It should come as no surprise to anyone that a company that sells sugary soft drinks and does not want to stop selling those sugary drinks would have a vested interest in finding ways to promote the sale of those sugary drinks, right? What is surprising is that a company like Coca-Cola would be able to get seemingly reputable scientists to basically lie by promoting a message that says it's a lack of exercise that is to blame for obesity and not sugary foods that are contributing to weight gain in the United States. And yet that's exactly what Coca-Cola is being accused of doing in a report published in the peer-reviewed Public Health Nutrition journal, and the evidence against the company is quite compelling.
More from MamásLatinas: Aguas frescas that will help you lose weight
The report is a collaboration between researchers from the nonprofit US Right to Know, the University of Oxford, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and the University of Bocconi in Milan, Italy. The researchers looked into how Coca-Cola tried to influence research conducted by the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN), which was founded in 2014 and claimed to be researching causes of obesity. What the new report found is rather upsetting. "This is a story about how Coke used public health academics to carry out classic tobacco tactics to protect its profits," said Gary Ruskin, executive director of US Right to Know. "It's a low point in the history of public health, and a warning about the perils of accepting corporate funding for public health work."