There's a theory that sugar - in particular, sugary soda such as Coke and Pepsi Pepsi - is the 21st ...

1. Coca-Cola Has A New Message: Exercise! (And Keep
Drinking Cokes)
There's a theory that sugar - in particular, sugary soda such as Coke and Pepsi Pepsi - is the 21st
century equivalent of cigarettes. The parallels are not perfect, but they are compelling. Like
cigarettes, sodas were once thought to be a harmless vice. As with Marlboros and Lucky Strike,
clever mass-marketing made them national brands. And, like cigarettes, science has gradually
detailed the damage that their key ingredient, sugar, does to the human body. Finally, as
with cigarettes - though with less success - some government agencies have been trying to restrict
soda consumption, usually with higher sales taxes.
We're now reaching the next stage of this process.
The website of the Coke-funded organization promoting exercise over diet
From the 1960s on, tobacco companies spent billions of dollars trying to cast doubt on the science
showing unambiguous links between smoking and lung cancer. Now sugar is starting to get a similar
treatment. The Coca-Cola Coca-Cola Company, the New York Times reports, has spent $1.5 million
bankrolling an organization called the Global Energy Balance Network, whose mission is to stress
"that weight-conscious Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not
paying enough attention to exercise."
"Energy balance" refers to the amount of calories (one form of energy) people consume in food and
drink vs. the energy the body expends breathing, pumping blood, moving around, and thinking.
Obviously, you can alter your energy balance by eating less and/or exercising more - and the GEBN's
focus is exercise.
The insidious thing is, unlike the binary do-cigarettes-kill question, this is a subtle issue. Regular
exercise is, as the GEBN asserts, good for your health. But the predominant scientific view is that
what and how much you eat is more important. Over time, excess sugar - and especially sugar in
sodas, which is more quickly taken up by the body than sugar in fruits or other foods - messes with
the workings of the metabolism, leading to an assortment of health problems. Ignoring or
downplaying that end of the energy balance equation is going to contribute to public health
problems.
The Times piece also details how Coke has bankrolled the work of professors who run the GEBN,
and its broader effort to generate research sympathetic to the exercise-centric point of view. For
instance:

2. But much like the research on sugary drinks, studies of physical activity funded by the beverage
industry tend to reach conclusions that differ from the findings of studies by independent scientists.
Last week, the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana announced the findings of a
large new study on exercise in children that determined that lack of physical activity "is the biggest
predictor of childhood obesity around the world."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/johnmcquaid/2015/08/10/coca-cola-has-a-new-message-exercise-and-kee
p-drinking-cokes/