News Focus
26 WDDTY | ISSUE 01 | AUG/SEP 2019 FACEBOOK.COM/WDDTYAUNZSugar for kids:
how Big Tobacco
changed the soda
industry
Big Tobacco understood the importance of putting addictive
ingredients in its cigarettes, and it applied the same principles
when it launched soda drinks—then changed the rules of
engagement by targeting kidsI
s ‘Big Soda’—the manufacturers of
sugary soft drinks—as bad as Big
Tobacco in covering up the health
risks of its products?
The parallel has been mooted a few
times, but in 2017, Praxis Project, a
health advocacy group, went a step
further and issued a lawsuit in which it
directly accused Coca-Cola of adopting
Big Tobacco’s tactics of using ‘science’
to disprove evidence its drinks were
harmful. Just five months later, Praxis
withdrew the suit, amid claims it had
overplayed its hand.
In the suit, Praxis claimed that Coca-
Cola—aided by the American Beverage
Association—had started to ramp-up
a campaign of “misrepresentation and
deception” in 2012 against a growing
body of evidence directly linking sugary
drinks to obesity, type 2 diabetes and
heart disease.
“Just as the tobacco industry formed
the Tobacco Industry Research
Committee in 1953 to respond to
scientific evidence linking smoking to
lung cancer, Coca-Cola’s strategy was
one of ‘cultivating relationships’ withscientists as a way to ‘balance the debate’
on sugar-sweetened beverages,” Praxis
stated in the lawsuit.
Coca-Cola hit back, describing the
suit as “legally and factually meritless”
in an email to Vice Media’s food website
Munchies—and just months after
issuing it, Praxis withdrew the lawsuit.
But a secret cache of papers, uncovered by
researchers at the University of California
at San Francisco, reveals that Praxis was
closer to the truth than it was able to
prove at the time.
Not only is ‘Big Soda’ like Big Tobacco
in its tactics, but for many years major
sugary drinks brands were owned by
tobacco companies, which generated
billions of dollars in revenue by using
the same flavors and colors applied in
selling cigarettes and adopting child-
focused marketing tactics that are still
used today.Children first
Sugar and nicotine are two of the most
important compounds in cigarettes.
They both help make the cigarette
addictive, as Victor DeNoble, awhistleblower at Philip Morris, revealed.
Although he was silenced for 10 years
after he was fired as a research scientist,
he finally was able to explain in 1994 just
how manufacturers made their products
as addictive as an illicit drug.
The sugars produce acetaldehyde, a
toxic compound that is carcinogenic
(cancer-causing)—and it is the sugar,
not the nicotine, that causes lung cancer.
Mixed with nicotine, it produces a
dopamine response in the brain, making
the cigarettes addictive, and DeNoble and
his team were tasked with creating the
optimal balance between the two.
Given the synergy with this essential
ingredient of cigarettes, it isn’t surprising
that America’s two biggest tobacco firms,
R J Reynolds and Philip Morris, took an
interest in sugary soft drinks. Both used
their knowledge of creating addictive
products to develop brands such as
Hawaiian Punch, Kool-Aid, Capri Sun
and Tang, the papers reveal.^1
As an R J Reynolds executive explained
in a memo to the company’s research
team, “many flavorants for tobacco
would be useful in food, beverages and
other products” that could produce “large
financial returns.”
Thus motivated, in 1962, a vice
president at R J Reynolds sanctioned
the company’s laboratories to develop
powdered and ‘fizz’ tablet forms of
sugary drinks and test them specifically
on children. This was a first for the
industry; at the time, the sector’s two
major players, Coca Cola and Pepsi,
hadn’t differentiated between adults and
children in the marketing of their drinks.
Reynolds launched its sugary stick
drink as King Stir Stick in 1963, and in
the same year, consolidated its position
in the soft drink sector by acquiring
Pacific Hawaiian products, which made
Hawaiian Punch.
Over the next 20 years, Reynolds
targeted children, doubling its marketing
budget to focus on the very young, and
launched fun cartoon characters to help
sell its sugary drinks. It even reduced the
size of its Hawaiian Punch cartons so they
would be easier for small hands to grasp.Morris men
Philip Morris saw the enormous success
its rival was having in the soft drink sector
and decided to get in on the act with the
purchase of the Kool-Aid brand in 1985.