Are big bucks from Big Soda corrupting ‘health’ advocates?
What do soda and good health have in common?
That’s easy — nothing!
So why would soda giants Coke and Pepsi shell out millions every year to bigwig health advocacy groups like the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and the American Heart Association (AHA)?
That’s really easy. Big bucks buy influence. And when you back up the money truck with huge piles of cash, you can buy a lot of it.
As a new study uncovered, those groups, and others, are taking millions in cash from Big Soda every year.
And at the same time, these health groups expect us to believe that doesn’t poison the well of advice they dish out to us.
Nobody is going to be shocked to learn from this study, published in the American Journal of
Preventive Medicine, that huge corporations like Coke and Pepsi cough up millions to get cozy with state and federal lawmakers.
The way soda makers see it, the problem is all these do-gooders want their lawmakers to set crazy high taxes on soft drinks.
Whether this actually works or not to lower obesity rates is beside the point. All Coke and
Pepsi know is that such taxes would be a disaster for their bottom lines. So they pump boatloads of money into their efforts to convince elected officials to just say “No,” to soda taxes.
But what about the not-so-little matter of the big bucks they give to organizations like the ADA and AHA, and even the National Institutes of Health (NIH)?
Two Boston University researchers sifted through years of data tracking down news releases, public databases, and any other scrap of information they could find.
As one of the researchers told the New York Times, “We wanted to look at what these companies really stand for.”
And when they got a clear look, it wasn’t a very pretty sight.
Take the nonprofit group Save the Children (STC). In several states, STC promoted campaigns to tax soda, but in 2010, it changed course and dropped its campaigns like a hot potato. That is after they received a $5 million grant from Pepsi.
A statement from STC contains exactly the corporate spin you’d expect. They’d already decided to deep-six the soda tax campaigns, they say. The donation was “unrelated” to that decision.
Maybe someone is buying that malarkey, but the huge potential for conflict of interest created by massive donations is impossible to ignore. These powerful corporations don’t peel off that many greenbacks just for the pleasure of making nonprofit executives smile.
In the past few years, Coke in particular has been on a charitable spending spree, The Times reports.
For example, it’s donated:
- more than $400,000 to the AHA,
- $140,000 to the ADA, and
- almost $2 million to the NIH
Surprise, surprise — Coke reps didn’t want to talk about all this. But as one public policy expert put it, Big Soda is “using corporate philanthropy to undermine public health measures.”
I’m not surprised Coke dodged the issue. Last year I told you about another New York Times report about Coke’s very generous multi-million-dollar support of a group called the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN).
Besides having a name that sounds like a parody of an authentic organization, a GEBN vice president told the paper that there is “virtually no compelling evidence” that junk food, soda, and overeating are causing the obesity epidemic.
That’s supposed to be a joke, right? It’s hard to believe that an adult actually spoke that sentence to a reporter.
What’s not at all hard to believe is that Big Soda’s big bucks giveaway helps convince these so-called health advocates to stand aside and let the soda and junk food pipeline keep flowing.
Sources:
“Coke and Pepsi give millions to public health, then lobby against it” Anahad O’Connor, October 10, 2016, The New York Times, nytimes.com
