Decades of health campaigns and scientific research about the risks of sugary soft drinks are a big reason that Americans have been drinking less soda since consumption peaked around 2000. A January paper in Nature Medicine found that in 2020, 2.2 million new cases of type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million new cases of cardiovascular disease worldwide were attributable to sugar-sweetened beverages. But many of us still have not gotten the memo – the average American today drinks about 12 ounces of sugary sodas a day. For each person who doesn’t drink any soda, there’s someone chugging 24 ounces every day.
Why are we still drinking so much of a beverage that makes people sick?
Eight years ago, two pastors sued Coca-Cola, by far the country’s most popular soda company, and the American Beverage Association over “their deceptive marketing, labeling, and sale of Coca-Cola’s sugar-sweetened beverages.” The complaint, filed in Washington, DC, alleged that Coca-Cola knew about the science linking sugar-sweetened beverages to chronic diseases but obscured those links through aggressive public relations campaigns. Some thought that the suit would finally tip the balance of public opinion against Coke – the same way a court case in 2007 over misleading marketing on OxyContin’s addictiveness shifted the tide against Purdue Pharma. But as I cover in my new book, “Sweet and Deadly,” every jab by health advocates has been deftly parried by Coke and its allies.
Like the tobacco companies, Coke has spent millions spinning science to hide soda’s health costs from the public and downplay the risks of sugar. In fact, Coke has been at this game longer than the tobacco industry. When the Tobacco Industry Research Committee started launching disinformation campaigns in 1954, it imported its staff and strategies lock, stock, and barrel from the Sugar Research Foundation, a nonprofit funded partly by Coke. The soda companies were pioneers of the PR strategy now known as the tobacco playbook.
For decades, the $300 billion corporation has duped consumers by promoting messages that are either misleading or flat-out false. It’s used an extensive network of allies and proxy groups to carry its messages, including co-opting scientists and their research, and spent billions of dollars on ads that associate Coke with warm and fuzzy feelings represented by polar bears, Santas, and happy families. Coca-Cola has yet to face a major reckoning for its outsize role in America’s health crisis.
One of the dietary falsehoods that Coca-Cola spreads is the concept that a calorie is a calorie. “We don’t believe in empty calories,” Katie Bayne, Coke’s former chief marketing officer, said in 2012. The following year, James Quincey, now the CEO of the corporation, said, “When we talk about obesity, a calorie is a calorie. The experts are clear – the academics, the government advisors, diabetes associations – we need to have balance in the calories. And if you’re taking in too many, or burning them off, that is a problem; wherever they’re coming from, a calorie is a calorie.”
But in the human body, not all calories are created equal – far from it. Research has long shown that a calorie of liquid sugar is not metabolized in the same manner as a calorie of whole grain, for example, or a calorie of fruit or nuts. Those calories have fiber, vitamins, and other nutrients that are not present in soda.
Coke also promotes the related message of “energy balance.” The simplest energy balance argument posits that a calorie of food will be metabolized the same whether it comes from cashews, kale, or Coca-Cola, so consumers should focus not on the type of food but on trying to burn as many calories as they consume. Coke has been especially interested in emphasizing the calories-out side of the equation.
This was the focus of the Global Energy Balance Network, an organization launched in 2014 by researchers affiliated with the University of Colorado and the University of South Carolina. One of the academics, Steven Blair, did yeoman’s work to shift Americans’ focus from the elements of the diet to the concept of balancing calories in and calories out. In a video for the organization, Blair said, “Most of the focus, in the popular media, in the scientific press, is ‘Aww, they’re eating too much, eating too much, eating too much.’ Blaming fast foods, blaming sugary drinks, and so on, and there’s really virtually no compelling evidence that that in fact is the cause.”
