The cola companies are armed with billions of marketing dollars, exclusive school contracts, even logo-emblazoned baby bottles. Their targets are American kids, a vulnerable group whose weight (growing) and health (sinking) poses a huge threat to the public well-being.
Rachel Johnson, nutrition professor and an acting dean, is equipped with science, regulatory influence and outrage.
"People," she said during a Sept. 9 lecture to first-year students, "call me the soft drink Nazi."
Four days before Johnson meticulously argued for a relationship between rising consumption of soft drinks and skyrocketing childhood obesity rates, the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, released a 1,000 page report with new guidelines on nutrient intakes for optimal health. The report, which offered "dietary reference intakes" of energy and nutrients, made television and newspaper headlines worldwide.
Johnson was one of 21 experts who participated in the three-year process of creating the guidelines. The new rules, which set targets and limits for consumption of sugar, fat, protein and fiber among other things, evolved from close study of the scientific literature and countless meetings and conference calls.
"These rules are huge because they will set federal nutrition policy," Johnson said.
A committee wrote the report, but Johnson played an important role in setting the guidelines for sugar. The report urges that no more than 25 percent of daily calories come from added sugar in food, a recommendation that drew some criticism. Johnson believes that some in the media have mistook an "absolute, upper limit" as a recommendation.
"It's critical that we need to say this is not a recommendation," Johnson said. "At 25 percent of calories from sugar you would have trouble meeting the other guidelines."
The 25 percent limit, Johnson continued, came from a careful examination of survey information. When sugar intake reached 25 percent, "we started to see a clear and consistent drop-off in mineral intake", a condition which can impair health. Hence, the limit.
It's ironic that the strictures of science involved Johnson in recommending a sugar guideline that some observers find too lenient: As the first-years found during Johnson's President's Lecture, she is no friend of the sweet stuff.
Those sugary drinks may be effervescent on the palate, she told her audience, but their health effects linger, helping to drive a calorie and obesity boom that has reshaped the entire country, with particularly tragic effects for young people. Childhood obesity rates are up 300 percent in 25 years, and lifestyle-related "adult" conditions like type II diabetes are threatening more young people than ever before. Accompanying this grim march are steady increases in the consumption of soft drinks, which are a huge calorie source for youth.
This state of affairs, which has changed radically in only a single generation, has nothing to do with genes, Johnson argued. It's an environment of super-sized and super-marketed food, soft drinks especially. And the toll is huge and growing.
"A study by the Rand Corporation recently found for the first time that the cost of obesity-related diseases exceeded the cost of tobacco- and alcohol-related diseases combined," Johnson said.
Even baby humans have an innate preference for sweet tastes, Johnson said, and the food industry capitalizes on this with ever-larger portions and marketing budgets. As Americans eat out more often, and drink soda more often, those empty calories displace fruits, vegetables and milk, and more of the population creeps toward obesity and its associated ills.
Johnson sees a case for taxing and regulating high-sugar foods in some of the same ways that tobacco is now regulated. She applauded school districts, such as Los Angeles Unified, that have banned cola from campuses. Another part of the answer, she thinks, is nutrition education.
"The entire federal budget for nutritional education is one-fifth of what they spend to market Altoids mints," she said. "We've never really tried nutritional education."
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