Authors: Tristan Donovan
Without question the rising levels of obesity were the result of a great many interlinked contributory factors. The shift toward office-based work. The trend for eating out and fast food. Increased portion sizes. A lack of physical activity. The shift to home entertainment. Urban planning that prioritized cars over other forms of transportation. Our own food and drink preferences. Where soda fit into this complex cocktail was an obvious question. The ancient belief in the healing power of fizz had turned out to be nothing more than a myth; all carbonation did was make water look prettier, tickle the tongue, and encourage more burping. But the caloric content of sodas did have the potential to make us fat, a potential that more and more studies were concluding was being realized as sales of fizzy drinks soared.
The idea that the sugar in soda might cause weight gain had dated back years, but there was little evidence to support the link. Even in the early 1970s, when Michael Jacobson cofounded the consumer advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest, there were few studies to support the notion that soda could make you fat. “It made sense, but there were
no scientific studies to show that soda promoted obesity and obesity was a much smaller problem back then, so the focus was on tooth decay,” he recalls.
Studies linking the sugar and acidity of soda to tooth decay and the erosion of tooth enamel first gained public attention in the late 1940s, as dentists began warning their patients about the damage that sugary pop and candy could have on oral health, and advising them to cut down soda consumption. By the summer of 1951 Coca-Cola estimated that the talk of soda damaging teeth had cost the company a million gallons in syrup sales, and internal memos discussed how to stage a “counter-offensive against attacks on Coca-Cola on the dental and nutritional fronts.” The resulting plan sought to emphasize the complexity of the issue by highlighting how regular brushing, fluoridation of water, and the amount of time food spent in the mouth also played a role in tooth decay and erosion. As one company memo put it: “We want to dislodge the cocksure attitude in the minds of dentists, which incites them to tell their patients they should avoid candy and soft drinks.”
The counteroffensive made little difference. Dentists continued to advise the public that sugary soda could harm teeth but, says Jacobson, the issue of rotting teeth simply wasn't compelling enough to persuade many people to change their drinking habits. “People didn't care all that much about tooth decay, so we didn't get much traction back in the 1970s,” he says. “But we certainly called soda a junk food and bad mouthed it when we could. It was just junk. Total junk. It stood apart from just about every other food in that it was consumed in fairly large volumes and had no vitamins, minerals, protein, fiberânothing. Just sugar. So we told the public and people didn't care that much.”
The Cola War deepened. Soda serving sizes grew. More people took to drinking soda. Those who already drank soda drank even more. Soda shifted from a treat to a several times a day drink suitable for every occasion. “I grew up in the '50s,” recalls Jacobson. “My family would have a soda on a Sunday with dinner or maybe if we went on a picnic. It just wasn't the kind of thing you get anywhere. Sometimes I worked in my father's store and one of the guys working there would go out and get a few sodas for
us. We saw that as a treat and not a big deal, but it's become a big problem. One reason is larger serving size. You have to remember that when family sized Coca-Cola was introduced in the '50s that was marketed as something the whole family could consume. It was twenty-six ounces, four six-and-a-half-ounce servingsâtoday that's a single serving for some people. Then the proliferation of fast-food restaurants helped to standardize soda as the beverage you would drink with your meal.”
There was no doubt that by the end of the 1990s Americans were drinking soda in quantities that would have been unthinkable in the 1950s, and with much of the growth in sales coinciding with the nation's weight gain, soda became a prime suspect in the hunt for who made the nation fat. Research intensified and soon more and more studies were concluding that nondiet sodas were the source of some, possibly many, of the extra calories that were making America fat. These findings were followed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishing maps that vividly illustrated the extent of obesity state by state. Soon the issue of weight had become the foremost health issue in America.
As soda sales peaked in 1998, Jacobson published
Liquid Candy,
a report that picked out some of the most damning evidence about soda's role in obesity and pointed an accusatory finger at Big Soda for fattening up the kids. In the wake of its publication, orchestrated stories about the Cola War from their own publicity departments gave way to newspaper and TV reports citing the research that painted soda as the enemy of good health.
