Part 2 (2/2)

As Eric Schlosser describes in Fast Food Nation Fast Food Nation, in the 1990s a 21-ounce medium soda at McDonald's sold for $1.29, while a 32-ounce large soda sold for only 20 cents more. But the cost for ingredients was only 3 cents more-for 17 cents of pure profit. Everyone won-the customer got exponentially more soda, the restaurant got more profit, and the company sold more syrup. And if that wasn't enough, customers could request to ”supersize” their drinks-a stomach-busting 64 ounces and 610 calories a pop. By 1996, supersizing accounted for a quarter of soft drink sales. (It was the same story at the 7-Eleven chain of convenience stores, which introduced the 32-ounce Big Gulp, the 44-ounce Super Gulp, the 52-ounce X-Treme Gulp, and finally the 64-ounce Double Gulp. The true champion, however, was ”The Beast,” an 85-ounce refillable cup released by Arco service stations in 1998.) With two-thirds of the fountain sales market, Coca-Cola was the clear beneficiary of the new drive to push volume. And as consumers became more and more accustomed to larger sizes of soft drinks at fast-food restaurants and convenience stores, the company quietly retooled vending machines and supermarket displays to increase package sizes as well. In some ways, it was the consumers' fault. In the skittish days after New c.o.ke, the company engaged in more and more consumer testing, all of which pointed in one direction: ”Bigger is better,” according to Hank Cardello, c.o.ke's director of marketing in the early 1980s, who has since broken with his industry roots to become a health advocate. ”The mantra was bigger packages, bigger servings, and more of everything per container,” he writes in his 2009 book Stuffed Stuffed.

In 1994, c.o.ke began introducing a new 20-ounce bottle, fas.h.i.+oned from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic in c.o.ke's trademark ”contour” shape-a variation on the old green-gla.s.s hobbleskirt bottle. It quickly replaced the 12-ounce can to become the standard serving size for c.o.ke. The new container was a boon to the company-reversing years of discounts on multipack boxes of cans and allowing it to charge a premium price on the new, larger bottle. Along with the bigger sizes, c.o.ke doubled down on Woodruff's ”arm's reach of desire” strategy to put c.o.ke anywhere and everywhere it could. ”Our goal was to make Coca-Cola ubiquitous. At all times, at all places. . . . c.o.ke Was It,” writes former brand manager Cardello. ”My job was to keep the logo in your face, and present it in the most positive light. And I had access to a huge war chest with which to accomplish this.”

In 1997, c.o.ke's annual report laid bare its strategy with striking candor, stating, ”We're putting ice-cold Coca-Cola Cla.s.sic and our other brands within reach, wherever you look: at the supermarket, the video store, the soccer field, the gas station-everywhere.” A c.o.ke marketing newsletter later distributed to fast-food restaurants encouraged them to push soft drinks for breakfast, recommending they put c.o.ke on the breakfast board and introduce special Coca-Cola cups for ”the most important meal of the day.”

The big push to sell more volume worked. Annual soda consumption soared to 56.1 gallons-more than 600 cans-per person in 1998, up 30 percent from 1985, and two and a half times what it had been in 1970. And more and more soda drinkers were drinking c.o.ke, which had reclaimed 45 percent of the market in the United States compared with Pepsi's 30 percent. Naturally all of those soda sales sweetened c.o.ke's bottom line, leading to more than $4 billion in net income, and a whopping 3,500 percent increase in c.o.ke's stock price over Goizueta's tenure-to a high point of $88 a share by 1998.

Even as consumption grew, c.o.ke knew that it couldn't count on customers to drink that much c.o.ke without a little nudge. Goizueta, more than anyone, realized how important advertising was to selling product. ”We don't know how to sell products based on performance,” he once said, shrugging. ”Everything we sell, we sell on image.” When Goizueta took over in 1981, c.o.ke's annual spending on advertising in the United States was up to $200 million. Goizueta doubled it, to $400 million, by 1984. There it hovered throughout the next decade, until Sergio Zyman came back on board in 1993.

