So much of what we, the public, believes about the food we consume and how it affects our health comes to us in bytes of information provided by the corporations that produce the food. And they aren't unbiased sources. Harvard social anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh did a yeoman's amount of research for her book Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola in order to differentiate what we might think of as pure science from corporate science. They're two entirely different disciplines.
Evan Kleiman: I've had a bottle of Mexican Coke in my refrigerator for over a year, but I can't bring myself to drink it. And once I saw the infographic in your book describing in horrific detail what happens to your body in the first hour after drinking a Coke, I don't think I'll ever open it. Why don't you read it for us?
Susan Greenhalgh: The first 10 minutes, 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. That's 100% of your recommended daily intake. You don't immediately throw up from the overwhelming sweetness, because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor, allowing you to keep it down. Twenty minutes, your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning all that extra sugar into fat. There's plenty of that at this moment. 40 minutes, caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dilate, your blood pressure rises, and as a response, your liver dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked, preventing drowsiness.
Okay, five minutes later, your body ups its dopamine production, stimulating the pleasure centers of your brain. By the way, this is physically the same way heroin works. The phosphoric acid binds calcium, magnesium and zinc in your lower intestine, producing a further boost in metabolism. This is compounded by high doses of sugar and artificial sweeteners, increasing the urinary excretion of calcium 60 minutes, the caffeine, diuretic properties come into play. That is, it makes you have to pee. It's now assumed you'll have to evacuate the bonded calcium, magnesium, and zinc that was headed to your bones, as well as sodium, electrolytes, and water. In other words, your body can't absorb these good ingredients. It gets excreted.
60 minutes. Here's the final one. As the rave inside of you dies down, you have a sugar crash. You may become irritable and or sluggish. You've also now literally pissed away all the water that was in the Coke but not before infusing it with valuable nutrients your body could have used for things like having the ability to hydrate your system or building strong bones in teeth, and that's what happens after drinking a Coke.
Harvard social anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh researched "pure science" vs. "corporate science." Photo by Rose Lincoln.
The subtitle of your book is so ironic, "Making the World Safe for Coca Cola" instead of "from."
Exactly and that subtitle is a clue to what I do in the book. What I do is I take the perspective of the soda industry and I ask when the obesity epidemic started up and all these public health officials began demanding soda taxes, the industry was under this terrible threat, and so what did it do? It started creating a science to protect itself. So the whole book is trying to look at things from the industry's perspective, from inside that world of corporate science. And who knew that things worked that way?
Take us through what was happening in the 1990s that caused giant food corporations, and in particular Coca Cola, to start a very particular kind of research.
In the health statistics collected by the federal government, all of a sudden, researchers began to see this spike in the proportion of Americans who were overweight and obese. They used to consider that about 25% of the adult population fell into those categories but they were freaked out when they saw that a much larger proportion, up to 33% with an increase over just 10 years, that's a gigantic shift in national statistics. And then the trend kept continuing, and that's when the soda industry began to feel very threatened.
And how did they respond?
What they did is they used a framework called the Energy Balance Framework. It's fairly simple and that's been a central framework used in nutritional science for decades, only they twisted it a bit. What that framework says is in order to stay at a healthy weight, you need to balance the number of calories coming in through eating with the number of calories burned off through moving. That's how you're supposed to stay at a healthy weight. These soda scientists used that framework but, in fact, when you look at their science, they're focusing almost exclusively on the exercise, on the calories out portion, under the motto, "eat everything you want, and then you can just exercise it off and you won't gain weight."
So they effectively put the onus on the consumer, rather than the producer of this high-sugar product.
Absolutely. And also no onus on the government either because some folks in public health were calling for soda taxes and restrictions on marketing to kids. This soda science is unusual science that was developed, argued secretly for no soda taxes. They did it by simply never mentioning that possibility when everybody in public health was talking about that.
What other strategies did they use to shape public perception?
They adopted the term "healthy, active lifestyles," and Coca Cola began investing in so-called "healthy, active lifestyle" programs around the world, including in the US. So that term, "healthy, active lifestyle," equates "healthy" with "active." It doesn't say much about eating.
If you look closely at the programs, Coke also provides nutritional education but the nutritional education is very industry-friendly. It certainly doesn't say, "Don't eat soda." It says, "Drink soda and then burn it off."
There's just massive efforts, and Coke was the leader in these big food companies, but all of them worked together. They had a scientific nonprofit that all of them were members of, and that scientific nonprofit was the organization that sponsored this new kind of soda science. Meanwhile, all the companies were out there promoting "active, healthy lifestyles." It made it seem as though the soda companies themselves had taken on combating the obesity epidemic as part of their work.
Amazing. Is there anything else that you'd like to talk about regarding the science? About whether or not it's actually fake science or if it's a corrupted kind of science?
Yeah, so we can't say it's fake science. It's real science. But it definitely is bad science. It's real science because this soda science, this corporate science, was created by prominent scientists, and it was published in leading journals, but it was distorted by its aim, which was to help the soda industry, [its] aim to protect soda sales by pushing exercise.
But it still is real science and this is really important because most of the observers of corporate science, they just dismiss it. They say, "This is ridiculous, such bad science. We don't even need to think about this." But what I do in my book is say, wait a minute, this is real science. If we analyze it, if we study it as a science, we can understand what motivated the scientists who did it and understand why it was so helpful to Coke. If everybody thought Coke was putting out fake science, nobody would pay attention. But everybody thought this was a real science, so they got away with this for 15 years. That's a very long time. Nobody called them on it for 15 years.
And then what happened?
An obesity researcher up in Canada noticed that on a website of a new global network of energy balance specialists there was nothing about the funding. So he sent a tweet to one of the organizers, and the organizers had to say, "Oh, didn't we put that up there? This is funded by Coca Cola."
So that obesity researcher in Canada sent all the information he had gathered to a health researcher at the New York Times. That researcher spent three or four months digging, digging, and finding all sorts of information. Then, in August 2015, there was this gigantic expose in the New York Times, front page article, big pictures of the three principles of soda science. It was this massive scandal.
As a result of the scandal, Coca Cola stopped funding the science, so it effectively stopped as an active project of the soda industry. In fact, some of the scientists are still doing that kind of research but it's not funded by Coke. Meantime, it lives on in other countries. So it's ended in this country but it lives on in China, where it was already built into Chinese policy.
As consumers, what should our takeaway be? Why does it matter?
It matters because the impact of this soda science is largely hidden. I followed these scientists to China, and if you can believe it, they got this... Soda science is an exercise for science. It makes two claims. One is exercise is the priority solution to obesity. In fact, it's not true that it is. Exercise helps but dietary restriction is more important. The second claim is that soda taxes and other measures by the government are not that important. These soda scientists took those ideas to China. They got them endorsed as the authoritative body of ideas for the country, and they got them built into Chinese policies on chronic disease. Today, in China's master policy on chronic disease called Healthy China: 2030, you'll find Coca Cola's fingerprints. So that's pretty scary.
It also has had impacts in the US. I certainly haven't studied all of them but one is very obvious. Today, in the US, our fitness culture is dominated by step-counting, moving, counting all the movements that we engage in. We have a Fitbit-wearing, step-counting, exercise, and weight-obsessed culture. I make a strong argument that this soda science, which was launched in the early 2000s, has helped to make this culture much stronger. People are still out there counting and think that's an adequate solution to their weight problem. Well, it's not. It's not going to work unless you pair it with dietary restriction. So these guys, these soda science companies and the allied scientists, have really caused a lot of harm.
"Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola" delves into the corporate-backed messaging around soda's health effects. Photo courtesy of the University of Chicago Press.