From the latest Taco Bell concoction to the lack of fresh produce in many low-income communities across the country, there’s no shortage of targets to blame for America’s poor national diet. But in recent years, many public health campaigns have zeroed in on a single enemy: soda. And there’s good reason for this. Drinking soda is entirely optional (there’s no medical reason to consume sugar water). It is remarkably common (around 50 percent of Americans regularly consume non-diet sodas). And the industry has huge political sway (Big Soda contributes millions of dollars a year to campaigns and candidates).

Now Marion Nestle (no relation to the Nestlé food company), a nutritionist and professor of sociology and food systems at New York University, has written what she hopes will serve as a guide to effectively fighting the soda industry. In Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (And Winning), Nestle details how soda companies have used their power to manipulate our political process and encourage overconsumption of their products. “Everyone interested in health,” she writes, should be “doing everything possible to discourage the marketing, promotion, and political protection of sugary drinks.”

Nestle isn’t a hardliner about soda or sugar consumption in moderation. “Sugars are indeed delicious,” she writes, “and even their severest critics are not concerned about small amounts.” But the average American isn’t consuming sugar in moderation. American children on average consume 16 percent of their daily calories in added sugars, and for adults the average is 13 percent. That’s way higher than most health experts’ recommendation, that sugars should comprise at most 10 percent of daily calories. High sugar consumption has been associated with higher risk for heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.

The attack on Big Soda will be familiar to many readers. The issue made headlines in 2012 when then New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg attempted to pass a 1-cent-per-ounce soda tax. Many critics dismissed that attempt, along with Bloomberg’s effort to cap the size of fountain soda containers, as “nanny statism.” But soda taxes have found an audience elsewhere. Earlier this year, Berkeley, California, implemented a 1-cent-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. In the two years since the federal government in Mexico imposed a 10 percent tax on sodas, national soda consumption has dropped by 6 percent.

But these victories are small compared to the power and size of the soda industry. The top three soda companies—Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Dr Pepper Snapple Group—control 86 percent of the U.S. soda market. Globally, the top two control 50 percent of the soda market. That market share represents an enormous number of products. Coca-Cola alone sells over 3,500 products under 500 different brand names in more than 200 countries.

And the big keep getting bigger. In recent years, Coca-Cola has bought a number of smaller beverage lines, including Naked Juice, Honest Tea, and Vitaminwater. They’ve also integrated across sectors: in 2009, both Coca-Cola and PepsiCo bought their North American bottling companies. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo had previously primarily acted as syrup producers, but, as Nestle explains, “producing the syrup controls the enterprise; every company further down the supply chain depends on getting syrup from the manufacturer.”

Read the full article here.