After the debacle with New c.o.ke, everyone had a.s.sumed Zyman would be the fall guy. c.o.ke's marketing chief not only was one of the prime movers behind the fateful change to c.o.ke's formula, but was also abrasive and authoritarian, alienating many in c.o.ke headquarters. His insistence on numbers with no excuses had earned him the t.i.tle of ”Aya-Cola” back in the 1980s, when he had famously killed the ”Mean” Joe Greene ad, one of the most endearing and popular ads in c.o.ke's history, when it didn't ”move the needle” to sell more product. ”The sole purpose of marketing is to get more people to buy more of your product, more often, for more money,” he would write later, in his 1999 book The End of Marketing As We Know It The End of Marketing As We Know It.

Whatever Zyman's past mistakes, that philosophy made perfect sense to Goizueta, who hired Zyman back as chief marketing officer in 1993. Once back, Zyman pushed the concept of ”spending to sell”; every marketing campaign, he announced, would be weighed against how much it increased sales of soft drinks-if it didn't, then it would be cut. If it did, ”we poured on more.” The domestic ad budget rose to $500 million in 1994, $600 million in 1996, and $700 million in 1997 (with $1.6 billion spent on advertising worldwide).

And it wasn't enough to get more people to drink c.o.ke products-it was also important for those already drinking c.o.ke to drink more of them. Company statistics showed that of the 64 ounces the average person drank in a day, c.o.ke products accounted for just a miserable two of them. It was Zyman's job to think of ways to get people to increase that number; after all, in his native Mexico, it was common for people to drink three or four cans a day. ”These are the consumers you want,” he said. ”And you want to make sure that you capture all of them.”

Zyman came up with a new concept he called ”dimensionalizing,” which he defined as giving people more reasons to drink beyond c.o.ke's ”original selling proposition.” If a person had eight drinks a week because he was thirsty, then telling him to be sociable might drive that up to ten. ”Then you have to create a new reason after 10,” said Zyman. In order to get a better handle on the various reasons to drink c.o.ke, the company had 3,600 super-consumers-whom they called, without irony, ”heavy users”-to keep diaries of all of the occasions when they drank, which the marketers called ”need states.”

The research was enormously successful, revealing 40,000 separate occasions when the test subjects might pop open a can. Zyman distilled them down to thirty-five different reasons to drink c.o.ke, or ”dimensions,” including: ”c.o.ke is part of my life. It understands me. Cool people drink it. People of all ages drink it. It has a bite and a distinctive taste. It comes in a contour bottle. It is modern, funny, emotional, simple, large, friendly, consistent, and everywhere.” Of course, such an approach to advertising raises the question: At what point are you antic.i.p.ating customers' needs and at what point are you creating them? c.o.ke didn't dwell on the question long. For each attribute, the marketers designed a different ad, rolling them all together in a new campaign under the slogan ”Always Coca-Cola” (which had the delicious double entendre of harkening back to c.o.ke's heritage while encouraging consumers to drink it at every occasion).

At the same time, Zyman shook up Madison Avenue by spreading work among different agencies, having them compete for c.o.ke's vast advertising war chest. Along with Apple and Nike, c.o.ke even began to contract out to Hollywood powerhouse Creative Artists Agency, which created one of c.o.ke's most compelling symbols. During the 1993 Academy Awards presentation, TV viewers were introduced to a computer-generated family of polar bears watching the northern lights in a vast expanse of ice with nothing to break up the monotony but the familiar logo of Coca-Cola. The bear clan returned for the following holiday season, c.o.ke's most successful branding of Christmas since it introduced its Santa Claus ads in the 1930s.

The polar bears were the perfect new branding agent in an era when branding was king. A few years after New c.o.ke taught the Coca-Cola Company the value of its brand name, the rest of Wall Street learned the same lesson when Philip Morris cut the price of its Marlboro cigarettes by 20 percent to compete with generics flooding the market. Immediately Philip Morris's stock dropped, along with Coca-Cola and many other brands, as the financial press rang a death knell for the brand.

A few weeks after the incident, Goizueta called Wall Street a.n.a.lysts down to an emergency meeting in Atlanta. ”We are getting a b.u.m rap,” he whined. ”It's one thing when your stock drops 10 percent because of a mistake your company has made . . . but it's something else . . . when it drops because of a business with totally different financial and social dynamics.” For the next four hours, he patiently explained why people might not pay for a Marlboro but they would pay for a c.o.ke. And he was right. c.o.ke's stock righted itself in a few weeks.

