Even as it was dominating the field, however, Coke was having difficulty meeting its high earnings expectations year after year, especially as the market for soft drinks became increasingly saturated. Pepsi solved its problem, in part, by diversifying, buying up first Frito-Lay and then Gatorade and becoming as much a snack food vendor as a soda company. (Soft drink sales now account for less than 20 percent of Pepsi’s business.) But Coke saw its future in liquid, specifically in carbonated soft drinks, which still make up more than 80 percent of its sales. It would need new markets to swim in, and so it redoubled its efforts to put its red-and-white dynamic ribbon within all 360 degrees of customers’ sight lines.
In all of the pressure to continue expanding, Ivester and company never asked: Did the world really need all of that Coke? The answer to that question took them completely by surprise. After years of drinking more and more gallons of sugar-laced beverages, people finally couldn’t ignore the consequences of all of that consumption in one area: their health. As it turned out, increasing evidence showed that Coke was not only “biggering” its own beverage sizes, sales, and profits—but also “biggering” American waistlines. The ensuing controversy over soda’s role in a burgeoning crisis of obesity and diabetes presented the company’s biggest challenge in more than a century, finally putting the brakes on its engine for growth.
In actuality Coke had been here before. When Coca-Cola first gushed from Gilded Age soda fountains, it was touted as a panacea for anything that ailed you. Within just a few decades, however, the tide turned on Coke, with the public increasingly questioning whether that bottle full of fizz could really be all that good. The drink hadn’t quite lived down its associations with cocaine, for starters. In the early years of Coke, the press stirred up sensational visions of “Coke fiends,” hopped up on Coca-Cola terrorizing good southern women. (The overtly racist coverage said more about the anxieties of the South after slavery, since the fiends were invariably black and the women invariably white.)
By the turn of the century, however, there was a wide backlash against patent medicines in general, as muckraking newspaper and magazine stories, starting with a series by Samuel Hopkins Adams in Collier’s in 1905, exposed what was really in those elixirs—including chloroform, turpentine, and an awful lot of alcohol. At the same time, the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which blew the lid off the dangers and lack of sanitation in the meatpacking business, led to increasing strictures on what food manufacturers could put in the products that Americans ate. It was the dawn of the Progressive Era, a reaction to the excesses of Gilded Age capitalism, in which government increasingly clamped down with increased regulations.
In this general climate, one man emerged as the flawed hero of the consumer movement—Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, the head of the government’s Bureau of Chemistry. Wiley nearly single-handedly railroaded a new law, the Pure Food and Drug Act (commonly called the Pure Food Law), through Congress in 1906. It proceeded on a simple if suspect proposition—that adding artificial preservatives and colorings to food or patent medicines made them less wholesome. Due to the “increased amounts of poisonous and toxic matters in the system,” Wiley testified before Congress, “the general vitality of the body is gradually reduced. . . . Even old age, which is regarded as a natural death, is a result of these toxic activities.” Wiley proved his theories with his celebrated “poison squad,” a group of young men to whom he and his colleagues fed all manner of suspect food additives, including large quantities of boric, sulfuric, and benzoic acid to see if it made them sick. The experiments weren’t exactly scientifically rigorous—lacking, for example, a control group or measures to account for preexisting medical conditions of the unfortunate crew, but the publicity they engendered gave public support to the idea of a new law. Congress passed it on June 30, 1906.
Over the next few years, Wiley went on the attack against blended-whiskey producers and catsup makers (for adding benzoate of soda as a preservative), earning a reputation as a crusading health advocate, if a bit of an arrogant self-promoter. His nemesis, however, would be Coca-Cola. From reports early on that Coke contained cocaine and alcohol, he demanded that a sample be tested. When it came back negative, it hardly dampened his ardor against bringing Coke down. At the same, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, hot against the scourges of alcohol, published pamphlets that—despite Wiley’s tests—railed against Coke as hazardous to children because of its content of cocaine, alcohol, and caffeine.
It was this last ingredient that Wiley would eventually make into the crook that dragged Coke into court. In keeping with his theories of adulterated foods, Wiley argued that “free caffeine” added to products such as Coke was much more harmful and addictive than the caffeine that occurred naturally in coffee and tea, comparing the added substance to opium and cannabis. On this basis, he tried several times to seize Coke shipments to put the company on trial but was constantly overruled by the secretary of agriculture, James Wilson, whom he later blamed for protecting Coke. Finally, when an Atlanta newspaper editor caught wind of the interference, Wilson relented, if only Wiley would try the company in Chattanooga, headquarters of Coke’s largest bottler and, after Atlanta, the territory friendliest to the beverage company. (Other accounts have it that it was Wiley who chose the venue for the trial, in an effort to get it in front of an Eastern Tennessee judge who was known to look kindly on progressive regulation.)
