The soft drink industry is in big trouble. Sugary drinks aren’t great for health, and sales are down. But this industry keeps trying.
I’m starting to collect interesting innovations. Would you believe?
Yum?
The article, which starts on the front page and continues to another two full pages and more, is headlined How Big Business got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food.
It’s mostly about how Nestlé (no relation) recruits women in low-income countries to sell the company’s products from small mobile carts.
Here are a few quotes:
- Nestlé’s direct-sales army in Brazil is part of a broader transformation of the food system that is delivering Western-style processed food and sugary drinks to the most isolated pockets of Latin America, Africa and Asia. As their growth slows in the wealthiest countries, multinational food companies like Nestlé, PepsiCo and General Mills have been aggressively expanding their presence in developing nations, unleashing a marketing juggernaut that is upending traditional diets from Brazil to Ghana to India.
- Sean Westcott, head of food research and development at Nestlé, conceded obesity has been an unexpected side effect of making inexpensive processed food more widely available. “We didn’t expect what the impact would be,” he said.
- Ahmet Bozer, president of Coca-Cola International, described to investors in 2014. “Half of the world’s population has not had a coke in the last 30 days. There’s 600 million teenagers who have not had a coke in the last week. So the opportunity for that is huge.”
- “What we have is a war between two food systems, a traditional diet of real food once produced by the farmers around you and the producers of ultra-processed food designed to be over-consumed and which in some cases are addictive,” said Carlos A. Monteiro, a professor of nutrition and public health at the University of São Paulo. “It’s a war,” he said, “but one food system has disproportionately more power than the other.”
- [From Felipe Barbosa, a Nestlé supervisor:] “The essence of our program is to reach the poor,” Mr. Barbosa said. “What makes it work is the personal connection between the vendor and the customer.”
- But of the 800 products that Nestlé says are available through its vendors, Mrs. da Silva says her customers are mostly interested in only about two dozen of them, virtually all sugar-sweetened items like Kit-Kats; Nestlé Greek Red Berry, a 3.5-ounce cup of yogurt with 17 grams of sugar; and Chandelle Pacoca, a peanut-flavored pudding in a container the same size as the yogurt that has 20 grams of sugar — nearly the entire World Health Organization’s recommended daily limit.
The article is worth the read. Or see the 3-minute video for a quick summary. It also comes with a nifty interactive map of world obesity.
Politico Pro Agriculture asked Nestlé for a comment (this may be behind a paywall):
A Nestlé spokesperson defended the company while acknowledging the deeper childhood obesity problems currently plaguing Brazil. “We are disappointed by the New York Times’ biased approach in this article, which we believe does not accurately reflect the breadth and reality of our product portfolio in the context of the public health issues impacting the people of Brazil,” the spokesperson said. “However, we do agree that the real and serious issues raised in the article should be discussed in a balanced and constructive way that focuses on practical solutions.”
Resources
Here’s the article en Español.
And here it is em Português.
Take a look at Center for Science in the Public Interest’s report on Carbonating the World, which covers much of the same territory for Coca-Cola. In the meantime, subsequent articles in this series are promised for soft drinks and fast food.
Last Sunday’s New York Times had a front-page story on Coca-Cola’s relationship to the current nominee for director of the CDC. I’m quoted in it and soon got this request:
Good morning, Marion:
I saw this Times news coverage in which you’re quoted.
Given this news about reversing the CDC’s position on aligning with the private sector on sugar sweetened beverages, I’m wondering if you’d be game to elaborate on this and provide your perspective on it.
Sure. Happy to.
The New York Times story on Coca-Cola’s connections to Brenda Fitzgerald, President Trump’s nominee to head the CDC, goes right into the book I’m writing. The book is about food, beverage, and supplement industry funding of nutrition research and practice and with luck will be published by Basic Books late in 2018.
Fitzgerald was health commissioner for the state of Georgia and at first glance looks well qualified to head the CDC. But a health advocacy group, US Right to Know, has had a long-standing interest in Coca-Cola’s cozy relationships with CDC—both Coke and CDC are in Atlanta, after all—and at some point obtained emails through FOIA that explain just how cozy.
Here’s what especially got my attention in the Times article :
Food, beverage, and supplement companies are happy to fund research with a high probability of supporting marketing objectives. Industry-funded research almost invariably comes out with results favorable to the sponsor’s commercial interests.
