The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [41]
Not that the food company execs at Coke or any other brand were evilly plotting to make America fat—they were thinking about their own survival. “When you come in in the morning, there is no sheet that says you get 50 altruism points if you do something charitable,” says Coke’s former marketing director Hank Cardello, now an anti-obesity advocate at the University of North Carolina. “The sheet says here’s how many cases I sold and is it above or below the target.” Besides, he says, no one was thinking about soft drinks in terms of obesity or diabetes. “At the time, the product was perceived so positively, it was feel-good stuff. I talk to executives now and they feel like they woke up one day with a target on their back. It’s like you wake up one day and all of a sudden someone is saying your kid is ugly.”
If Cardello and his fellow executives thought about health at all, it was during periodic flare-ups such as the program CBS did about health concerns over aspartame—the sweetener better known as NutraSweet—which both Coke and Pepsi had started using to sweeten their diet beverages starting in 1983 (moving to a 100 percent aspartame formula by the end of 1984). Complaints about the chemical more than doubled in the latter half of that year, from 108 to 248, with regular diet soda drinkers complaining about headaches, dizziness, fatigue, depression, and insomnia within a few days of starting to drink the beverages. It’s telling that the company treated the issue as one of brand image—not health. Cardello nervously wrote a memo to his superiors telling them it wasn’t a big deal “unless the CBS story snowballed,” which it never did. Eventually the Centers for Disease Control declared concerns about aspartame of minor importance, even as more than seven thousand complaints—three thousand concerning soft drinks—were received by the FDA in the first fifteen years. Concerns over the chemical continue to persist, with a comprehensive, if controversial, study conducted in Italy and published in 2006 over seven years that found aspartame statistically linked to an increase in cancer in rats. (The FDA dismissed the study as flawed by preexisting disease in the rat population.) Faced with the catastrophic upheaval that would come with a reformulation of Diet Coke, the Coca-Cola Company has reflexively held the line on aspartame, sending representatives to lobby against a bill to ban the substance introduced in New Mexico in 2006.
Coke intervened even more directly when another potentially dangerous chemical was discovered in diet sodas in 1990s. During product tests, chemists at rival company Cadbury-Schweppes discovered excessive levels of benzene—a chemical linked to leukemia and other forms of cancer—in some of its sodas, particularly diet orange sodas. The chemical, which apparently was formed from a reaction of the preservative sodium benzoate with ascorbic acid (vitamin C), was found in levels of more than 25 parts per billion (ppb), well above the legal limit of 5 ppb.
Representatives of the National Soft Drink Association—of which Coke was a member—met promptly with the FDA and expressed concern over the “potential for adverse publicity associated with this problem,” according to a memo from the meeting. The government agency agreed to let the companies quietly reformulate their drinks to prevent a scare. (Earlier that year, Perrier water was found contaminated with benzene at levels up to 22 ppb, and the company forced to recall more than 160 million bottles worldwide at a cost of $263 million.) It hardly policed their efforts, however; the FDA’s own tests from 1995 to 2001 show that 79 percent of diet soda samples tested were contaminated with benzene at an average of 19 ppb.
The public