— The soft drink industry has worked to smother a proposal to tax sugared beverages, a plan advocates said would have reduced obesity and helped finance health care reform.
Only months ago, supporters of the soda tax saw it as an idea whose hour was near. The sheer magnitude of the medical cost of obesity added urgency to the issue: Being overweight is so widespread and so closely tied to diabetes, heart disease and other health problems that this generation of young people may be the first in the U.S. to live shorter lives than their parents.
But opponents questioned any link between sugary drinks and obesity, and expressed concern about a slippery slope of taxes on other products.
Proponents, meanwhile, thought a tax that drove down consumption while raising money for health care seemed like a natural with Democrats controlling Congress.
The White House has dismissed the idea, however, even after President Barack Obama had expressed interest last summer. A key congressional committee, though initially seeming receptive, ended up refusing to consider it. Several minority advocacy groups, including some committed to fighting obesity, lined up against the tax after years of receiving financial support from the industry.
First lady Michelle Obama, who consulted with fast-food and soft drink representatives on her new healthy eating initiative, scheduled for unveiling Tuesday, is expected to steer clear of taxes.
Meanwhile, beverage lobbyists attacked several nutrition scientists, accusing them of bias and distorting available evidence. The beverage industry also financed research that reached conclusions favorable to its position.
No one underestimated the difficulty of getting new taxes approved, but Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., a member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, said, "We thought we had a chance to punch through."
Targeting the tax writers
From the beginning, fast-food and beverage company executives were uneasy about Obama. There was widespread concern that the promised Obama health care initiative might include taxes or other incentives to reduce consumption of fast food and high-calorie beverages.
A big push in Washington, coupled with similar initiatives under way in such states as California, raised the specter of a full-scale national debate on sweetened soft drinks and their effect on health.
Another alarm sounded in May, when the Senate Finance Committee heard testimony from public health advocates who proposed using a soda tax to help finance health care legislation.
Analysts at Yale University have calculated that a penny-an-ounce tax would induce a 23 percent drop in consumption, and the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that a smaller tax could raise $50 billion over 10 years.
A few weeks later, soda tax advocates in the Ways and Means Committee reported initially favorable responses from colleagues during closed-door meetings. And in July, Obama told a Men's Health magazine reporter that such a tax was an "idea we should be exploring."
Sanchez was one of the committee members who pushed for consideration of the idea.
She told a closed-door meeting of committee Democrats that it would be a political winner. "We are on the moral high ground here," she said. "We can improve health outcomes and get more revenue."
At the beginning, several other Democrats expressed support, including six-term Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey and freshman Rep. Allyson Schwartz of Pennsylvania, the daughter of a dentist.
Beverage lobbyists immediately went to work, enlisting other industries as well to pressure Ways and Means members.
"The industries in our coalition realized that this is a slippery slope; that once government reaches into the grocery cart, your business could be next," said Kevin Keane, executive vice president of the American Beverage Association.
The coalition, operating under the name Americans Against Food Taxes, included the soft-drink makers, their suppliers and such chains as McDonald's and Dominos Pizza.
To the surprise of public health analysts, it also included a bevy of Latino groups, among them the Hispanic Alliance for Prosperity, the National Hispana Leadership Institute and the League of United Latin American Citizens.
Most surprising on that list was the National Hispanic Medical Association, which represents 36,000 doctors and focuses on health issues such as obesity-related diabetes, which is hitting Latino youth especially hard.
"Why in the world would a Hispanic health advocacy group do this?" asked Kelly Brownell, the director of Yale University's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.
Nearly all the Hispanic groups, including the medical association, had received beverage industry money in the past or have industry representatives on their governing boards.
The association's director, Dr. Elena Rios, said the financial support, which amounted to no more than $10,000 from a single company, had nothing to do with the decision to oppose the tax. She and the other Latino groups contend the tax would unfairly burden lower-income consumers. She also said the evidence is not clear that the tax would effectively reduce obesity. On Friday, Rios said her organization had decided to withdraw from the industry coalition.
