Currently browsing posts about: Soft drinks

Santa Cruz, a college town on the California coast south of San Francisco, has a ballot initiative to tax sugar-sweetened beverages (Berkeley has one too but its vote is expected to be so favorable that the soda industry isn’t even bothering to fight it).

But the soda industry is sinking a fortune—more than $1.6 million so far—into fighting the Santa Cruz proposal.

The reason is obvious, as Politico explains.

In 2018, industry lobbyists succeeded in pressuring the Legislature to pass a bill banning local governments from enacting new soda taxes for six years.

With next month’s vote, Santa Cruz officials hope theirs will be the first city to attempt to defy that ban by winning voter approval for Measure Z. The two-cent-per-bottle tax is specifically crafted to provoke a lawsuit over the constitutionality of the 2018 state law…Those soda giants are now descending on the Santa Cruz boardwalk with a familiar playbook, relying on seemingly bottomless corporate resources to flood the city with an anti-tax message updated for a new moment in which soda has lost its stranglehold on the American palate.

Do soda taxes discourage purchases?  So it seems.  The money also can be used for good purposes, as it has been in Berkeley.  A win-win for public health!

If you are a Santa Cruz voter, here’s your chance to vote for something that might actually do some good—and an excellent reason to go to the polls and do your overall civic duty, while you are at it.

The Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI) has issued this new report.  It’s well worth a look.

By now, soda taxes are well established to decrease consumption and raise revenues that can be used for social purposes.  As you might imagine, the soda industry does not like such taxes.  As the report explains,

Recently, Big Soda has adapted their [the cigarette industry’s] playbook and shifted their approach from outrightly opposing SB [sugary beverage] taxes to favoring weaker SB tax standards. This report highlights different actions and narratives employed by the industry and demonstrates how these strategies follow a global playbook, including:

1. Proposing weaker taxes tailored to favor industry interests at the risk of public health.

2. Threatening and challenging governments that have passed an SB tax.

3.  Delegitimizing evidence to distort perceptions about SB taxes.

4.  Stigmatizing SB taxes through economic arguments.

5.  Taking advantage of and using vulnerable populations and environmental concerns to avoid the SB tax.

Under Strategy #5, for example, the report provides this information:

The report offers advice about how to counter industry measures by “(1) protecting the tax design to ensure it will have an optimal public health outcome, (2) safeguarding the policy decision-making process from undue influence and (3) leveraging opportunities for civil society to defend SB taxes.

For example, to safeguard policy decisions, it advises:

Avoid participating in public-private partnerships, especially those claiming to mitigate the “economic damages” of the SB tax through false solutions. This is the entry point for corporations to take a seat at the policy-making table and meddle with the design and implementation of the tax.

Soda taxes are up for renewal in Berkeley and are under consideration in Santa Cruz.  Stay tuned.

The World Health Organization has issued guidelines for taxing unhealthy foods: Fiscal Policies to Promote Healthy Diets.

On the basis of current evidence, the WHO recommends:

• Taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs)
• Consideration of policies to tax unhealthy foods
• Consideration of policies to subsidize healthy foods

A recent article explains why the recommendation for SSB taxes is so strong: Sweetened Beverage Tax Implementation and Change in Body Mass Index Among Children in Seattle.

• Findings  In this cohort study of 6313 children living in Seattle or a nearby comparison area, a statistically significant reduction in BMI was observed for children in Seattle after the implementation of a sweetened beverage tax compared with well-matched children living in nontaxed comparison areas.
• Meaning  These results suggest that the sweetened beverage tax in Seattle may be associated with a small but reasonable reduction in BMI among children living within the Seattle city limits.

The World Bank is tracking global SSB taxes in a database.

The Global Food Research Program at University of North Carolina also has a database.  It displays the data in maps.

The news here is the recommendation to start working on tax strategies to reduce consumption of unhealthy foods and promote consumption of healthier foods.

Stay tuned!

Susan Greenhalgh. Soda Science: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola.  University of Chicago Press, 2024.

This terrific book picks up where I left off with Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning) (2015) and Unsavory Truth: How the Food Industry Skews the Science of What We Eat (2018).

Susan Greenhalgh’s focus, however, is on ILSI, the International Life Sciences Institute (now renamed the Institute for the Advancement of Food and Nutrition Sciences).  ILSI is a classic industry front group,  It was created originally by Coca-Cola to make sure science promoted corporate interests.  It is funded by big food companies.  It positions itself as an independent think tank.  Hence: front group.

Soda Science documents how ILSI, working through personal connections (guanxi) at the Chinese Ministry of Health, convinced the Chinese government to target obesity prevention measures at physical activity (“move more”), rather than diet (“eat less,” or “eat better”).

