PHA-Exchange> Fizzy drinks and Health

[Maria Hamlin Zúniga]

Article from the Guardian Weekly



Are fizzy drinks doing this to our children?

War is breaking out over junk food and sugary drinks. The World Health
Organisation says they are making children obese. The hugely powerful
multinationals involved say that's rubbish.  Sarah Boseley investigates :
Soft drinks, hard facts



There was a time when children drank water or milk. That has gone as surely
as short trousers for schoolboys and the rag and bone man's horse and cart.
Wherever today's kids hang out - be it in fast-food restaurants, in cinemas,
at home or at school - they are swigging cola and cans of fruit-flavoured
fizz. Last year more than 200 litres of the stuff bubbled down each of their
gullets. And they are getting alarmingly fat. Could these facts be
connected?It is a suggestion that makes the soft drinks industry (UK sales
$13.8bn in 2001) incandescent with rage, but the Geneva-based World Health
Organisation (WHO) has for the first time nailed it to the agenda in a
ground-breaking draft report on obesity and nutrition. The report urges
governments to clamp down on TV ads pushing "sugar-rich items" to
impressionable thirsty youngsters and to consider slapping heavier taxes on
them. It suggests that school vending machines should be turned into scrap
metal.
This is all-out war. The WHO, concerned about the rising tide of obesity
that is killing and debilitating millions in rich countries such as the
United States and Britain, and that is now edging into poor countries to
co-exist obscenely with malnutrition, means business. The soft drinks
industry, appalled at this interference with its global dominance, disputes
not only the scientific evidence but the WHO's right even to raise issues of
taxes and advertising.
For many years the food industry has fought a largely successful battle to
have us believe that couch potato culture is a bigger villain even than
high-fat chips, burgers and chocolate bars in the increasingly porcine
appearance of British youth. Children have been denied school playing fields
and corralled in front of the TV, they argue. They have exchanged running in
the streets for passive internet roaming.
But the WHO has now marched in where nanny once feared to tread, insisting
that slothfulness is not all, and asserting that food and drink is an issue
of public health - not just a matter for consumer choice. In naming and
shaming sugar as well as fat, it is taking on corporations with more wealth,
power and global reach than many small nations. The industry has gone
ballistic.
"We are going to see the most astonishing public fight," says Tim Lang,
professor of food policy at City University, London. "It is going to be
straightforward war." For years, he says, industry has been successfully
lobbying and operating behind the scenes to prevent the sort of
confrontation that is now taking place. But the stratospheric surge in
obesity, its first cousin diabetes and other nutrition-related diseases has
spurred the WHO to act.
"If the WHO had not taken this on it would have been derelict in its
duties," says Professor Lang. "It is taking on people who have fought for
20-30 years denying the evidence  about the impact of diet on degenerative
diseases and food-related cancers. They have argued this is a nonsense. They
have hired rent-a-professors and argued that it wasn't true. They have gone
down the lobbying route. They have gone down, above all, an ideological
route, arguing that there are problems, but they are down to an individual's
mis-consumption."
First strike has come from the US, where big business and the Bush
administration meld indistinguishably into one and where, in 1997, Americans
spent more than $54bn on 53bn litres of soft drink. Babies are weaned on
soda pop - a fifth of one- and two-year-olds drink a cup a day. The average
teenage boy quaffs more than a can and a half daily. Some 12% of boys and
11% of girls are obese. In the past 20 years obesity levels in adolescents
have tripled.
The US government registered a formal objection to the WHO draft report, arg
uing that it had not proved its case. It said the report found "insufficient
evidence to conclude a causal link between soft drinks consumption and
weight gain exists". It demanded that the offending words be "deleted or
significantly revised".
This is curious, because - as Congressman Henry Waxman pointed out - the
review that led the WHO to its conclusion was co-authored by William Dietz,
director of the division of nutrition and physical activity of the Centers
for Disease Control and the US government's leading obesity expert. Both Dr
Dietz and the US surgeon general have praised schools that ban soft drink
machines - as has happened across Los Angeles county.
The US government's response - and its lobbying of European Union
governments to share its stance - is a powerful shot across the WHO bows.
But what many campaigners fear is not so much the public fracas as the
subtler power play of covert influence behind the scenes. The UN agencies,
which have to listen to opinion from every quarter, are wide open to
infiltration and manipulation. It happened when the WHO took on the tobacco
industry. An unpublished report obtained by the Guardian suggests it has
been happening with the food industry too.
The report was compiled by a retired American public health academic called
Norbert Hirschhorn, who has written tomes on the secrets of  the tobacco
industry after delving into the archives set up during the litigation in the
US. Those archives provided comprehensive evidence for a report to the WHO
director- general, Gro Harlem Brundtland, in July 2000 that the tobacco
companies had succeeded in infiltrating the WHO and were exerting "undue
influence" over its policies on cigarettes. Professor Hirschhorn sought to
discover whether similar tactics had been employed by sectors of the food
industry owned by or linked to tobacco.
His unpublished report, dated June 19 last year, finds "that 'undue
influence' has indeed been exerted by the tobacco industry, its food
subsidiaries and allies" on food and nutrition policies. The tactics, he
says, were to position the industry's own toxicologists and other experts
on WHO and FAO (Food and Agricultural Organisation) committees and to fund
and support non-governmental organisations that would put forward their
views. Funds were channelled through food companies to research and policy
groups sympathetic to industry. Libertarian think-tanks and writers who
would denounce over-regulation and champion individual choice were given
financial support.
Prof Hirschhorn pays particular attention to an organisation called the
International Life Sciences Institute, which was founded in 1978 by
Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola, General Foods, Kraft (owned by Philip Morris tobacco)
and Procter & Gamble. Until 1991 it was led by Coca-Cola vice-president
Alex Malaspina, who negotiated for a position as an NGO "in official
relations" with the WHO, and a  specialised consultative status with the
FAO. The environmental sciences division of ILSI worked closely with the
tobacco industry.
The report states that after the FAO/WHO issued nutrition guidelines in
1992, members congratulated themselves on steering the UN organisations away
from any curbs on sugar consumption, in line with the position of the food
industry.