Coke made us all obese: McDonald’s, high-fructose corn-syrup and the sick, super-sized strategy to make you fat When soda makers switched to high-fructose corn syrup, it cost pennies to super-size drinks -- and our waistlines TOPICS: BOOKS, EXCERPTS, COCA-COLA, OBESITY, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, EARL BUTZ, FDA, USDA, MICHAEL POLLAN, ARCHER DANIELS MIDLAND, MCDONALDS, SODA, EDITORS PICKS, SUSTAINABILITY NEWS, BUSINESS NEWS Coke made us all obese: McDonalds, high-fructose corn-syrup and the sick, super-sized strategy to make you fat (Credit: Monkey Business Images via Shutterstock/Salon) Excerpted from Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism Coke’s growth in the final decades of the twentieth century was literally littered with waste, yet much of this pollution, especially the aluminum and plastic, remained out of sight, tucked away in landfills many citizens never saw. Packaging, however, was just one of the obfuscated problems of perpetual growth. Many other unpleasant by-products of Coca-Cola’s conquest were hidden from view by 2000. Coke’s bottlers, for example, relied on petroleum-guzzling trucks that emitted large quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. By 2006, over 200,000 Coke trucks puttered around the world, burning millions of gallons of fossil fuels to bring Coke to market. Likewise, for many years Coke’s countless coolers and refrigerators pumped chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) into the air, contributing to the depletion of the earth’s ozone. All this was done to push a luxury item. But if many of Coke’s pollutants remained out of sight, one unwanted by-product of growth became conspicuously abundant after 1985: human fat deposits. As Coke’s consumers indulged in supersized soda binges, downing more and more sugary beverages each year, their bodies began to reflect the costs of excess. In response, a growing group of consumer health advocates began to attack Coke and other soft drink firms for making people fat. Their claim could not have been more damning. Coke itself was garbage, they complained, a “junk” food that was contributing to a growing obesity epidemic. Coke at one time might have been a simple treat, a “pause that refreshes,” but by the 1990s it had become a staple of the average American’s diet, consumed throughout the day, channeling more calories into people’s bodies than they needed. The statistics seemingly said it all. Annual per capita consumption of caloric soft drinks in the United States had more than tripled since 1955. A country that had once consumed 11 gallons per person annually in the 1950s now downed over 36 gallons fifty years later. That meant the average American in 2000 packed away over 35 pounds of sweetener a year, just from soft drinks. This was a problem. What had happened? How did this dramatic increase in soft drink consumption come about? How did Coke and other soft drinks become such significant contributors to citizens’ corpulence?
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 17:37:28 +0000
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