In 2015, a New York Times expos revealed that the Global Energy Balance Network was simply a front group for Coca-Cola. The corporation had funded it and guided it since its inception but wanted it to appear independent. This prompted a very public apology from Coke’s then-CEO Muhtar Kent, who penned a Wall Street Journal column titled “We’ll do better.” Coca-Cola did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
But it was far from the only misleading messaging Coke had spread. In a May 2013 blog post, Coca-Cola trumpeted its success in removing calories from the American diet through changing its product formulation, portion size, and promotion. “Yesterday, America’s top food and beverage manufacturers announced an important milestone: more than 1.5 trillion calories have been removed from the US marketplace,” the now-removed post read. “This achievement is the result of efforts made by the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation (HWCF), a coalition of 16 food and beverage corporate partners, including The Coca-Cola Company, and over 230 organizations, who are working together to help reduce obesity, especially childhood obesity.”
The post ran beneath a photo of the former Department of Agriculture secretary Dan Glickman, Lisa Gable of HWCF, and the author Hank Cardello at an event sponsored by the Obesity Solutions Initiative at the Hudson Institute. While the photo appears to be three independent experts cordially discussing the problem of obesity, the whole event was paid for by Coke, Pepsi, and other food corporations. Coke alone had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Hudson Institute and $5 million to HWCF.
What the company didn’t mention is that Coca-Cola could remove far more calories from the marketplace in a heartbeat by taking full-sugar beverages off the market or reducing its advertising of those products. Not only does it aggressively market these calorie-dense drinks, but it continues to introduce new Coke blends that in some cases, such as Coca-Cola Spiced, have even more sugar than the original Coca-Cola.
Coke is in the business of selling sugar water. If it tries to reduce sales of its products, it would be violating its obligations to its shareholders. (Woe to the CEO who announces on an earnings call – “We did it, we finally succeeded in reducing the amount of Coke we sell, thus reducing calories!”) What is unexpected is for Coca-Cola to concurrently sell more sugar-sweetened beverages than any other corporation while taking credit for reducing calories.
One front group ended up taking the pro-sugar stance a bit too far. The International Life Sciences Institute, founded in the 1980s by a Coca-Cola executive, spent decades spinning food science in favor of its corporate funders, including Hershey, Kraft, and Kellogg. But when it funded a 2016 research paper critiquing the growing body of science on the health risks of sugar, it was a step too far for some of its corporate members. Matthias Berninger, a Mars spokesperson at the time, said the paper would not help consumers make better choices. When Mars left ILSI in 2018, Berninger said, “We do not want to be involved in advocacy-led studies that so often, and mostly for the right reasons, have been criticized.” Two years later, Coke quietly left the group as well.
In 2018, Coke was part of an elaborate front group to help it push back against the soda taxes several California municipalities had enacted. Coke and its soda industry allies, under the guise of a campaign called “Californians for Accountability and Transparency in Government Spending, Sponsored by California Businesses,” gathered signatures to support a statewide initiative that would require municipalities to get the approval of two-thirds of voters before implementing any local tax change. By crafting an initiative so abhorrent to municipalities and unions that California lawmakers would do anything to make it go away, Coke gained bargaining power. With signatures in hand, the soda alliance went to Sacramento and swung a deal. We’ll withdraw the initiative, they said, in exchange for a law banning new taxes on groceries, including sodas, through 2030. Legislators took the deal and pushed that provision through as a rider on a budget bill. This strategy, known as preemption, has also proven effective for gun rights groups.
Coke has created this elaborate parallel world to mislead consumers about the health risks of sugar-sweetened beverages and take strategic actions like preventing soda taxes. All of the innocuous-sounding, Coke-funded groups named above are part of a plan that has prevented the balance of public opinion from tipping against Coca-Cola, as it has for other corporations such as the tobacco company Philip Morris, Purdue Pharma, and Exxon. In the 2024 Axios Harris Poll 100, which ranks company reputations, Coke placed 27th with a “very good” score compared to Exxon’s “fair” score at No. 86. The PR strategy ensures that Coca-Cola appears shrouded in an aura of goodness while staying profitable and steadily rewarding their shareholders.
And that DC lawsuit? It dragged on for years, as Coke’s top-notch legal team successfully whittled it down. The plaintiffs finally withdrew the suit in 2019. Coke won again.
Murray Carpenter is a health and science journalist and the author of “Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick” and “Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts and Hooks Us.”
This story is adapted from “Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick by Murray Carpenter. Copyright 2025 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
