Soda Science
Making the World Safe for Coca-Cola
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
Takes readers deep inside the secret world of corporate science, where powerful companies and allied academic scientists mold research to meet industry needs.
The 1990s were tough times for the soda industry. In the United States, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a main culprit and advocated for soda taxes that might decrease the consumption of sweetened beverages—and threaten the revenues of the giant soda companies.
Soda Science tells the story of how industry leader Coca-Cola mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity, a view few experts accept. Anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh discovers a hidden world of science-making—with distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claims—dedicated to creating industry-friendly science and keeping it under wraps. By tracing the birth, maturation, death, and afterlife of the science they made, Greenhalgh shows how corporate science has managed to gain such a hold over our lives.
Spanning twenty years, her investigation takes her from the US, where the science was made, to China, a key market for sugary soda. In the US, soda science was a critical force in the making of today’s society of step-counting, fitness-tracking, weight-obsessed citizens. In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally. By following the scientists and their ambitious schemes to make the world safe for Coke, Greenhalgh offers an account that is more global—and yet more human—than the story that dominates public understanding today.
Coke’s research isn’t fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim. Her gripping book raises crucial questions about conflicts of interest in scientific research, the funding behind familiar messages about health, and the cunning ways giant corporations come to shape our diets, lifestyles, and health to their own needs.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this troubling exposé, Greenhalgh (Fat-Talk Nation), an anthropology professor emerita at Harvard University, reveals how Coca-Cola waged a pseudoscience campaign throughout the aughts to deflect public concern that their high-fat, high-sugar drinks were fueling an obesity epidemic. The soft drink company relied on the International Life Sciences Institute, a D.C.-based nonprofit funded by the food industry, to push its specious claim that exercise would allow Americans to fight obesity without cutting back on junk food. ILSI prioritized its political goals over empirical evidence, Greenhalgh contends, noting that the organization promoted a program encouraging elementary schoolers to take physical "activity breaks" throughout the day, even though no research had been conducted on whether the program actually affected childhood obesity. Greenhalgh's dogged research pulls from open records requests and ILSI tax forms to trace how Coke used its deep pockets to influence ostensibly independent researchers, offering multimillion-dollar grants to "scientists whose research was friendly to corporate interests" and whom the company would then call on to represent its favored outlook at medical conferences across the globe. A damning study of how corporations skew science to their benefit, this outrages.
