Coca-Cola has bought itself a huge economic footprint. It provides funding to the American Heart Association, the American Lung Association, the American College of Cardiology, the American Academy of Pediatrics and Harvard Medical School/Partners in Health. It donates to major universities, recreation and fitness groups and organizations serving ethnic and minority groups whose members are especially challenged with obesity.
Junk food sellers even manipulate the press. The BMJ has reported on Coca-Cola's secret influence on medical and science journalists through funding of journalism conferences including those held by the prestigious Washington, D.C.-based National Press Foundation. No wonder "obesity is caused by lack of exercise" not by junk food like Coke is heard not just from governments and medical professionals but from reporters.
In the 2014 movie "Fed Up" Katie Couric exposed how the US government admonishes people to eat right, while pushing the foods that make them fat, and how school lunchrooms have also been bought by Big Food. The film reveals how the egg, sugar and other Big Food industries revised guidelines generated from the 1977 McGovern Report that recommended people eat less foods high in fat and sugar to favor them, overruling the late Sen. McGovern.
In 2006, a similar Big Food triumph occurred. Faced with the United Nations' WHO food recommendations that were similar to the McGovern Report, then Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Tommy G. Thompson actually flew to Geneva to threaten WHO that if the guidelines stood, the US would withdraw its WHO financial support. Yes--supporting agriculture is more important to the US government than the health of its people.
Targeting Poor People in the US
A few years ago, the New York Times revealed the devastating toll that junk food, obesity and diabetes have on poor people in Appalachia. They are sicker than people in Central America, noted Dr. Joseph Smiddy, a health volunteer in Virginia. "In Central America, they're eating beans and rice and walking everywhere. They're not drinking Mountain Dew and eating candy. They're not having an epidemic of obesity and diabetes." Of course he was talking about areas not yet invaded by Nestle, Coca-Cola and McDonald's.
In 2017 in Chicago there was a bitter fight over a penny-per-ounce tax that had been levied on sweetened beverages. The beverage industry spent more than $1.4 million on television ads trying to reverse the tax and won. The industry framed the desire to drink high-calorie, obesity-, diabetes- and dental cavity-causing soft drinks as "consumer choice." The biggest supporters of the tax repeal were poor communities in Chicago--the ones most hurt by soft drinks and "food deserts" where better food is not readily available. They drank the Kool-Aid and the Mountain Dew.
Once upon a time, "sugar" meant sugar from sugar cane or sugar beets. But since 1980, soft drink producers have favored high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and they have been followed by most major food producers and processors. Trade restrictions in other countries to protect local sugar production made sugar more expensive to use even as US farmers were growing copious amounts of corn because of farm subsidies and GMO seeds. HFCS is also cheaper to produce, store and ship.
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