"It's all about payback," Brownell said, referring to industry donations. "Public health advocates ran into the same phenomena when seeking to increase taxes on tobacco."
The coalition launched an intense lobbying effort, including a $10 million television ad campaign in key markets warning against taxing food. The paper industry, a major supplier of fast-food companies, also contacted members of Congress. Some truckers joined the fight.
Outside of Washington, representatives from Coca-Cola and other companies contacted community groups, mostly in Chicago, Obama's hometown, asking them to join the campaign.
By the time the Democratic caucus held its next closed-door meeting in early summer, the atmosphere had changed, Sanchez said. That assessment was shared by Pascrell and some committee staffers.
Rep. John Lewis, the civil rights pioneer who represents Atlanta, the corporate headquarters of Coca-Cola, argued that the soda tax could lead to taxes on other foods, raising prices for hard-pressed consumers during a severe recession.
Rep. Ron Kind, who represents a rural Wisconsin district where dairy farming is widespread, said he became concerned about the fairness of targeting one industry. Kind had heard from local Pepsi and Coke distributors, and he and other members also received letters from the National Milk Producers Association concerned that the proposed tax could apply to chocolate milk.
"We went from having real interest in this idea to it just falling off the table," Sanchez said. "It was my perception that opposition increased as members began hearing from local businesses" that were part of the beverage industry coalition.
Attacking the science
The soft-drink industry was also waging a long-term war over the scientific evidence linking soda consumption to the nationwide epidemic of obesity.
In a two-pronged campaign, the industry attacked the findings of nutrition scientists and underwrote studies by other scientists whose work was more supportive of beverage companies' claims.
"The soda industry is taking their strategies right out of the tobacco playbook," said Harold Goldstein, who heads the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, which focuses on obesity and other public health issues.
Goldstein recently joined with researchers at UCLA in a survey of 43,000 Californians that found adults who drink one or more sodas per day are 27 percent more likely than non-soda drinkers to be overweight or obese.
"Sugared beverages are the single largest source of sugar added to the American diet," said Yale's Brownell.
But Keane of the American Beverage Association said researchers like Brownell and Goldstein are acting as advocates when they equate the soda industry to tobacco.
"Cigarettes kill. Soda doesn't," Keane said. "They pick and choose the facts that support their view, and they attack anyone who disagrees," including those whose work appears in peer-reviewed journals, Keane said. "It's scientific McCarthyism."
The American Beverage Association Web site for the campaign against the soda tax points to three studies in peer-reviewed journals that dispute a link between soda and obesity.
One was conducted by an author working for Decatur-based Archer Daniels Midland, a major producer of high-fructose corn syrup. Two were conducted by a researcher who now works for the Beverage Association; one of those studies was funded by a grant from the association.
"The researchers worked independently, and their findings were published in a peer-reviewed journal. That's the gold standard in the scientific community," Keane said.
Some of the studies Keane refers to argue that sedentary lifestyles and high-fat diets are more significant causes of obesity. And, largely through reviews of previously published studies, they say that the existing science on soft drinks' role is at best unclear.
Keane also says that soda accounts for just over 5 percent of the average American's calorie intake, and that blaming soda for the obesity epidemic "defies common sense."
Some research suggests that the body has not developed a system for processing sugared beverages, which are densely packed with calories and relatively new to the human diet. One study found that kids who drank soft drinks consumed nearly 200 more calories per day than those who didn't drink sodas.
The beverage industry rejects the argument that liquid calories lead to greater weight gain, pointing to a study conducted by Frank Sacks, a professor in the nutrition department at Harvard School of Public Health. The study sought to determine whether certain diets are more effective than others at achieving weight loss. Sacks concluded that diets that reduce calorie intake result in weight loss, regardless of which calories are cut.
Keane argues that the study proves his point, that "a calorie is a calorie," regardless of whether it's consumed in solid or liquid form.
But Sacks disagrees. "I don't know how they possibly could come up with that kind of interpretation," he said. "There was no testing of sugar-containing beverages, and, in fact, the participants were taught to avoid them."
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