The first half of the book tells the story of ILSI’s role in the Global Energy Balance Network, a group outed as funded by Coca-Cola (I wrote about this in 2015, particularly here, here, and here in The Guardian).

The second half gives an intimate, first-hand account of how science politics works in China.

Greenhalgh is a distinguished anthropologist.  She retired from Harvard as as the John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Research Professor of Chinese Society (she is an expert on China).  She uses social science methods—interviews and qualitative research as well as document review—to study this particular example of soda politics.

• The International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI): true colors revealed (October 3, 2019)
• ILSI tracked media responses to my book, Unsavory Truth (February 22, 2023)

The story she tells here is fascinating in its own right and a great read.

It also makes one other point: social science methods are really useful in getting information unavailable any other way.

I say this because bench scientists tend to look down on qualitative research and consider it non-research.  I disagree.  I think qualitative research is essential, and has plenty to contribute.  This book is a great example of why.

Here’s what started all this:

P&G, Coca-Cola make Olympics promotional push: Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola are among the companies making a promotional push around the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. P&G is planning to focus its efforts on specific brands such as Pampers diapers and Gillette razors, and Coca-Cola has plans for over 70 markets. Sponsors of the International Olympic Committee have spent 18% more than they did for the Tokyo Games in 2021, Comcast reports.

And here’s the response:

TODAY, the global digital campaign, “Hey Big Soda!”  was launched demanding an end to Big Soda’s sponsorship of sport…Please share the campaign with the hashtag #KickBigSodaOutofSport!

Sign the petition from Kick Big Soda Out urging the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to terminate the Coca-Cola Company’s sponsorship.

For more information: info@kickbigsodaout.org.

In its Week #2 report, Kick Big Soda Out says:

Over 34,000 people have signed the petition, and 60 organizations from 21 countries have endorsed the campaign as Campaign Partner Organizations!

Partner materials are here.

Examples from the Mexico team:

• A demonstration, featuring the campaign and organized by El Poder del Consumidor and other Mexico partners, was held in front of Mexican Olympic Committee Headquarters on July 23. Multiple publications covered the event including Greenpeace Mexico, Aristegui Noticias, Cronica and 24 Morelos, among others.
• Simón Barquera, took to Instagram and Twitter to urge his followers to sign and share the “Kick Big Soda Out of Sport” petition. https://x.com/SBarquera/status/1815410422490825089

Food Politics in action!  Join the campaign.

The UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) has long led efforts to tax unhealthy products, starting with tobacco.

WHO describes its health tax efforts here.

It recently issued Global report on the use of sugar-sweetened beverage taxes, 2023.

The report finds that 108 countries have some kind of tax on sugar-sweetened beverages.

But, it finds

Less than a quarter of countries surveyed account for sugar content when they impose taxes on these non-alcoholic beverage products. Countries with a sufficiently strong tax administrative capacity are encouraged to tax beverages based on sugar content, as it can encourage consumers to substitute with alternatives that have lower sugar content as well as incentivize the industry to reformulate beverages to contain less sugar.

One of its major overall findings:

Among its conclusions are these:

• Existing taxes on SSBs could be further leveraged to decrease affordability and thereby reduce consumption. While other perspectives and competing factors have to be accounted for when designing taxation policies, the protection of health should be a key consideration, particularly considering the health and economic burden associated with obesity and diet-related NCDs.
• This report concludes that excise taxes on SSBs are not currently being used to their fullest potential. Improving tax policy and increasing taxes so that SSBs become less affordable should be pursued more systematically by countries in order to effectively reduce consumption and prevent and control diet-related NCDs, including obesity and dental caries.

Here’s the evidence.  Get to work!

Resoures

• More about WHO’s work on health taxes
• Global report on the use of alcohol taxes, 2023
• WHO technical manual on alcohol tax policy and administration
• Health taxes database

The FDA says it is proposing to revoke the regulation authorizing the use of brominated vegetable oil (BVO) in food.  In  transslation from FDA-speak, the agendy now intends to ban BVO.

This is the second time I have written an RIP for BVO.  The first was in 2013—ten years ago!— when PepsiCo said it no longer use BVO in Gatorade in response to a petition from a teenage influencer.

BVO, a flame retardent, is made by adding bromine to vegetable oil.  Studies for years have found BVO to cause neurological and other health problems.  The FDA says:

In our 2014 review, we identified four unresolved safety questions with respect to the use of BVO in food: the potential for thyroid toxicity, bioaccumulation, developmental neurotoxicity, and reproductive toxicity. We determined that the safety data and information available did not provide evidence of a health threat resulting from the limited permitted use of BVO as a flavoring stabilizer in fruit-flavored beverages,…We concluded that high-quality data from contemporary studies, performed under current guideline standards, were needed to address the knowledge gaps regarding the safety of BVO …. The rodent safety studies…confirmed previous reports that dietary exposure to BVO is toxic to the thyroid and results in bioaccumulation of lipid-bound bromine in the body at doses relevant to human exposure.

