Takes readers deep inside the secret world of corporate science, where powerful companies and allied academic scientists mold research to meet industry needs.
The 1990s were tough times for the soda industry. In the United States, obesity rates were exploding. Public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a main culprit and advocated for soda taxes that might decrease the consumption of sweetened beverages—and threaten the revenues of the giant soda companies.
Soda Science tells the story of how industry leader Coca-Cola mobilized allies in academia to create a soda-defense science that would protect profits by advocating exercise, not dietary restraint, as the priority solution to obesity, a view few experts accept. Anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh discovers a hidden world of science-making—with distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claims—dedicated to creating industry-friendly science and keeping it under wraps. By tracing the birth, maturation, death, and afterlife of the science they made, Greenhalgh shows how corporate science has managed to gain such a hold over our lives.
Spanning twenty years, her investigation takes her from the US, where the science was made, to China, a key market for sugary soda. In the US, soda science was a critical force in the making of today's society of step-counting, fitness-tracking, weight-obsessed citizens. In China, this distorted science has left its mark not just on national obesity policies but on the apparatus for managing chronic disease generally. By following the scientists and their ambitious schemes to make the world safe for Coke, Greenhalgh offers an account that is more global—and yet more human—than the story that dominates public understanding today.
Coke's research isn't fake science, Greenhalgh argues; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim. Her gripping book raises crucial questions about conflicts of interest in scientific research, the funding behind familiar messages about health, and the cunning ways giant corporations come to shape our diets, lifestyles, and health to their own needs.
Industry Reviews
"Greenhalgh's dogged research pulls from open records requests and ILSI tax forms to trace how Coke used its deep pockets to influence ostensibly independent researchers, offering multimillion-dollar grants to 'scientists whose research was friendly to corporate interests' and whom the company would then call on to represent its favored outlook at medical conferences across the globe." * Publishers Weekly *
"Brava! Greenhalgh's Soda Science is a deeply researched, well-documented expose on how Coca-Cola and other major food corporations hired mercenary scientists to mislead the public into believing that as long as you exercised, you could consume plenty of calories and not gain weight. That initiative fell apart in the United States, but Coca-Cola and its accomplices were able to infiltrate the public health system of China, helping stop the world's most populous country from instituting programs that would make its people healthier." -- David Michaels, author of The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception
"Soda Science is a brilliant story of corporate science, carefully researched and compellingly told. When the US obesity epidemic was a set of statistical warning signs, Coca-Cola and other makers of ultraprocessed food and drink started up scientific research programs focused on exercise. A squad of industry-supported scientists and research organizations steered discussions away from calories consumed and toward calories spent. They taught people to think in terms of small changes in daily activity-ten or fifteen minutes of moderate exercise each day. Through seemingly independent non-profits, the industry then exported the model, to Mexico, Latin America, and especially to China, the world's biggest market and biggest fan of science-based policy." -- Sergio Sismondo, author of Ghost-Managed Medicine: Big Pharma's Invisible Hands
