The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [39]
Coca-Cola had emerged victorious, and essentially intact, from the attack. Eventually the Pure Food Law itself was repealed, as prevailing scientific opinion decided there was nothing wrong with food additives, which became rampant throughout the twentieth century. Ironically, it’s only now that the purity of foods has become an issue in health—fueled by the writings of Michael Pollan and the “slow food” movement, which has railed against the “nutritionism” that has dominated the last few decades of food science, and urged a return to unadulterated foods.
For Coke, it would take another ninety years for the next major attack on the grounds of health, and when it came, it focused not on any detrimental additives but on the core ingredient that made up most of the drink’s contents—sugar. And unlike the prior skirmish, this fight wouldn’t occur in a court of law—but in the court of public opinion.
Every day , it seems, there’s new evidence of America’s expanding waistline—from a policy on Southwest Airlines requiring customers to buy two seats if they are going to spill over from the eighteen inches allotted in one, to the motorized carts Wal-Mart now offers for people too large to amble around the store by themselves. In medical terms, a person is obese when his or her body mass index (BMI) tops 30.2 And after holding steady for much of the last century, the percentage of American adults checking that box has more than doubled, from 14 percent in the 1970s to 34 percent today, translating into some 75 million people.
Another 34 percent of adults with a BMI over 25 are classified as “overweight,” placing more than two-thirds of the adult U.S. population into one of those two categories. And along with those statistics come increased risks for diseases such as high blood pressure and heart disease. The prognosis for the next generation is just as bad, with the percentage of obese teenagers more than tripling, from 5 percent to 18 percent over the past thirty years, and the number of obese children climbing to 20 percent.
On the face of it, the reason people get fat is simple: They eat more than they burn off in exercise. Beyond that, however, it’s enormously difficult to pinpoint exactly what has led to the explosion in America’s waistline. “Obesity is not rocket science, it’s more complicated,” warned Frank Hu, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, at a 2006 conference in Boston looking at responses to childhood obesity. Nearly all scientists now agree that at least part of the equation is genetic; some people are just programmed with so-called thrifty genes that cause the body to retain fat more than others.
For the rest, recent papers have blamed the obesity epidemic on everything from an increased prevalence of air-conditioning to decreased rates of smoking. But by far the most likely culprit is diet—and on that score, an increasingly convincing stack of evidence lays at least part of the blame at the syrupy feet of the soda companies. The math is simple: At the same time that America’s obesity rates doubled, so has Americans’ soda consumption; between 1970 and 1998, it accounted for nearly half the increase in calories in the average diet. It now represents the largest single source of calories for the average person, at 7 percent for adults and up to 10 percent for children.
Several years ago, Hu led a team analyzing some thirty studies linking soda consumption to weight gain, concluding that they “show a positive association between greater intake of sugar-sweetened beverages and weight gain and obesity in both children and adults.” The report recommended that “sufficient evidence exists for public