Currently browsing posts about: Soft drinks

Thanks to Jim Krieger of Healthy Food America, for sending this one.

According to the Daily Beast: MAGA Influencers Caught Red-Handed Shilling for Big Soda

A string of MAGA influencers appear to have been caught taking money from Big Soda to undermine the government’s attempts to ban people from buying soda with food stamps.  Last week, a host of influential online pro-Trump personalities…raised eyebrows on X when they all appeared to abruptly change their views on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s push to pass legislation which would ban food-stamp recipients from spending their money on soft drinks and junk food….conservative journalist Nick Sortor posted an expose of the offending posts side-by-side on X, alongside claims they had been paid to adopt a pro-soda stance by a social media PR company named Influenceable….“Not a SINGLE ONE of them disclosed they were paid for these posts, which led readers to believe a general SODA BAN was in the works.”

According to The Daily Wire: Soda Lobby Group American Beverage Denies Paying Influencers To Fight SNAP Restrictions

In a statement sent to The Daily Wire on Tuesday, ABA President and CEO Kevin Keane further echoed the denial, saying it had conducted a “thorough vetting” and is “confident” that it was not involved in the effort.

Whew.  What is this about?

The issue of adding sugar-sweetened beverages to the short list of food items that cannot be bought with SNAP benefits (Alcohol, Cigarettes, prepared foods, medicines, supplements) is a difficult one, splitting some public health advocates from some anti-hunger advocates and forging unexpected political alliances.

RFK Jr’s MAHA movement wants sodas out of SNAP.  The MAHA arguments:

• Sodas contain sugars (lots) but no other nutrients.
• Drinking a lot of them correlates with poor health.
• SNAP recipients buy a lot of soda.
• SNAP benefit are not taxed, making the cost of sodas cheaper for them in some states.
• SNAP recipients could still buy sodas with their own (non-SNAP) money.
• The WIC program specifies which foods (all of them healthy) recipients can buy with their benefits; it works fine.

Arguments against:

• Poor people should be able to eat just as unhealthfully as everyone else.
• Blocking them from buying sodas is condescending.
• Doing this removes choice and is unfair.
• A ban will hurt the profits of the soda industry and retailers who sell sodas.

For years, public health advocates and some states have called for pilot projects (“waivers”) to see how removing sodas might work.  The USDA has always rejected such petitions.

I favor pilot projects, in part because of what I learned as a member of the SNAP to Health Commission, and also because of the letters I received after publication of Soda Politics.  SNAP recipients wrote me that they viewed their benefits as a license to buy junk food and would welcome restrictions.  They would not buy as much soda if they had to pay for it with non-SNAP funds.

The new USDA Secretary says she will agree to waivers.  Good.  Let’s try this and see how it works.

Several groups under the auspices of Healthy Eating Research got together to produce this guide for kids ages 5-18.

To summarize:

• • Drink: water or milk
  • Limit: 100% juice (too much sugar), plant-based milk alternatives (except for medical reasons), flavored milk (too much sugar)
  • Avoid: beverages with caffeine and other stimulants, sugar-sweetened beverages, beverages with non-sugar sweeteners

Resources

• Press Release
• Consensus Statement  [(Spanish) (Vietnamese) (Tagalog)]
• Technical Report
• Summary
• Tips for Families
• Provider Toolkit

Translated Materials

• Consensus Statement  [(Spanish) (Vietnamese) (Tagalog)]
• Recommendations Graphic  [(Spanish) (Vietnamese) (Tagalog)]
• Added Sugars  [(Spanish) (Vietnamese) (Tagalog)]
• Caffeine Facts  [(Spanish) (Vietnamese) (Tagalog)]

I don’t get it really.  These commercials don’t look any different to me.  Maybe you can tell the difference.

Coca Cola’s annual Christmas commercial has been created with AI this time. pic.twitter.com/xO72akwoBh

— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm) November 15, 2024

According to news reports, Coca-Cola is getting a big backlash.

Instead of recognizing it was a mistake and apologizing, as many expected, the brand justified its use of AI, stating that it “remains dedicated to creating the highest level of work at the intersection of human creativity and technology.”

This is all about marketing, and marketing to kids at that.  The Center for Science in the Public Interest did a big report on that some years ago.  It’s still worth reading.

Addition: my distant but dearly loved cousin, Michael Kravit, who is in this business, writes:

Well, since we’re talking advertising, this zevia commercial is their cheeky response to coke’s ad. And they are getting a lot of attention for it.

The Santa Cruz Sentinal says Measure Z soda tax officially passes in Santa Cruz.

According to the Santa Cruz County Elections Department, 15,780 votes were counted in favor of the ballot initiative, or about 52%, and 14,364 votes, or approximately 48%, were counted against the passage of Measure Z….“Despite being outspent $1.9 million to our $85,000 by corporate special interests, the people of Santa Cruz stood strong and made their voices heard.”

The tax has been a long time coming.  It was first proposed in 2018, but was blocked by a California state act backed by the soda industry which prevented taxes on groceries until 2031.  Lawsuits overturned the penalty provision of the act, which allowed tax proposals to continue.

Politico reviews the history of soda tax fights in California.

Berkeley voted to renew its existing tax, no doubt for these reasons and despite being outspent tenfold.

Research looking at the last decade of Berkeley’s sugary drink tax shows the tax is working: Consumption of sugary drinks dropped by 52% and water increased by 29% among Berkeley residents in diverse neighborhoods with a large proportion of Black and Latino residents. In addition, 16 hydration stations have been installed and $5.7 million has been invested into 18 community gardens at Berkeley Unified School District sites. Funding has also supported vital public health and sustainability programs through organizations like Lifelong Medical Care, Healthy Black Families, The Multicultural Institute, YMCA of the East Bay Early Childhood Impact and The Ecology Center.

The point of all this:

Sugary drinks are the largest source of added sugar in the American diet. The American Heart Association recommends no more than six teaspoons of added sugar per day for women and nine teaspoons for men. One 12-ounce can of sugared soda contains about 10 teaspoons.

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.