Soda science : making the world safe for Coca-Cola

"Recent years have brought growing concern about the power of huge corporations to distort science for corporate benefit, often to the detriment of human health. This book unearths a kind of corporate science that the author, anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh, calls "soda science." Soda science was created not to combat obesity but to defend the soda industry from threats to profits posed by public health calls to see soda as a major contributor to the obesity epidemic. Greenhalgh unravels the project of the global food industry to assemble this new, industry-friendly body of knowledge in the US, spread it to key markets around the world, and get it embedded in official policies on diet-related chronic disease. She follows the "soda scientists"-industry executives, leaders of scientific nonprofits, influential American scientists, and top Chinese scientist-officials-as they made the science, carried it to China, and translated it into Chinese ideas and public policies. Soda science was a real if unconventional science, and it deserves attention because it had harmful effects that remain largely hidden, even today. In the US, soda science, which was widely circulated through public health campaigns and diet books, spread the idea that exercise is more important for weight loss than caloric restriction, a belief that remains pervasive in American culture. Soda science, in other words, was a key forerunner of the step-counting, weight-obsessed fitness culture of today."