The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [40]
One of the most compelling studies Hu looked at was done by nutritionist David Ludwig and published in the British journal The Lancet in 2001. Ludwig followed five hundred eleven-year-olds for more than two years, and concluded that each soda added daily to their diets increased their chances for becoming obese by 60 percent. (A later study by Ludwig showed that removing a daily can of soda led to a weight loss of about a pound a month for already overweight teens.) The implications of that were literally enormous. “It’s not the exceptional child who drinks a liter, two liters, or even three liters a day,” says Ludwig, who runs an obesity clinic for kids at Boston’s Children’s Hospital. “It’s actually remarkably common among my patients.” Another analysis, of thousands of nurses, by Harvard University nutritionist Matthias Schulze found that women who increased soda consumption to at least one a day gained an extra pound a year, and were twice as likely to contract diabetes. That study was all but a “smoking gun” that soda was linked to weight gain, wrote Boston nutritionist Caroline Apovian in The New England Journal of Medicine, concluding that reducing soda consumption “might be the best single opportunity to curb the obesity epidemic.”
Of course, linking soda consumption to obesity doesn’t necessarily prove it is soda making people fat—soda drinkers could also be couch potatoes, or eat more french fries. A surprising study by Purdue University nutritionist Richard Mattes has shown, however, that soda is unique in its contribution to weight gain. Mattes gave patients an extra 450 calories a day of jelly beans, telling them they could eat whatever else they wanted. When participants returned a month later, however, they hadn’t gained weight, since they’d compensated by eating less other food. But when Mattes repeated the study with an extra 450 calories of Coke, he found they didn’t compensate, and their weight and BMI increased. He hypothesized that “when drinking fluid calories,” people simply didn’t register the extra energy, and continued to eat more calories to keep their bellies full.
Some researchers such as Harvard’s George Bray have even hypothesized that soda’s main ingredient—high-fructose corn syrup—also leads to increased weight gain, since fructose isn’t broken down in the bloodstream in the normal way, instead building up in the liver and turning directly into fat. Other obesity researchers disregard the theory—arguing that sugar is sugar. They virtually all agree, however, that any sugar in large quantities disrupts with the body’s natural mechanisms, causing cells to become more resistant to the enzyme insulin, and, over time, leading to diabetes.3 Before the 1990s, this kind of diabetes was known as “adult-onset diabetes,” since it typically occurred later in life. By 1996, however, so many children had developed the disease that the name was changed to simply “type-2 diabetes.” Recently the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued the shocking pronouncement that of all children born in the year 2000, one in three will become diabetic in their lifetimes.
Despite the preponderance of evidence linking soda to obesity—to say nothing of the commonsense proposition that drinking gallons of sugar might not be super-great for one’s diet—the awareness of soda’s harmfulness was slow to hit. Back in the 1980s, the government was continually warning Americans about too much fat—not sugar—in their diets. As Michael Pollan explains, “The whole of the industrial food supply was reformulated to reflect the new nutritional wisdom, giving us low-fat pork, low-fat Snackwells, and all the low-fat pasta and high-fructose (yet low-fat!) corn syrup we could consume.” Meanwhile, as the shareholder value movement gained momentum, Coke wasn’t the only company pushing larger and larger portion sizes to satisfy shareholders