The case went to trial in Chattanooga in March 1911, coinciding with Wiley’s honeymoon with his new bride, feminist Anna Kelton. Officially called The United States v. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola, the trial turned on two counts—the unhealthy addition of “free caffeine,” as well as the fact that it was “misbranded” as Coca-Cola, since it contained neither coca leaves nor kola nut. In fact, however, the trial brought out all Coke’s dirty laundry—from government inspectors who testified about the unsanitary conditions of Coke’s factory and the discovery of bug parts in the drink, to medical experts testifying that Coke drove people insane. The evidence presented by the government about the harmful effect of caffeine on humans was equally dubious, relying on flawed experiments of frogs and rabbits; no one from the poison squad made an appearance. In the end, none of it mattered. The entire case hinged upon a technicality when the judge ordered a directed verdict, at Coke’s urging, that Coca-Cola’s formula had always had caffeine, so it couldn’t be considered an additive.
Wiley wasn’t there to see it, having left town a week earlier, perhaps seeing the way the wind was blowing. A year after the trial, he resigned rather than risk having Secretary Wilson force him out. The case wasn’t done, however. Years later, the government appealed it all the way up to the Supreme Court, which ruled it had been wrongly decided and sent it back to the district level. Coke maneuvered to spare itself the indignity of appearing again in court, striking a deal with the government whereby it reduced the level of caffeine in the drink by half and adding more coca leaf (from which the cocaine had been removed) and kola nut to address the issue of misbranding. The government would keep the forty barrels and twenty kegs it had initially seized but refrained from bringing the case anew against Coke’s new formula.
Coca-Cola had emerged victorious, and essentially intact, from the attack. Eventually the Pure Food Law itself was repealed, as prevailing scientific opinion decided there was nothing wrong with food additives, which became rampant throughout the twentieth century. Ironically, it’s only now that the purity of foods has become an issue in health—fueled by the writings of Michael Pollan and the “slow food” movement, which has railed against the “nutritionism” that has dominated the last few decades of food science, and urged a return to unadulterated foods.
For Coke, it would take another ninety years for the next major attack on the grounds of health, and when it came, it focused not on any detrimental additives but on the core ingredient that made up most of the drink’s contents—sugar. And unlike the prior skirmish, this fight wo
uldn’t occur in a court of law—but in the court of public opinion.
Every day , it seems, there’s new evidence of America’s expanding waistline—from a policy on Southwest Airlines requiring customers to buy two seats if they are going to spill over from the eighteen inches allotted in one, to the motorized carts Wal-Mart now offers for people too large to amble around the store by themselves. In medical terms, a person is obese when his or her body mass index (BMI) tops 30.2 And after holding steady for much of the last century, the percentage of American adults checking that box has more than doubled, from 14 percent in the 1970s to 34 percent today, translating into some 75 million people.
Another 34 percent of adults with a BMI over 25 are classified as “overweight,” placing more than two-thirds of the adult U.S. population into one of those two categories. And along with those statistics come increased risks for diseases such as high blood pressure and heart disease. The prognosis for the next generation is just as bad, with the percentage of obese teenagers more than tripling, from 5 percent to 18 percent over the past thirty years, and the number of obese children climbing to 20 percent.
On the face of it, the reason people get fat is simple: They eat more than they burn off in exercise. Beyond that, however, it’s enormously difficult to pinpoint exactly what has led to the explosion in America’s waistline. “Obesity is not rocket science, it’s more complicated,” warned Frank Hu, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, at a 2006 conference in Boston looking at responses to childhood obesity. Nearly all scientists now agree that at least part of the equation is genetic; some people are just programmed with so-called thrifty genes that cause the body to retain fat more than others.
For the rest, recent papers have blamed the obesity epidemic on everything from an increased prevalence of air-conditioning to decreased rates of smoking. But by far the most likely culprit is diet—and on that score, an increasingly convincing stack of evidence lays at least part of the blame at the syrupy feet of the soda companies. The math is simple: At the same time that America’s obesity rates doubled, so has Americans’ soda consumption; between 1970 and 1998, it accounted for nearly half the increase in calories in the average diet. It now represents the largest single source of calories for the average person, at 7 percent for adults and up to 10 percent for children.
Several years ago, Hu led a team analyzing some thirty studies linking soda consumption to weight gain, concluding that they “show a positive association between greater intake of sugar-sweetened beverages and weight gain and obesity in both children and adults.” The report recommended that “sufficient evidence exists for public health strategies to discourage consumption of sugary drinks.” In scientific language that’s not quite “Drop the soda can, fatty!” but it is enough to point the finger for obesity squarely Cokeward.
One of the most compelling studies Hu looked at was done by nutritionist David Ludwig and published in the British journal The Lancet in 2001. Ludwig followed five hundred eleven-year-olds for more than two years, and concluded that each soda added daily to their diets increased their chances for becoming obese by 60 percent. (A later study by Ludwig showed that removing a daily can of soda led to a weight loss of about a pound a month for already overweight teens.) The implications of that were literally enormous. “It’s not the exceptional child who drinks a liter, two liters, or even three liters a day,” says Ludwig, who runs an obesity clinic for kids at Boston’s Children’s Hospital. “It’s actually remarkably common among my patients.” Another analysis, of thousands of nurses, by Harvard University nutritionist Matthias Schulze found that women who increased soda consumption to at least one a day gained an extra pound a year, and were twice as likely to contract diabetes. That study was all but a “smoking gun” that soda was linked to weight gain, wrote Boston nutritionist Caroline Apovian in The New England Journal of Medicine, concluding that reducing soda consumption “might be the best single opportunity to curb the obesity epidemic.”
