are literally illegal in Europe with their original US formulations and are produced with tweaked ingredients. It's in the very DNA of society to default to a more healthy lifestyle. Sure, it's possible to be unhealthy but the default setting of your environment is much healthier so more people are healthy.
The point is that people operate at a default setting that seems normal for their society. Some will be healthy minded and will outperform the norm for their area, but not everyone will. If you want a healthy population, you need a healthy norm and no amount of telling people to take responsibility is going to fix a society if literally every food easily available is bad for you. There is just a mountain of public health evidence that shows this to be true.
The sugar obesity link has been clouded by fat (in food) being the same words as being fat, for quite some time I guess. Probably the same thing about getting a cold from being cold?
A 375ml can of coke is 161 calories / 40g of sugar. Two 375ml cans a day is the equivalent of a small meal calorie wise with no nutritional benefit, only 80g of sugar."
That's the thing, sugar water is not a bad drink for people doing sports. It's common to consume 60-90g of carbohydrates per hour during prolonged endurance exercise (let's say 90min+). Whether that's from gels, sports drinks or Coke doesn't make much of a difference. They are all full of sugar and caffeine. Even glucose-fructose-syrup is fine for sports: there's a limit to how much glucose the colon can absorb in a period of time, because fructose is absorbed via different pathways it helps increase performance.
Outside of sports I wouldn't drink refined sugar myself. But a positive aspect is that a high-sugar diet will not give people diabetes, while a high-fat diet can.
> In fairness, if people drink this everyday, as some do, it's hardly Coca Cola's fault.
It's hardly coca cola's fault that they paid scientists to lie? This article is not about individual behavior.
>It's quite obvious that obesity is caused by a bad diet.
It's less obvious when a company uses its market power to distort science and encourage bad diets.