How corporations are trying to convince us that soda isn’t really that bad.

So much of what we as a public think about the food we eat and how it affects our health comes to us in the form of bytes of information provided by food corporations. And they are not unbiased sources. Harvard social anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh did a lot of research for her book The Science of Soda: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola to distinguish what we might consider pure science from corporate science. These are two completely different disciplines.

Evan Kleiman: I’ve had a bottle of Mexican Coke in my refrigerator for over a year now, but I can’t bring myself to drink it. And once I saw the infographic in your book that described in horrifying detail what happens to your body in the first hour after drinking cola, I don’t think I’ll ever open it. Why don’t you read it for us?

Susan Greenhalgh: In the first 10 minutes, 10 teaspoons of sugar hits your system. This is 100% of the recommended daily value. You won’t immediately vomit from the unbearable sweetness, because phosphoric acid weakens the taste, allowing you to mute it. Twenty minutes later, your blood sugar levels spike, causing a spike in insulin. Your liver reacts to this by converting all the excess sugar into fat. There’s a lot of that at the moment. 40 minutes, caffeine absorption is complete. The pupils dilate, blood pressure rises, and the liver responds by releasing more sugar into the blood. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked, preventing sleepiness.

Okay, five minutes later, your body increases dopamine production, stimulating your brain’s reward centers. By the way, physically this is similar to the effects of heroin. Phosphoric acid binds calcium, magnesium and zinc in the lower intestines, causing a further acceleration of metabolism. This is exacerbated by high doses of sugar and artificial sweeteners, which increase the excretion of calcium in the urine within 60 minutes, and the diuretic properties of caffeine come into play. That is, it makes you pee. Now it is expected that you will have to evacuate the bound calcium, magnesium and zinc that were going into your bones, as well as sodium, electrolytes and water. In other words, your body cannot absorb these beneficial ingredients. It is eliminated from the body.

60 minutes. Here’s the last option. When the rave inside you dies down, you experience a sugar crisis. You may become irritable or lethargic. You’ve also now literally drunk all the water that was in the cola, but not before filling it with valuable nutrients that your body could use for things like being able to hydrate your body or build strong bones in your teeth, and that’s what happens. after drinking cola.

Harvard social anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh has explored “pure science” and “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 the key to what I’m doing in the book. What I do is take a perspective on the soda industry and ask, when the obesity epidemic started and all these health officials started demanding soda taxes, the industry was under terrible threat, and what did it do? It began to create science to protect itself. So the whole book tries to look at things from an industry perspective, from inside the world of corporate science. And who knew that everything worked this way?

Let us tell you what happened in the 1990s that forced giant food corporations, and Coca Cola in particular, to begin very specific research.

IIn health statistics compiled by the federal government, researchers suddenly began to see a sharp increase in the percentage of Americans who were overweight and obese. They previously believed that about 25% of the adult population fell into these categories, but were horrified when they saw that a much larger proportion, up to 33% with an increase in just 10 years, represented a giant shift in national statistics. The trend then continued, and that’s when the soda industry started to feel more threatened.

And how did they react?

They used a framework called the Energy Balance System. It’s pretty simple, and it’s been a basic concept used in nutrition science for decades, only they’ve twisted it a little. This system states that in order to maintain a healthy weight, you need to balance the number of calories you eat with the number of calories you burn by moving. Here’s how you should stay at a healthy weight. These soda scientists used this concept, but in fact, if you look at their science, they focus almost exclusively on exercise, on calorie expenditure, with the motto, “eat whatever you want, and then you can just exercise.” take it off and you won’t gain weight.”

So they actually put the responsibility on the consumer rather than the manufacturer of this high sugar product.

Absolutely. And also no accountability to the government, because some people in the public health field have called for soda taxes and restrictions on marketing to children. This soda science is an unusual science that was developed in secret in the absence of soda taxes. They did this by simply never mentioning the possibility when everyone in public health was talking about it.

What other strategies did they use to shape public opinion?

They adopted the term “healthy, active lifestyle” and Coca Cola began investing in so-called “healthy, active lifestyle” programs around the world, including in the United States. Thus, the term “healthy, active lifestyle” equates “healthy” with “active.” Not much is said about food here.

If you look closely at the programs, you will see that Coke also provides nutrition education, but nutrition education is very industry-friendly. It certainly doesn’t say, “Don’t eat soda.” It says, “Drink the soda and then burn it.”

It’s just a huge effort, and Coke was a leader in these big food companies, but they all worked together. They had a scientific non-profit organization that they were all members of, and this scientific non-profit organization was the organization that sponsored this new kind of soda science. Meanwhile, all companies promoted an “active, healthy lifestyle.” It seemed as if the soda companies themselves had taken on the fight against the obesity epidemic as part of their work.

Amazing. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about regarding science? Is it really fake science or is it bad science?

Yes, so we can’t say it’s fake science. This is real science. But it’s definitely bad science. This is real science because this soda science, this corporate science, was created by eminent scientists and published in leading journals, but it was distorted by its purpose, which was to help the soda industry, (its) purpose to protect sales carbonated drinks. by pressing exercises.

But it’s still real science, and that’s really important because most observers of corporate science simply dismiss it. They say: “This is ridiculous, such bad science. We don’t even have to think about it.” But in my book I say, wait, 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 beneficial to Coca-Cola. If everyone thought Coca-Cola was spreading fake science, no one would pay attention. But everyone thought it was real science, and they got away with it for 15 years. This is a very long time. Nobody called them to do this for 15 years.

And then what happened?

An obesity researcher in Canada noticed that the website of a new global network of energy balance experts made no mention of funding. So he sent a tweet to one of the organizers, and the organizers had to say, “Oh, didn’t we post this here? It’s funded by Coca Cola.”

So this Canadian obesity researcher sent all the information he had collected to a health researcher at New York Times. This researcher spent three or four months digging and digging and finding all kinds of information. Then, in August 2015, it happened this is a giant revelation New York Timesfront page article, large images of the three principles of soda. It was a huge scandal.

As a result of the scandal Coca Cola has stopped funding sciencetherefore it has effectively stopped as an active soda industry project. In fact, some scientists are still doing similar research, but Coke is not funding it. Meanwhile, it lives in other countries. So it’s over in this country, but it lives on in China, where it was already built into Chinese politics.

What should our customers be like as consumers? Why is this important?

This is important because the influence of this soda science is largely hidden. I followed these scientists to China and if you can believe it, they got it… Soda science is an exercise in science. He makes two claims. First, exercise is a priority solution to the problem of obesity. This is actually not true. Exercise helps, but dietary restrictions are more important. The second claim is that soda taxes and other government policies are not that important. These soda scientists brought these ideas to China. They won their approval as an authoritative body of ideas for the country and incorporated them into Chinese chronic disease policies. Today, China’s general policy for combating chronic diseases called Healthy China: 2030you will find Coca-Cola’s fingerprints. So it’s pretty scary.

This also had an impact in the US. I haven’t looked at them all, of course, but one is very obvious. Today in the United States, our fitness culture is dominated by counting steps, moves, and all the movements we make. We have a culture of wearing Fitbits, counting steps, exercising, and obsessing over weight. I make a strong case that soda science, begun in the early 2000s, has helped this culture become much stronger. People still believe and think that this is an adequate solution to their weight problem. Well, that’s not true. It won’t work unless you couple it with dietary restrictions. So these guys, these soda companies and allied scientists have really done a lot of harm.

“The Science of Soda: Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola” delves into corporate-backed messages about the health effects of soda. Photo courtesy of University of Chicago Press.