Globesity — Brainwashing Caribbean Kids

Recently, Childhood Obesity News mentioned public resistance to the soda industry’s deliberate and unrelenting targeting of teenagers in its advertising, as documented by Deakin University research. U.S. Right to Know co-director Gary Ruskin maintains that teens are vulnerable to manipulation just as children are (and adults, for that matter).

Ruskin speaks of Coke’s “efforts to evade responsibility for the global obesity epidemic” and adds,

What’s insidious here is a health campaign that is using tobacco’s tactics, promoting alternative science in a way that advances the notion that sugary sodas aren’t really so bad for people’s health.

A big part of that notion, as revealed by the study, is Big Soda’s ambition to convince the world that what people eat and drink has nothing to do with their obesity status. The corporations are pitching the idea that the only responsible factor is lack of exercise, and they are even trying to induce the World Health Organization to endorse their point of view.

Co-author Benjamin Wood said the point of the study was to “raise awareness of these hidden tactics and strategies to target teenagers and their mothers.” The Coca-Cola Company had promised to stop marketing to kids under 12, but in what universe is it possible to produce advertising aimed at teenagers that will not be seen and heard by younger kids? To call this any sort of meaningful promise is silly.

The high SSB consumption in the Caribbean

What part of the world consumes the relative highest amount of sugar-sweetened beverages? The Caribbean. The area shares with Latin America the distinction of “highest absolute mortality related to SSB consumption.” In all the entire world, eight of the 20 countries with the highest SSB-related death toll are in Latin America and the Caribbean. Dominica, the Bahamas, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines are the countries in the most trouble.

In Trinidad, approximately 75% the students between the ages of 13 and 15 consume SSBs daily. In Barbados and Jamaica, and the Bahamas, the percentages are almost as high. Journalist Daphne Ewing-Chow obtained a quotation from Maisha Hutton, Executive Director of the Healthy Caribbean Coalition:

One in every three Caribbean children is obese and at risk for developing non-communicable diseases including diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.

Apparently, part of the attraction of many popular beverages is that they dye the kids’ lips and tongues in garish neon colors, which some grownups find particularly annoying.

More bad news

As if all this were not enough, these scary statistics prevail despite the fact that restrictions and preventative measures are in place in many areas. Four years ago, Barbados initiated a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, including fruit juice and sports drinks. But…

While there was a 4.3% decline in SSB sales and an increase of 7.5% in bottled water sales during the first year of implementation, a recent study found evidence suggesting that consumers responded to the price increase by purchasing cheaper sugary drinks that are typically associated with higher levels of sugar.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Coca-Cola internal documents reveal efforts to sell to teens, despite obesity crisis,” WashingtonPost.com, 12/18/19
Source: “Sugary Beverages Are Feeding A Childhood Obesity Epidemic In the Caribbean,” Forbes.com, 12/23/19
Photo credit: Amir Appel on Visualhunt/CC BY

Soft Drink Ogre Wants to Swallow the World

Among other disreputable acts, the Coca-Cola Company has been accused of co-opting and corrupting the music industry. They started hiring singing stars, wrote Ryan Alexander Diduck, as far back as 1900, with a cabaret singer named Hilda Clark (pictured). In 1964, Canadian vocalist Bobby Curtola hit the bigtime with a song titled “Things Go Getter with Coca-Cola” that is described as “both a commercial song and a song commercial.”

It was also recorded by Roy Orbison, the Supremes, Otis Redding, and other artists. Diduck went on to say,

What Coca-Cola introduced was the concept of adapting their jingles to as many musicians as possible. Coke even released a record of these various iterations in 1966, and the corporate jingle became a mainstay on radio, television, and in film for decades afterwards…

Then in 1984, there was Michael Jackson’s notorious Pepsi commercial. Musical purists accuse these practices of weakening the entire art form. Critics in another area say that members of minority groups are “targeted, recruited, and objectified” in this way, because compared to white kids, black children are about twice as likely to see soft drink ads on TV.

Red Bull seems to be the leader in figuring out new strategies to reach kids, by sponsoring breakdancing competitions, video game tournaments, and extreme sporting events. The writer describes the company as “micro-targeting the so-called ‘unreachables’ — the emerging, tech-savvy, and highly profitable millennial generation of consumers that most industries regarded as beyond the grasp of conventional advertising,” and goes on to say:

Red Bull never commissioned a musician to sing a Red Bull jingle or contracted an artist to be their celebrity spokesperson. Instead, they devised insidious ways to harness themselves to grassroots communities that were already in full trot, infiltrating music scenes like a virus instead of simply co-opting them.

Diduck also points out that since the 1990s, the marketing of tobacco and alcohol to minors has been tightly controlled. Despite many people’s belief that sugar is an equally serious threat, the soda industry enjoys a benefit equivalent to a hunting open season, when it comes to targeting children and teens, and soft drink corporations “exhibit the very essence of predatory behavior.” Diduck writes,

Reach them while they’re young, addict them to sugar, caffeine, addict them to addiction itself, addict them for life.

