If your core business involves the mass production and distribution of sugary products with little nutritional value, times are tough. In the old days, prominent health institutions and regulatory governmental agencies looked upon sugar as relatively benign. Today, however, the science of sugar metabolism is much better understood and accordingly, those institutions and regulatory agencies are becoming increasingly fastidious regarding sugar.
The cat is out of the bag and it’s not going back. So if you’re in the sugar business, your most viable marketing strategies may well involve shifting consumer attention away from food and toward other aspects of healthy living, like exercise.
This seems to be the case with Coca-Cola, according to a story that broke earlier this week in The New York Times. A new nonprofit organization, the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN), which collected $1.5 million in donations from Coke in 2014, promotes the idea that focusing on healthy food is the wrong approach to losing weight.1 Instead of food, dieters should be focusing on exercise.
In an astounding, you-have-see-it-for-yourself online video, GEBN’s vice president, Dr. Steven N. Blair, explains about obesity, “Most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is that they’re eating too much, eating too much, eating too much, blaming fast food, blaming sugary drinks and so on. And there’s really virtually no compelling evidence that that in fact is the cause.”
While it’s true that no single food is solely responsible for obesity, the notion that sugar consumption doesn’t matter flies in the face of decades of nutritional science research. Even the big regulatory governmental agencies are now lining up against sugar and this isn’t happening for lack of “compelling evidence.”
After sitting on the sidelines for decades, both the U.S. and the U.K. governments are now aligning themselves with the published scientific literature and indicating that official warnings against excessive sugar consumption are forthcoming.
