The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [42]
These kinds of strategies set the tone for the Coca-Cola Company’s early responses to the obesity epidemic, in which it made common cause with its competitors to try to fly under the radar—worried above all about the possible damage done to the Coca-Cola brand. Almost from the beginning, however, the obesity fight would be different—dragging Coke kicking and screaming into the public arena to defend itself against attack.
The opening salvo was fired by a nonprofit group called the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), which released a report about soda in 1998 called Liquid Candy that teased out the connections between soda and health issues. “I had been watching soda sales rise for decades, ever since World War II,” says CSPI president Michael Jacobson. “We always knew that soda was the quintessential junk food, but the concern was tooth decay. No one talked about obesity.” The report would change that—drawing the connection for the first time between the corresponding rise in soda sales and obesity rates over the previous twenty years, and sparking a debate that eventually spilled out into a national backlash against sugary soda.
CSPI was founded in 1971, one of the first of the many “public interest” groups that proliferated in a period that business historian David Vogel calls the last of the “three major political waves of challenge to business that has taken place in the United States in [the twentieth] century” (the first two being the Progressive Era and the strong push by organized labor in the post-Depression 1930s). Groups such as the Sierra Club, Common Cause, and Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen used any means possible to curb the power of big business at a time when public support for corporations was at a low ebb.
In CSPI’s case, the group has held vocal press conferences, slapped complaints against companies with government agencies, and even threatened lawsuits in its usually successful attempts to remove what it sees as deceptive advertising and nutrition labeling for food. For its actions, CSPI has been labeled the “food police” and derided as a reactionary group for taking on everything from cheese to hamburgers. (Most recently, it has gained notoriety for its push to ban trans fats in New York City restaurants and its fight for calorie counts in chain restaurants.)
But Jacobson makes no apologies for sounding the alarm over soda. As he watched the parallel rise of obesity statistics and soda consumption, he says, he couldn’t help putting the two together. All of that emphasis on growth pushed by Goizueta and Ivester, he argued in Liquid Candy, had created collateral damage—especially with some of the most vulnerable of the nation’s citizens—children. According to the report, even young children drank more than a can of sugary soda a day. A typical teenage boy who drank soda consumed nearly two and a half cans—with some drinking up to five. Not that girls fared much better, averaging nearly two cans a day. To put that into perspective: One 12-ounce can of soda contains about 10 teaspoons of sugar; a Double Gulp has more than 50—just over one cup. Other statistics in the report spelled out the aggressive marketing tactics that the company was using to push even greater sales of soft drinks. (Indeed, when CSPI did an update of Liquid Candy in 2005, the percentage of calories from soft drinks in the average person’s