Then in 1999, as the debate about soda and health gathered speed, a revolution began in Venice, California. Beverage companies had long sought access to schools. Not so much for the sales, but for the chance to get their products in front of the next generation in the hope of turning them into loyal fans of their brands. In the 1950s every successful push into a school was a cause for celebration among soda makers. “Orange Crush is served to the children and they love it,” the orange soda's internal newsletter
O.C. News
proudly reported about one such deal in May 1951. The children, it continued, even spontaneously burst into song to express their love of Orange Crush and “mothers have been writing in to state that consumption of milk has been on the decline since the advent of the program.” Whether
the mothers' letters were thanking Orange Crush for weaning their children off milk remained unrecorded. This push into education evolved into long-term deals where soft drink companies got the exclusive right to provide beverages to a school and, in return, cash-strapped schools got money. As the 1990s ended, these deals, which could last as long as ten years, existed in 92 percent of high schools, 74 percent of middle schools, and 43 percent of elementary schools.
Jacqueline Domac, a teacher at Venice High School, knew nothing about these deals. So when in 1999 one of the students in her health classes asked her why there was no pure fruit juice on sale in any of the school's twenty-two vending machines, she was surprised at the absence. Simple enough to fix, she reckoned, and she sent a request to the school's finance manager asking for fruit juice to be added. The next day she got a reply in her mailbox: “Sorry, selling this juice would conflict with our soda contract.”
Venice High School had an exclusive deal with Coca-Cola worth $3,000 a year plus several hundred cases of free beverages. As far as soda-school deals go it was a poor one, given that similar schools were getting $50,000-plus a year, but what angered Domac was that this contract was stopping students from accessing healthier drinks. In response, she and her students launched a campaign pushing for the Coke deal to be canceled and for healthier options to be introduced. As part of the campaign Domac obtained a copy of the school's beverage contract and sent it to the
Los Angeles Times,
a move that earned her a stiff telling-off at work but also shoved the nature of these school contracts into the public eye.
Domac wasn't alone. As concerns about obesity deepened, grassroots campaigns against the sale of soda on school premises were bubbling up all across the country. By 2002 Domac and her fellow campaigners scored their first major victory when Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the largest in the United States with more than 750,000 students, voted in favor of a ban on soda in its schools, despite the objections of several schools that said they would be thousands of dollars worse off as a result. Many kids weren't too pleased either, as one Pepsi-loving eighth-grader told the
Los Angeles Times:
“It's unfair because when we get thirsty we need something to drink, and we don't want water. We want something that has sugar.”
But the tide had turned. In district after district, state after state, the soda was kicked out and the industry's contracts ripped up. Similar bans followed in Europe, including the United Kingdom and France. The beverage industry fought back for a while, arguing with little success that pulling soda out of schools would take money away from children's education. But the momentum was unstoppable. In May 2006 the soda industry struck an agreement with the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, the childhood obesity campaign group founded by Bill Clinton and the American Heart Association. As part of the deal the big three soda giants pledged to phase out nondiet soda in the nation's schools by 2010. By the fall of 2009 shipments of regular fizzy drinks to schools were down 95 percent compared to 2004-05, and water had become the most common drink on sale in schools.
By the time the industry agreed to start removing fizzy drinks from schools, soda was clearly in trouble. Studies linking it to obesity had continued to pile up, and sales were dropping as weight-watching consumers turned their back on full-calorie soda and opted for bottled water instead. Bottled water had come a long way since the days when Perrier's mineral water became the fizz of choice for the go-getting yuppies of the 1980s. In 1986 Americans bought 1.4 billion gallons of bottled water, but in 2006 bottled water sales had reached 8.3 billion. Soda still topped the beverage industry, of course, with more than 15 billion gallons sold every year, but it was losing ground fast as water, new age beverages, and energy drinks peeled away its consumers and concerns about obesity damaged its image.
