Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola

In this troubling exposé, Greenhalgh (Fat-Talk Nation), an anthropology professor emerita at Harvard University, reveals how Coca-Cola waged a pseudoscience campaign throughout the aughts to deflect public concern that their high-fat, high-sugar drinks were fueling an obesity epidemic. The soft drink company relied on the International Life Sciences Institute, a D.C.-based nonprofit funded by the food industry, to push its specious claim that exercise would allow Americans to fight obesity without cutting back on junk food. ILSI prioritized its political goals over empirical evidence, Greenhalgh contends, noting that the organization promoted a program encouraging elementary schoolers to take physical “activity breaks” throughout the day, even though no research had been conducted on whether the program actually affected childhood obesity. Greenhalgh’s dogged research pulls from open records requests and ILSI tax forms to trace how Coke used its deep pockets to influence ostensibly independent researchers, offering multimillion-dollar grants to “scientists whose research was friendly to corporate interests” and whom the company would then call on to represent its favored outlook at medical conferences across the globe. A damning study of how corporations skew science to their benefit, this outrages. (Aug.)