The Coke Machine - Michael Blanding [50]
By the time L.A. passed its resolution, word had already spread to other school districts, spawning similar resolutions in San Francisco, Sacramento, Madison, and Oakland. It wasn’t just Coke that stood to lose from the backlash—but Pepsi as well. The two companies, bitter rivals in the press, closed ranks to defend themselves through their trade organization, the National Soft Drink Association. As with the initial criticism of CSPI’s report, the group painted Domac and her students as misguided. “This is like using a squirt gun to put out a forest fire,” said NSDA spokesman Sean McBride. “The LAUSD missed an important opportunity to stem rising obesity rates by having more physical education in their schools and better nutrition education.”
That notion that “it’s the couch, not the can,” became a rallying cry for Big Soda. Coke quickly launched a pilot program in Houston, Philadelphia, and Atlanta called “Step with It!”—distributing Coke-red pedometers to kids to encourage them to exercise more by taking 10,000 steps a day. The program won praise from Health and Human Services secretary Tommy Thompson, and expanded to 250 schools around the country by 2003. Even as Coke was playing nice in the media, however, it was funding studies to cast doubt on the connection between soft drinks and obesity.
Along with Tyson Chicken and Wendy’s, Coke reportedly “donated” $200,000 to a new group called the Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF), which took the lead in ridiculing the fight against soda and other unhealthy food, all without revealing its funding. (Pepsi publicly disavowed the group.) “There is a rush to blame soda companies that far outstrips any scientific evidence,” said CCF senior analyst Dan Mindus. He pointed to competing studies, one showing that soda had no effect on weight gain, another contending that it was lack of exercise that caused weight increases. What CCF doesn’t advertise, of course, is who is paying for those studies. A recent review by David Ludwig—the author of the previously mentioned study on kids and soft drinks—found that beverage studies paid for by industry sources were four to eight times more likely to deny the connection between soda and weight gain than those funded by government or private sources. He makes the connection between soda and the tobacco industry, which funded studies attacking the connection between smoking and lung cancer for forty years. “Is that happening today with the soft drink industry?” Ludwig asks. “Only time will tell, but there certainly is a precedent.” As its name implies, CCF argues that consumers should be free to eat what they want—without the “food police” looking over their shoulder at the dinner table. “Their ultimate goal is to restrict our access to certain food,” says Mindus. “If they don’t believe that we are to be trusted with the decision of choosing the food we eat, how can Americans be trusted with anything?” The argument has resonance. Shouldn’t Americans be free to choose what they eat and drink? And if it makes them fat, isn’t that their own fault? The argument hits deep in the American psyche, evoking images of founding fathers dumping tea and the Marlboro Man bestriding the Western plains. It also evokes the spirit of free-market capitalism, which enshrines free choice as its highest value.
Ultimately, however, the argument is a cynical one—since the very success of Coke and its fellow companies has given the company the ability to narrow kids’ choices. In 2009 alone, Coke spent $2.8 billion in advertising to push its products to the general public. And in schools, the deck is even more stacked against students, since they can choose only from a preselected array of beverages, all the while subjected to the advertisements of the exclusive brand. “Certainly students should be taught to make healthful choices and take individual responsibility,” says Lori Dorfman, of the Berkeley Media Studies Group, who has analyzed the way that the soda/obesity issue has played out