As it happened, the soda giants had been looking beyond the world of fizz for several years. Coca-Cola was accelerating its efforts to turn itself into an all-around beverage company that produced water, juice, energy drinks, and sports drinks, as well as the soda that made the company famous. Cadbury Schweppes tried unsuccessfully to reinvent soda's image with 7Up Plus, a diet version of the lemon-lime drink that featured added vitamin C and calcium. PepsiCo went furthest of all. In the late 1990s it started hunting for healthy brands to add to its portfolio of soda and snacks. It sold off its fast-food chains, bought Tropicana, and then swallowed Quaker Oats. By the time Indra Nooyi became its chief executive in 2006, PepsiCo had
become bigger than Coca-Cola in market value by reaching far beyond the world of soda in its hunt for a less sugary future.
While Pepsi and Mountain Dew would remain top sellers for the company, PepsiCo now saw its future as a maker of “fun for you” products like Pepsi, “better for you” products like the zero-calorie Pepsi Max and, increasingly, “good for you” lines such as Quaker Oats. For Nooyi the Cola War battles for slivers of market share were history. “We, Pepsi, would push like hell ⦠and get a tenth of a point of market share,” she told the
Wall Street Journal
in June 2011. “The next period, Coke would come along, push like hell, and gain a tenth. This was a zero-sum game. The cola category was profitable, but didn't grow profits.”
But even as the soda companies reinvented themselves and their products, the number of obesity studies connecting soda to the problem of fat continued to grow. An examination of the obesity studies published in the journal
Public Health Nutrition
concluded that the consumption of sweetened beverages might account for as much as a fifth of the weight gained in America between 1977 and 2001. Another review of the studies, this time in the
American Journal of Public Health,
reported that there were “clear associations of soft drink intake with increased energy intake and body weight,” and that studies funded by the food industry tended to conclude that soft drinks had less of an effect than studies funded by other organizations.
Some researchers claimed that high fructose corn syrup, the money-saving sugar substitute that the industry adopted in the late 1970s and early 1980s, caused even more weight gain than sugar. The finding prompted a spate of sodas such as Mountain Dew Throwback that made a virtue out of containing cane sugar instead of corn syrup. But the evidence that high fructose corn syrup was worse than sugar was weak. Obesity was rising just as fast in Europe, where the industry had stuck with sugar, and even the ardent soda critics at the Center for Science in the Public Interest felt corn syrup made little if any difference compared to sugar. But even without the unconvincing claims about high fructose corn syrup, by the start of the 2010s soda was being compared to cigarettes with the
New York Times
posing the question: “Is soda the new tobacco?”
Comparing soda to tobacco was a real stretch, but that such a comparison was even being made only underlined how the concern about obesity had turned fizz into public health enemy number one. The American Beverage Association, the trade body representing the beverage industry, argued that the research wasn't conclusive or thorough enough and that it was unfair to blame soda alone for something as complex as obesity, but just as with the fight over soda in school, the momentum was with the health campaigners. “It's clear that soda is losing,” says Michael Jacobson. “It's been kicked out of schools and some city government properties. They are really feeling the pressure from a bunch of different directions. Sales of the sugary drinks have been going down year after year.”
Soon cities and states across America were floating proposals designed to curb soda drinking. Most looked to taxes as a way of not only encouraging people to drink fewer fizzy drinks but also raising revenue. Attempts to impose such a tax in the small California cities of Richmond and El Monte were firmly rejected by voters in November 2012 after heavy campaigning by the beverage industry. But while soda taxes remain more idea than reality, Jacobson is convinced that the soda industry will ultimately fail to stop the introduction of such levies: “The industry wants to crush every tax initiative. They got a tax repealed in the state of Maine and a temporary tax in Seattle repealed. They spent millions of dollars to fight off taxes in Philadelphia and New York State. They are willing to put any amount of money into killing these proposals. But as the health evidence continues to build up and as cities and states need money, I think our governments will continue to look at soda taxes as a way to reduce sales and generate revenue.”