Hop on Pop

How soda is being attacked in the media

Anti-soft-drink activism usually focuses on four arguments, and the Washington Post article embraced them all.

Soft drink consumption causes childhood obesity.
In addition to the obvious flaws in David Ludwig's research (see "Lance It" below), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is on record as saying: "There are no data from the Harvard study that allow us to make an estimate of what proportion of obesity might be accounted for by changes in soft drink consumption."

Soft drink consumption causes tooth decay.
Despite the Post's acknowledgement that "in the United States, cavities have decreased while soda consumption has increased," the article quotes the Ohio Dental Association as saying, "Acid begins to dissolve tooth enamel in only 20 minutes." Our advice: swallow before your 20 minutes are up.

Soft drink consumption among kids leads to caffeine dependence.
This baseless contention depends on the work of long-time anti-soda activist Roland Griffiths. The director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse (which funded Griffiths' research) has rebutted Griffiths' claims of caffeine addiction, insisting that the sample group was too small to draw any conclusions. In an earlier example of his penchant for junk science, Griffiths drew criticism from the International Food Information Council for trying to prove caffeine addiction using a "sample size of only seven subjects," including himself and six fellow researchers.

Soft drink consumption can deplete bones of calcium.
This porous myth lives on, despite the fact that the researcher, Grace Wyshak, never measured bone density and didn't ask how much soda her subjects drank. In her own words: "the [study] design is cross-sectional and causality cannot be inferred from the data."

We wish we could say for sure that these weightless arguments will dry up and blow away. Unfortunately, they are gaining gravitas with every media report. As long as headlines like "Soda pop is killing our children" (OOH!) sell more newspapers than "Refreshing drinks please a wide audience" (Ho-hum), these campaigns will continue to gain new converts.

Activist groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine have been trumpeting a study in The Lancet by Harvard's Dr. David Ludwig, whose research purportedly connects soda drinking to obesity. However, a Lancet editorial observed that "a large proportion of the children [in Ludwig's study] were obese" to begin with - which, the Lancet points out, certainly affected the study's outcome.

Ludwig himself concluded in the study's findings that "there is no clear evidence that consumption of sugar per se affects food intake in a unique manner or causes obesity." Still, his study garnered radio and TV airtime all across America and inspired a host of newspaper editorials calling for reductions in soft drink consumption, as well as for outright bans in schools.