It’s unreasonable to expect otherwise. Food companies are not public health agencies; they are businesses expected to generate profits and returns to shareholders—that is their #1 priority.
The moral for public health: don’t take the money.
Who knew that such things existed, let alone that they would be directed at anti-obesity and pro-soda tax advocates.
The New York Times reports that frightening messages about their families (the article gives examples) were sent to the advocates with links
laced with an invasive form of spyware developed by NSO Group, an Israeli cyberarms dealer that sells its digital spy tools exclusively to governments and that has contracts with multiple agencies inside Mexico, according to company emails leaked to the New York Timeslast year.
Supposedly, this Group sells “tools only to governments for criminal and terrorism investigations.” These can “trace a target’s every phone call, text message, email, keystroke, location, sound and sight.”
As the Times gently puts it, this discovery “raises new questions about whether NSO’s tools are being used to advance the soda industry’s commercial interests in Mexico.”
Citizen Lab has more information about this situation.
The spyware targeted these individuals:
I am leaving on Wednesday for three weeks on a Fulbright to the National Institute of Public Health in Cuernavaca and hope to find out a lot more about this. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, here’s a tweet from someone I don’t know (I like the soda cans).
Late addition: Gary Ruskin sends his paper on corporate espionage against nonprofit organizations.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest sent out a press release yesterday to announce a lawsuit filed on behalf of the nonprofit Praxis Project.
The complaint says Coca-Cola and its trade association, the American Beverage Association (ABA), mislead the public when they trash the science linking sugary drinks to obesity, type 2 diabetes, and the like.
It cites the August 2015 account in the New York Times of Coca-Cola’s funding of the Global Energy Balance Network, which aimed to shift attention from poor diets as a cause of obesity to lack of physical exercise. Coca-Cola spent $120 million on research from 2010 to 2015 that could cast doubt on evidence linking health risks to sugary drinks.
It also cites quotations from officials of Coca-Cola and the ABA and researchers they fund “making false and deceptive statements about sugar-sweetened drinks.” For example:
The complaint also charges that Coca-Cola paid dietitians to promote sugary drinks; it quotes one dietitian who suggested that an eight-ounce soda could be a healthy snack, like “packs of almonds.”
It will be interesting to see how this lawsuit fares. Stay tuned.
Marcus Strom of the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia did a follow up to my post, “I’ve been WikiLeaked!”
Recall that a Coca-Cola representative took notes at a talk I gave in Australia and passed them up the chain of command where they got hacked as collateral damage from the ones obtained from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta.
The notes advised ongoing monitoring of my activities in Australia but also of research conducted by Dr. Lisa Bero, in whose group I was working for a couple of months early this year.
The article begins:
Coca-Cola has been exposed having a secret plan to monitor research at Sydney University that examines how private companies influence public health outcomes in areas such as obesity.
In a leaked internal email, a paid consultant to Coca-Cola South Pacific writes that a “key action” for the global soft-drinks manufacturer is to “monitor research project outcomes through CPC [Charles Perkins Centre] linked to Lisa Bero’s projects”.
Future monitoring should include planned research on “treatment and prevention of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease”, the email says.
Professor Bero, who works at the university’s Charles Perkins Centre, studies the integrity of industry-sponsored research and how it is used to influence public policy. While in the US, she worked to expose the influence of tobacco companies on health debates. Those methods are now being used to examine how companies like Coke seek to influence public health outcomes.
The reaction: See letters printed in response (you have to scroll way down to find them)
Roberto Mercadé, President of Coca-Cola South Pacific, wrote to object that Coke is not secretly monitoring academics; its monitoring is entirely public:
Readers of the article “Revealed: Coke’s plan to monitor academic” (Herald, October 22-23) may have been left with the impression that Coca-Cola South Pacific somehow engages in the “secret” monitoring of academics at the University of Sydney. Put simply, we don’t. We make no secret of the fact that we keep abreast of research in the health and wellbeing sector, as you would expect of any food or beverage company. The important work being done by the university on the integrity of industry-sponsored research is among the many fields important to us. Finally, in the article the word “monitor” was also used out of context and distorted to mean something other than what it is – our ongoing engagement with academics and experts in health and wellbeing.
