Coca-Cola loves to promote the Calories In/ Calories Out (CICO) model. As one of the leading purveyors of sugar sweetened beverages, it constitutes a significant portion of the added sugars in the American diet. Do you remember the story of the Twinkie diet? In 2010, Mark Haub, a researcher at the Kansas State University, achieved notoriety as a follower of the Twinkie diet. For 10 weeks, Haub ate a Twinkie every three hours instead of a regular meal. He also ate Doritos, Oreo cookies and sugary cereal. The catch was that he would only eat 1,800 calories per day of some of the most fattening foods on the planet. In those two months, he lost 27 pounds and his LDL cholesterol got better, as did his triglycerides. This gained the attention of every mainstream media outlet and supported the view that weight loss is all about the calories. You could eat whatever you wanted, and as long as you reduced calories, you could still lose weight. There was only one thing missing from this story. One glaring omission. Haub was paid by Coca-Cola. He was one of those researchers relying upon Coke’s deep pockets to fund him and his kids’ college fund. Chump change? Hardly. Coke spent a total of $2.3 million on these "health professionals and scientific experts." On the press release, Coke stated that these experts "state their own views and disclose their relationship with The Coca-Cola Company”………except that they don’t. Mark Haub never talked about Coca-Cola’s payoff in the hundreds of interviews and articles in the media about his Twinkie diet. In academic circles, misrepresenting your source of funding, which has grave implications for results, is tantamount to lying under oath. The original story sounded a lot better than “Coca-Cola pays a guy to do an unsupervised, unverified study and claims to lose weight eating Twinkies.” What Coke was trying to do was create a puppet organization where they could drive “research" that proved that sugar and soda doesn’t make you fat. They carefully hid their name behind the university and the doctors, who you can imagine were well paid for their part as well. Make no mistake. A big part of Big Soda’s game plan is continuing to try to hoodwink the public into believing that all calories are equally as fattening. They’ve spent millions of dollars and decades doing just that. A calorie is a calorie, sure, but that’s not the point. Are all calories equally fattening? Will eating cookies every day lead to the same weight gain as eating salad? Only a fool believes that.