No matter how admirable the Olympic Games may be for philosophical reasons, there is ideological pushback from critics who see the Coca-Cola Company’s sponsorship of the Olympics (since 1928) as just as sneaky and underhanded as using music videos by pop stars.

When the Coke wrote up its sponsorship proposal for the 2016 global competition, it appears to have had the blatant intention of brainwashing teenagers and mothers. It is seen by suspicious groups as part of the gigantic public relations campaign whose goal is to shift public consciousness from the input side of the energy exchange theory, to the output side.

In other words, the beverage industry and the junk food industry have a very significant vested interest in convincing people that it really doesn’t matter what they ingest. They would like us to believe that every ounce of blame for overweight, obesity, and any related form of ill health rests solely on the individual, for not getting enough exercise. Just in case their advertising efforts cannot convince us of that, they have been pressuring the World Health Organization to tell us it’s true.

The organization U.S. Right to Know teamed up with scholars from Australia’s Deakin University to produce a paper that was published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The research they did convinced them that Coke had the specific intention of teaching teenagers that sugar-sweetened beverages have no health impact. If children and teens gain weight, it is their own fault for not skipping enough rope or playing enough basketball.

Coke’s stated hope is to “cement” its brand’s “credibility in the health and well-being space,” while numerous individuals and groups throughout the world are saying, in effect, that train has left the station and that ship has sailed.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “From Coke & Pepsi To Red Bull, How Fizzy Drinks Swallowed Music,” TheQuietus.com, 10/31/19
Source: “Coca-Cola internal documents reveal efforts to sell to teens, despite obesity crisis,” WashingtonPost.com, 12/18/19
Image source: Public Domain

A Decade of Perfidy — Beverage Additives

“SSBs” is a convenient nickname for sugar-sweetened beverages, but an inaccurate one, because artificially-sweetened beverages are just as awful in their own way. The resistance movement probably wastes a considerable amount of energy debating which is worse. It can all devastate lives, and it’s all crap. Researchers who are not on the Big Soda payroll have poked their investigative noses into plenty of questions whose answers stink.

Take this headline for example: “Artificially Sweetened Drinks (Aspartame, etc.) Found To Triple Your Risk of Stroke & Dementia.” A research team from Boston University published its official report (whose slightly longer title also included sugar) in the journal Stroke. Journalist Arjun Walia interpreted it for the lay reader as “a one of a kind study examining whether artificially sweetened beverage consumption is associated with risks of stroke or dementia.” The answer they came up with is, yes.

Artificial sweeteners had previously been spotlighted as active in causing diabetes and cancer, and now a decade-long study of 3,000 adults has found that “drinking diet soda regularly nearly triples your risk of developing stroke or dementia.” Actually, it didn’t come as that much of a surprise. The increased stroke risk was known from both American and Japanese studies as far back as 2012. One of the same authors was involved in research based on 4,000 subjects, published the same year in Alzheimer’s & Dementia:

The focus here was on people who consumed more than two sugary drinks per day of any type, and more than three per week of soda.

Among the “high intake” group, researchers discovered several signs of accelerated brain aging that all correlated with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease. They also found that at least one diet soda per day was associated with smaller brain volume.

Can soft drinks dosed with artificial sweetener actually shrink human brains? Do we really want to take this experiment any further, especially with our kids as laboratory animals? Apparently, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) refused to approve aspartame for 20 years, and a massive amount of political finagling in the early 1980s finally made it legal.

But no matter how viciously these battles are fought something else always comes along to capture the attention of the public.

The venerable nutrition expert Marion Nestle, back in 2014, was alerted by one of her readers to the existence of a product from Senomyx Inc. that had been christened Sweetmyx. She learned from the Bloomberg business news empire that the stuff was “generally recognized as safe.” This had been determined by an organization called the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association, which is kind of like letting a corrupt police department investigate itself for misconduct.

The FDA thought so too, and published a stern statement. Senomyx Inc. was trying to fool the public into thinking that the FDA itself had made the “Generally Recognized As Safe” determination, and while there is no law against anybody else using that phrase, implying that the FDA used it is definitely frowned upon.

PepsiCo didn’t care. They were so jazzed about Sweetmyx, they bought exclusive rights to use it in their soda pop. What happened next? Stay tuned.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Artificially Sweetened Drinks (Aspartame, etc.) Found To Triple Your Risk of Stroke & Dementia,” Collective-Evolution.com, 09/05/17
Source: “No, FDA Has Not Approved Sweetmyx; Another Reason To Fix GRAS Regs,” FoodSafetyNews.com, 03/17/14
Image by Jimelovski Platano Macho/Flickr