Steve Harrison, Balmain
It’s no great surprise that Coca Cola is panicked by research into the cause of diabetes. The consumption of sugar and processed foods looks more and more like a major reason for diabetes, many cancers and other serious diseases. In turn, the company, the food industry and drug companies will all be in big financial trouble when the penny drops that a diet of fresh food is the basis for good health.
If a fraction of the money spent on seeking cures was used to educate people to cut processed food and sugar from their diet we would be a much healthier society. We went through a very similar process with Big Tobacco some years ago, although that was on a smaller scale.
In the words of Hippocrates: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
Ivan Head, Camperdown
The score? Coke, Zero: Professor Bero, one.
Ninjas for Health posts this graphic from someplace in the emails leaked to DCLeaks (it’s good they are going through them so we don’t have to). 
The Ninjas point out that Coke divides the policies into three categories based on likelihood of happening and impact on sales:
The policy with the biggest impact greatest likelihood of materializing? Increased soda taxes.
No wonder soda companies are fighting back against them.
Nancy Huehnergarth pointed out in an email that a ban on advertising to children under the age of 12 shows up in the “Prepare” category, even though soda companies insist that they do not advertise to young children.
It’s interesting to see what Coca-Cola thinks has a high likelihood of happening: Protectionism against sugar imports, mandatory environmental labels, emission reduction targets, and the mysterious “provisions for lobbying.”
The company has a lot to worry about, apparently.
I’ve been following the story of Hillary Clinton’s Wikileaked e-mails (which John Podesta says the Russians released to sway the election) but never dreamed that I would turn up in them.
But Crossfit’s Russ Greene sent me his blog post yesterday and there I am [the photo comes from an article in the Sydney Morning Herald].
Coke’s Surveillance of Marion Nestle
Strangely, the DC Leaks database does not include any Coca-Cola emails from August 2015, the month that the New York Times first exposed the Global Energy Balance Network. Nonetheless, it does reveal that Coke sent a representative to attend and take notes on Dr. Marion Nestle’s speech at Sydney University in January.
Dr. Nestle, an NYU professor who most recently published “Soda Politics,” spoke on conflicts of interest in health science and government food policy. She mentioned the GEBN as a case study in soda-influenced science.
Nestle moderately concerned Coke. They mentioned the need to “Monitor social media,” but stated that Nestle achieved “very limited pick up from yesterday’s presentation – #sodapolitics.”
Of course the pick up was limited. This was a private, invitation-only meeting with Sydney nutritionists deliberately kept small so as not to compete with my subsequent public lectures (see below for the media list).
Who was the Coca-Cola note taker? I have no idea but the notes seem fine.
Coke’s Surveillance of CSPI
I also turn up in the e-mails related to Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). Evidently, Coca-Cola was tracking the social media response to a CSPI report on its marketing to children.
The most shared tweet was this one – https://twitter.com/CSPI/status/732239510138949633, which was mainly because Marion Nestle re-tweeted it.
By now I assume that someone from Coca-Cola is taking notes at every talk I give and reporting in to headquarters.
What does all this have to do with Hillary Clinton’s campaign?
As Russ Greene explains, the emails reveal that Capricia Marshall, who is working on the Clinton campaign, is also working for Coca-Cola’s communications team.
The evidence that Marshall is working on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is extensive and undeniable. HillaryClinton.com features her prominently at Clinton campaign events.
Just to make things easy for Coca-Cola, here’s my Australia media list
March 10 ABC 7:30, TV interview with Sarah Whyte on Coca-Cola’s funding of research: Sweet Talk
March 2 ABC-FM interview with Margaret Throsby, Classic FM, on Soda Politics
March 1 Lecture to Sydney Ideas: Soda Politics: Lessons from the Food Movement, U. Sydney
March 1 ABC News radio and print interview with David Taylor, on Soda Politics
Feb 29 Interview (online) with ABC Sydney on Soda Politics
Feb 27 “At Lunch With” column in the Sydney Morning Herald: “the powerful foodie”
Feb 24 Podcast of lecture on Soda Politics at the University of Melbourne
Feb 22 Lecture at symposium at Deakin University, Melbourne (this is an mp4 file requiring a lengthy download)
Feb 19 Radio interview with Mark Colvin, ABC News (Sydney) on Soda Politics
Feb 19 Podcast interview with Colvinius, ABC News (Sydney) on Soda Politics