As Naomi Klein recounts in her book No Logo No Logo, the real lesson of ”Marlboro Friday” was that companies needed to invest more money in branding, not less. The companies that succeeded after the recession of the early 1990s were those that wrapped consumers in their products, creating not just an a.s.sociation with their product but a complete lifestyle-think Starbucks, Disney, Apple, Calvin Klein, and Nike. ”And then there were companies that had always understood that they were selling brands before product,” writes Klein, citing c.o.ke at the top of her list. As Disney opened Disney Stores in malls across America, c.o.ke followed suit on a smaller scale with Coca-Cola stores in New York and Las Vegas and the original World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta.

The man responsible for of c.o.ke's new success, however, didn't live to see it for very long. In 1997, Goizueta was one of the wealthiest people in America-personally worth more than a billion dollars-and because most of his wealth was tied up in stock, he was able to avoid paying virtually any personal income tax. But just at his moment of greatest triumph, he discovered he had lung cancer. Within a year, he was dead.

Goizueta's sudden departure was a blow to the company's image on Wall Street, as well as a threat to its ties to the all-important beverage a.n.a.lysts that could keep pus.h.i.+ng c.o.ke's stock price into the stratosphere. Though no one knew it, Goizueta's death would coincide with a dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of the company. At the time, however, it seemed like the executive he left in charge would pick up his mantle without missing a beat. was a blow to the company's image on Wall Street, as well as a threat to its ties to the all-important beverage a.n.a.lysts that could keep pus.h.i.+ng c.o.ke's stock price into the stratosphere. Though no one knew it, Goizueta's death would coincide with a dramatic turnaround in the fortunes of the company. At the time, however, it seemed like the executive he left in charge would pick up his mantle without missing a beat.

Douglas Ivester was, if anything, more relentless about c.o.ke's need to grow. Joining c.o.ke as an accountant in 1979, he constantly had an eye on the bottom line. ”From his earliest moments at the company, he saw c.o.ke's business as a numbers game-one he could win,” writes New York Times New York Times business reporter Constance Hays in her book business reporter Constance Hays in her book The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company. As Hays describes, it was Ivester who pushed through the greatest revolution in c.o.ke's structure, ensuring unlimited growth in its stock, at the same time finally getting the bottlers under control.

Starting in the early 1980s, the company began buying up any bottlers that were for sale, spinning them off into a new company called Coca-Cola Enterprises. The Coca-Cola Company made sure to own 49 percent of outstanding shares of the new company, giving it control without any of the risk or liability. No longer bound by Thomas and Whitehead's original contract, Ivester and company forced the new bottling company to accept a new contract that allowed the price of syrup to fluctuate at whim.

Over the next decade, the Coca-Cola Company replicated the Coca-Cola Enterprises model with bottlers in other countries as well-creating less than a dozen ”anchor bottlers” all over the world, including the San Miguel Group in the Philippines, T.C.C. Beverages Ltd. in Canada, Panamerican Beverages (later Coca-Cola FEMSA) in Latin America, and Coca-Cola Amatil in Australia. Meanwhile, the tremendous debt acc.u.mulated from buying these bottlers was rolled right off c.o.ke's books, onto the balance sheets of the bottlers.

The new arrangement, called by Ivester ”the 49 percent solution,” was enthusiastically embraced by Goizueta, who called it ”a new era in American capitalism.” When the dust had cleared, however, it looked more like a scheme from the parent company to cook its books. By owning a controlling interest in its bottlers, c.o.ke could ensure that it hit its earning targets throughout the '80s and early '90s. Whenever the company didn't grow in sales, it could still force bottlers to buy syrup, ensuring profits for the parent company; how they sold that syrup was the bottlers' problem.

Not that parent c.o.ke was about to let its bottlers go under, of course. If it appeared that a bottler wasn't going to make ends meet, the company would give rebates at the end of the year in the form of ”marketing support” so they made just enough profit. Even as the anchor bottlers were under constant pressure to sell as many soft drinks as they could to eke out a minimum profit, they were also free to take on enormous amounts of debt-at one point, Coca-Cola Enterprises' debt was half its annual revenues-since lenders rightly a.s.sumed that the parent company would never let its franchises fail.