OK, but this FDA action has an even longer history, and shockingly so.

In 1970, the FDA ruled that BVO could no longer be considered “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS), but took no further action saying removing it was not much of a priority.

The UK banned it isoon after; the European Union got rid of it in 2008.  But the FDA did not.

In summary, the FDA has been worried about BVO since 1970 but is only just now getting around to banning it.

Why?  I can only speculate.

• The soft drink industry is losing power now that people view it as producing unhealthy products.
• California recently took the lead and banned BVO along with three other questionably safe additives.
• Or maybe it just didn’t judge the evidence for harm as adequate.

Better now than never.

Resources

• Constituent Update: FDA Proposes Rule to Revoke Regulation Allowing the Use of Brominated Vegetable Oil in Food
• FDA Voices: How FDA’s New Approach to Reviewing Chemicals Added to Food Will Strengthen Food Safety
• Constituent Update: FDA Update on Post-market Assessment of Certain Food Ingredients
• Lists of Select Chemicals in the Food Supply Under FDA Review
• Food Chemical Safety
• The full list of products containing BVO

The long-awaited report on aspartame from the International Agency for Research on Cancer and the WHO and FAO Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) are now out.  These agencies jointly issued two documents.

A press release

Citing “limited evidence” for carcinogenicity in humans, IARC classified aspartame as possibly carcinogenic to humans (IARC Group 2B) and JECFA reaffirmed the acceptable daily intake of 40 mg/kg body weight.

A summary of the findings

• The [IARC] working group classified aspartame as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B) based on limited evidence for cancer in humans (for hepatocellular carcinoma, a type of liver cancer)…There was also limited evidence for cancer in experimental animals…In addition, there was limited mechanistic evidence that aspartame exhibits key characteristics of carcinogens, based on consistent and coherent evidence that aspartame induces oxidative stress in experimental systems and suggestive evidence that aspartame induces chronic inflammation and alters cell proliferation, cell death and nutrient supply in experimental systems.
• The [JEFCA] Committee concluded that the data evaluated during the meeting indicated no reason to change the previously established acceptable daily intake (ADI) of 0–40 mg/kg body weight for aspartame. The Committee therefore reaffirmed the ADI of 0–40 mg/kg body weight for aspartame…Based on the results of the oral carcinogenicity studies of aspartame, the absence of evidence of genotoxicity, and a lack of evidence on a mechanism by which oral exposure to aspartame could induce cancer, the Committee concluded that it is not possible to establish a link between aspartame exposure in animals and the appearance of cancer.

If this feels crazy-making, I’m with you.

For starters, I’ve never seen a scientific report released this way—essentially by leakage and press release before the research is published where it can be reviewed independently.

To summarize the chronology:

• June 29: Reuters releases leaked information that aspartame is soon to be declared a carcinogen (I wrote about this in a post on July 6)
• June 29: American Beverage Association releases statement: “There is a broad consensus in the scientific and regulatory community that aspartame is safe.”
• July 1: Vox publishes a an article with the provocative title, “The WHO is about to declare aspartame can cause cancer. Here’s why you should listen.”
• July 12: Reporters tell me that they participated in a press conference with WHO and IARC to discuss what the reports will say when they are released at 12:30 a.m. ET on July 14.
• July 12: Anahad O’Connor writes in the Washington Post: “Does aspartame pose a health risk? Here’s what the science says” (I’m quoted in it).
• July 12 and 13: The agencies send reporters copies of press releases on embargo (see above), but not the published data.
• July 13: Reporters get copies of a statement from the FDA disagreeing with IARC.
• July 14:  Everything comes off embargo, including these four pieces:

1. Research article in Lancet Oncology:  Carcinogenicity of aspartame, isoeugenol, and methyleugenol 
2. Infographic
3. Q & A
4. Featured News page on the evaluation of aspartame

Here’s what I think of all this: if aspartame is a carcinogen, it’s a weak one.

But it is artificial and off my dietary radar.  It’s not essential in human diets.  I don’t like its taste and I don’t like all the iffy questions about how it is metabolized.  I avoid it.

You don’t want to avoid it?  JEFCA says you can have 9 to 14 cans of diet soda a day without exceeding tolerable limits.  If you want one once in a while, it is highly unlikely to hurt you.

But a much better idea is getting out of the sweetened-drinks habit.  If you must have something sweet to drink, try adding fruit juice to water.