Events

Attacking obesity, one can at a time

 ”For over 125 years, we’ve been bringing people together. Today, we’d like people to come together on something that concerns all of us: obesity.”

REUTERS/Mike Blake

So opens a new commercial from Coca-Cola, which goes on to tout the company’s 180 low and no-calorie beverage options (roughly 27% of Coke’s 650+ beverage portfolio) and claims an overall reduction of 22% in the average number of calories per serving for Coca-Cola’s U.S. beverage products since 1997.

Unconvinced by the soda maker’s claims to nutritional progress, health advocates took Coke to task.

“So professional. So brilliant. So smart. And so deceitful,” food journalist Mark Bittman told New York magazine. “The ad is an astonishing act of chutzpah, explainable only as an act of desperation,” nutritionist and New York University professor Marion Nestle wrote on her blog. Jeff Cronin, director of communications at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, called the commercial “laughable on its face.” CSPI even put out a YouTube response, “Coming Together: Translated“ that combines clips from the original Coke ad with “plain English translations” of the beverage maker’s claims.