The system worked beautifully through the late '80s and early '90s to drive stock price and soft drinks sales. When Goizueta suddenly died, it was only natural that Ivester should take control. Where Goizueta was charming inside and outside the company, however, Ivester had a reputation for being a cold numbers-cruncher-an ”iceman” in the eyes of fellow employees. Employees were all but forbidden to talk about their work outside of c.o.ke headquarters, and some even suspected their phones were tapped.

But Ivester was ambitious. Where Woodruff saw putting c.o.ke ”within an arm's reach of desire,” Ivester waxed on about a ”360-degree landscape of c.o.ke,” the red-and-white swoosh in every direction a customer looked. ”What I always wonder is, Why not?” he said in a speech to the National Soft Drink a.s.sociation. ”Why can't we keep this up? Just look around! The world has more people, in more countries, with more access to communication and more desire for a higher standard of living and quality products than ever before.” In his mind, Ivester lumped a higher ”standard of living” with consuming more sweet sugary c.o.ke, the ultimate international status symbol-shades of Candler putting c.o.ke bottles into the hands of the fas.h.i.+onable set in turn-of-the-century ads.

In one notorious speech to employees, Ivester cued the background noise of howling wolves, comparing the c.o.ke company to a wolf among sheep and all but howling along. In truth, though, Pepsi was on the ropes by the mid-1990s, its market share stagnating. c.o.ke showed no quarter, forcing food distributors to refuse to carry Pepsi if they wanted to keep their accounts for c.o.ke. Convenience stores, meanwhile, had to agree to increasingly restrictive advertising agreements if they wanted to stock c.o.ke in their store-agreeing not to hang signs for other products, or committing 70, 80, or even 100 percent of the available shelf s.p.a.ce for soft drinks to c.o.ke. (Eventually, Royal Crown Cola sued in Texas for violations of ant.i.trust laws, earning a $15.6 million verdict.) Even as it was dominating the field, however, c.o.ke 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 c.o.ke 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 need all of that c.o.ke? 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 c.o.ke 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. all of that c.o.ke? 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 c.o.ke 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 c.o.ke 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 c.o.ke, 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 a.s.sociations with cocaine, for starters. In the early years of c.o.ke, the press stirred up sensational visions of ”c.o.ke 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.) c.o.ke 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 c.o.ke, 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 a.s.sociations with cocaine, for starters. In the early years of c.o.ke, the press stirred up sensational visions of ”c.o.ke 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 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 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 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 Was.h.i.+ngton 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 quant.i.ties 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 pa.s.sed 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 c.o.ke contained cocaine and alcohol, he demanded that a sample be tested. When it came back negative, it hardly dampened his ardor against bringing c.o.ke 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 c.o.ke 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 c.o.ke into court. In keeping with his theories of adulterated foods, Wiley argued that ”free caffeine” added to products such as c.o.ke 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 c.o.ke s.h.i.+pments to put the company on trial but was constantly overruled by the secretary of agriculture, James Wilson, whom he later blamed for protecting c.o.ke. Finally, when an Atlanta newspaper editor caught wind of the interference, Wilson relented, if only Wiley would try the company in Chattanooga, headquarters of c.o.ke'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 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 c.o.ke's dirty laundry-from government inspectors who testified about the unsanitary conditions of c.o.ke's factory and the discovery of bug parts in the drink, to medical experts testifying that c.o.ke 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 c.o.ke'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. c.o.ke 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 c.o.ke'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 c.o.ke, 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 wouldn'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 ma.s.s index (BMI) tops 30. , 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 ma.s.s 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. 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 cla.s.sified 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 single source of calories for the average person, at 7 percent for adults and up to 10 percent for children. 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 a.n.a.lyzing some thirty studies linking soda consumption to weight gain, concluding that they ”show a positive a.s.sociation 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 c.o.keward.

One of the most compelling studies Hu looked at was done by nutritionist David Ludwig and published in the British journal The Lancet 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

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