"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"--
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 beveragesand 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-makingwith distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claimsdedicated 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 todays 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 globaland yet more humanthan the story that dominates public understanding today.
Cokes research isnt 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.
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