Of course, linking soda consumption to obesity doesn’t necessarily prove it is soda making people fat—soda drinkers could also be couch potatoes, or eat more french fries. A surprising study by Purdue University nutritionist Richard Mattes has shown, however, that soda is unique in its contribution to weight gain. Mattes gave patients an extra 450 calories a day of jelly beans, telling them they could eat whatever else they wanted. When participants returned a month later, however, they hadn’t gained weight, since they’d compensated by eating less other food. But when Mattes repeated the study with an extra 450 calories of Coke, he found they didn’t compensate, and their weight and BMI increased. He hypothesized that “when drinking fluid calories,” people simply didn’t register the extra energy, and continued to eat more calories to keep their bellies full.
Some researchers such as Harvard’s George Bray have even hypothesized that soda’s main ingredient—high-fructose corn syrup—also leads to increased weight gain, since fructose isn’t broken down in the bloodstream in the normal way, instead building up in the liver and turning directly into fat. Other obesity researchers disregard the theory—arguing that sugar is sugar. They virtually all agree, however, that any sugar in large quantities disrupts with the body’s natural mechanisms, causing cells to become more resistant to the enzyme insulin, and, over time, leading to diabetes.3 Before the 1990s, this kind of diabetes was known as “adult-onset diabetes,” since it typically occurred later in life. By 1996, however, so many children had developed the disease that the name was changed to simply “type-2 diabetes.” Recently the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued the shocking pronouncement that of all children born in the year 2000, one in three will become diabetic in their lifetimes.
Despite the preponderance of evidence linking soda to obesity—to say nothing of the commonsense proposition that drinking gallons of sugar might not be super-great for one’s diet—the awareness of soda’s harmfulness was slow to hit. Back in the 1980s, the government was continually warning Americans about too much fat—not sugar—in their diets. As Michael Pollan explains, “The whole of the industrial food supply was reformulated to reflect the new nutritional wisdom, giving us low-fat pork, low-fat Snackwells, and all the low-fat pasta and high-fructose (yet low-fat!) corn syrup we could consume.” Meanwhile, as the shareholder value movement gained momentum, Coke wasn’t the only company pushing larger and larger portion sizes to satisfy shareholders’ desires for growth, according to New York University nutritionist and Food Politics author Marion Nestle. After staying stable throughout the 1970s, the number of calories present in the food supply has risen steadily since 1980, up more than 20 percent from 3,200 to 3,900 per capita, mostly from carbohydrates and added fats and sugars.
Not that the food company execs at Coke or any other brand were evilly plotting to make America fat—they were thinking about their own survival. “When you come in in the morning, there is no sheet that says you get 50 altruism points if you do something charitable,” says Coke’s former marketing director Hank Cardello, now an anti-obesity advocate at the University of North Carolina. “The sheet says here’s how many cases I sold and is it above or below the target.” Besides, he says, no one was thinking about soft drinks in terms of obesity or diabetes. “At the time, the product was perceived so positively, it was feel-good stuff. I talk to executives now and they feel like they woke up one day with a target on their back. It’s like you wake up one day and all of a sudden someone is saying your kid is ugly.”
If Cardello and his fellow executives thought about health at all, it was during periodic flare-ups such as the program CBS did about health concerns over aspartame—the sweetener better known as NutraSweet—which both Coke and Pepsi had started using to sweeten their diet beverages starting in 1983 (moving to a 100 percent aspartame formula by the end of 1984). Complaints about the chemical more than doubled in the latter half of that year, from 108 to 248, with regular diet soda drinkers complaining about headaches, dizziness, fatigue, depression, an
d insomnia within a few days of starting to drink the beverages. It’s telling that the company treated the issue as one of brand image—not health. Cardello nervously wrote a memo to his superiors telling them it wasn’t a big deal “unless the CBS story snowballed,” which it never did. Eventually the Centers for Disease Control declared concerns about aspartame of minor importance, even as more than seven thousand complaints—three thousand concerning soft drinks—were received by the FDA in the first fifteen years. Concerns over the chemical continue to persist, with a comprehensive, if controversial, study conducted in Italy and published in 2006 over seven years that found aspartame statistically linked to an increase in cancer in rats. (The FDA dismissed the study as flawed by preexisting disease in the rat population.) Faced with the catastrophic upheaval that would come with a reformulation of Diet Coke, the Coca-Cola Company has reflexively held the line on aspartame, sending representatives to lobby against a bill to ban the substance introduced in New Mexico in 2006.
Coke intervened even more directly when another potentially dangerous chemical was discovered in diet sodas in 1990s. During product tests, chemists at rival company Cadbury-Schweppes discovered excessive levels of benzene—a chemical linked to leukemia and other forms of cancer—in some of its sodas, particularly diet orange sodas. The chemical, which apparently was formed from a reaction of the preservative sodium benzoate with ascorbic acid (vitamin C), was found in levels of more than 25 parts per billion (ppb), well above the legal limit of 5 ppb.
The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World's Favorite Soft Drink Page 9