The Coca-Cola Company formed a new organization by providing financial and logistical support to the Chicago-based Global Energy Balance Network. The goal of the new nonprofit is to spread the message that weight-conscious Americans worry too much about how much they eat and drink but fail to pay enough attention to exercise, the New York Times reports.
(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
The portfolios of Coca-Cola shareholders took a hit after 1998 as Americans focused on controlling obesity and consumed less sugar. For example, the average American in 1998 consumed about 40 gallons of sugary soda per year, and by 2014, that number had dropped to about 30 gallons, representing a 25-percent decrease in the consumption of sugary beverages. Share prices have since recovered to near historical highs, but shareholders want more.
Naturally, the company is going to try to do something, which, in this case, is to try to deflect our attention away from what we eat and drink and toward exercise. Unfortunately for Coke’s shareholders, this is at best a futile campaign, and at worst a wretched and reproachable example of bad corporate citizenship. They have enlisted the voices of several well-compensated “scientists” who have published papers about obesity, including Steven N Blair, of the Department of Exercise Science, Epidemiology, and Biostatistics at the Arnold School of Public Health, University of South Carolina, Columbia.
Of course, scientists are about five times more likely to reach a favorable conclusion from their investigations if they’re being paid by the manufacturer of the product. Didn’t anybody see Harrison Ford play Dr Richard Kimble in The Fugitive? If movies don’t convince the people at Coke that this is a transparent, half-baked plot to pull the wool over Americans’ eyes, they can also turn to more peer-reviewed research:
The main finding of our assessment was that those (systematic reviews conducted in the field of sugar-sweetened beverages) with stated sponsorship or conflicts of interest with food or beverage companies were five times more likely to report a conclusion of no positive association between (sugar-sweetened beverage) consumption and weight gain or obesity than those reporting having no industry sponsorship or conflicts of interest.
Even the federal government has issued substantial warnings over the years about this kind of “scientific” activity. “The public trust in what we do is just essential, and we cannot afford to take any chances with the integrity of the research process,” said Dr Francis Collins, Director of the National Institutes of Health, on a webpage that serves to strengthen existing regulations that manage financial conflicts of interest by taking a rigorous approach to managing the essential relationships between funding organizations and the researchers they support.
This means, more likely than not, any scientists Coke pays to do research will say there’s no association between drinking sugary soda pop and weight gain. The problem, which these scientists almost certainly won’t point out, is that the decrease in sugary soda consumption is working to reduce weight gain. In a 2012 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Janne C de Ruyter et al found that masked replacement of sugar-containing beverages with noncaloric beverages reduced weight gain and fat accumulation in normal-weight children. To get the same effect with exercise, it can take decades, and most people won’t make it to the goal: An increase in physical activity over several decades was linked to a significantly lower risk of weight gain in at least one peer-reviewed study.
These are correlations and don’t necessarily imply causation, but to reach a conclusion in the other direction, saying consumption of sugary soda is unrelated to weight gain, would be intellectually dishonest in light of research and the high correlations mentioned.
People don’t have a clue about this research, either, which makes what Coke is doing even worse. It’s expected behavior for a corporation to try to make money, but this is taking advantage of what people don’t know. Many Americans actually believe they can lose weight just by exercising. I have lost more than 100 pounds in the last eight months, and I can tell you, without a moment of hesitation, you can’t lose weight without decreasing the number of calories consumed each day.
The reason I say that is because exercise won’t last. Sure, I ride my bike an hour and burn maybe 500–700 calories. That creates a calorie deficit, which will help lose weight, as long as I don’t consume three bottles of Coke that day. The flaw in this argument, though, is that I don’t have time to ride my bike an hour every day, but drinking three bottles of Coke is easy.
Coke can develop all the marketing and PR campaigns they want. In order to change Americans’ lifestyle sufficiently that exercise alone will create enough of a calorie deficit to change obese people into those with a healthy body weight, it’s going to take a lot more than sharing a Coke and a smile. Smartphones can change our lifestyle. Video games or TVs can change our lifestyle. Sharing a Coke with a smile is probably not going to do it.
Look, we could all walk, ride, and just get off our duffs more than we do. I have no issue with trying to get people to exercise more than they do. It’s just not going to help them lose weight, and it’s probably not sustainable in the long run. To make something last, it takes a lifestyle-changing event, such as the development of the computer.
So, it looks like Coke is on its last legs here. This is how most huge companies take their last breath: by refusing to adapt to changing market pressures. Instead of trying to force people into a new lifestyle, what the company could do is spend a little more money on research and develop products that give people what they want, not what they have been tricked into desiring. Such products might not be as lucrative at first, but developing them would be more responsible than the snow job we’re likely to get from the Global Energy Balance Network. The sugar-sweetened beverage deniers will eventually see the light.
