Safe Soda for Coca-Cola Fans

The secret world of corporate science, where powerful companies and allied academic scientists mold research to meet industry needs, is the focus of this gripping account. In the 1990s, as obesity rates in the United States were soaring, public health critics pointed to sugary soda as a significant culprit, advocating for soda taxes to curb the consumption of sweetened beverages and potentially threaten the revenues of the giant soda companies.

Soda Science tells the story of how the 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 that few experts accept. Anthropologist and science studies specialist Susan Greenhalgh uncovers a hidden world of science-making, with distinctive organizations, social networks, knowledge-making practices, and ethical claims, all dedicated to creating industry-friendly science and keeping it under wraps.

By tracing the birth, maturation, death, and afterlife of the science they made, Greenhalgh demonstrates how corporate science has managed to gain such a hold over our lives. Her investigation spans twenty years and takes her from the United States, 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 today's 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.

Greenhalgh's 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. She argues that Coke's research is not fake science; it was real science, conducted by real and eminent scientists, but distorted by its aim to protect the company's profits.

By following the scientists and their ambitious schemes to make the world safe for Coke, Greenhalgh offers an account that is more global – and yet more human – than the story that dominates public understanding today. Her investigation uncovers a hidden world of science-making, where corporate interests have managed to exert a powerful influence over the research that shapes our understanding of health and nutrition.

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