For more than two decades, warnings about sugary sodas have piled up. Health campaigns, scientific research, and public policy debates have all highlighted the dangers of sugar-sweetened beverages. A study published in Nature Medicine in January 2024 estimated that, in 2020 alone, sugar-sweetened drinks were linked to 2.2 million new cases of type 2 diabetes and 1.2 million new cases of cardiovascular disease worldwide. Yet many of us still reach for them every day: the average American drinks about 12 ounces of sugary soda daily. For every person who avoids soda entirely, someone else is downing roughly 24 ounces.
So why are we still consuming so much of something that contributes to chronic disease?
Eight years ago, two pastors filed a lawsuit in Washington, DC, against Coca-Cola — the dominant player in the US soda market — and the American Beverage Association. They accused them of “deceptive marketing, labeling, and sale of Coca-Cola’s sugar-sweetened beverages,” arguing that the company understood the science connecting sugary drinks to chronic illness but hid those links behind powerful PR campaigns. Some observers hoped the case would become a turning point, much like the 2007 legal action over misleading claims about OxyContin’s addictiveness that helped shift opinion against Purdue Pharma. But as I describe in my book Sweet and Deadly, Coca-Cola and its partners have managed to deflect or neutralize one challenge after another.
Like cigarette makers before them, Coca-Cola has invested heavily in shaping the science and the story. Long before the tobacco companies became infamous for sowing doubt, Coke and the broader sugar industry were already refining the strategy. When the Tobacco Industry Research Committee began its disinformation efforts in 1954, it borrowed both personnel and tactics from the Sugar Research Foundation — a nonprofit partly funded by Coca-Cola. In many ways, soda companies wrote an early version of what would later be called the “tobacco playbook.”
Over the years, this $300 billion corporation has misled consumers with messages that are incomplete, skewed, or simply wrong. It has relied on a far-reaching network of allies and front groups, including researchers and organizations whose work it funded, and poured billions into ads linking Coke with polar bears, Santa Claus, and smiling families. Despite its role in rising rates of diet-related disease, Coca-Cola has never truly faced a broad public reckoning.
One of the most persistent myths Coca-Cola has promoted is that “a calorie is a calorie.” In 2012, then–chief marketing officer Katie Bayne said, “We don’t believe in empty calories.” A year later, James Quincey — now the company’s CEO — doubled down: “When we talk about obesity, a calorie is a calorie. The experts are clear — the academics, the government advisors, diabetes associations — we need to have balance in the calories. And if you’re taking in too many, or burning them off, that is a problem; wherever they’re coming from, a calorie is a calorie.”
But biologically, that’s not how it works. Research has repeatedly shown that calories from liquid sugar are processed very differently than calories from whole grains, fruits, nuts, or other fiber- and nutrient-rich foods. Those foods come with vitamins, fiber, and other components that help the body handle energy intake. Soda does not.
Coke pairs this with another narrative: “energy balance.” The simplistic version claims that it doesn’t matter whether your calories come from cashews, kale, or cola — all that counts is balancing energy in with energy out. Instead of questioning the type of calories people consume, this framing shifts attention to exercise and personal responsibility. Coca-Cola has repeatedly emphasized the “calories out” side of the equation.
This message was central to the Global Energy Balance Network, formed in 2014 by researchers tied to the University of Colorado and the University of South Carolina. One of its leading voices, Steven Blair, worked energetically to redirect attention away from diet. In a video for the group, he said, “Most of the focus, in the popular media, in the scientific press, is ‘Aww, they’re eating too much, eating too much, eating too much.’ Blaming fast foods, blaming sugary drinks, and so on, and there’s really virtually no compelling evidence that that in fact is the cause.”
In 2015, however, a New York Times investigation revealed that the Global Energy Balance Network was not an independent scientific body at all, but a front group funded and guided by Coca-Cola from the beginning. The company wanted it to appear neutral while pushing its preferred message. After the expose, then-CEO Muhtar Kent wrote a Wall Street Journal column titled “We’ll do better,” offering a public apology. Coca-Cola did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
That apology didn’t erase the broader pattern. In a 2013 company blog post, Coca-Cola celebrated its role in supposedly helping to remove calories from the US diet. The post, since removed, proclaimed: “Yesterday, America’s top food and beverage manufacturers announced an important milestone: more than 1.5 trillion calories have been removed from the US marketplace. This achievement is the result of efforts made by the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation (HWCF), a coalition of 16 food and beverage corporate partners, including The Coca-Cola Company, and over 230 organizations, who are working together to help reduce obesity, especially childhood obesity.”
The article appeared under a photo showing former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, HWCF’s Lisa Gable, and author Hank Cardello at an event sponsored by the Obesity Solutions Initiative at the Hudson Institute. It looked like a gathering of independent experts discussing obesity. In reality, the event was funded by Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and other food companies. Coke had given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Hudson Institute and $5 million to HWCF.
What the company did not emphasize is the simplest way it could cut calories: reduce or phase out full-sugar beverages and scale back marketing for them. Instead, it continues to heavily promote sugary drinks and even launch new high-sugar varieties, such as Coca-Cola Spiced, which in some cases contain more sugar than the flagship soda.
Coca-Cola’s business model relies on selling sugar water. A company that deliberately reduced demand for its core products would be seen as failing its shareholders. No CEO is going to proudly tell investors, “We’ve finally succeeded in selling less Coke and cutting the calories we put into the world.” What is remarkable is that Coca-Cola has been able to maintain its position as the top seller of sugar-sweetened beverages while simultaneously claiming credit for removing calories from Americans’ diets.
One longtime industry front group eventually pushed the message too far. The International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), founded in the 1980s by a Coke executive, spent decades promoting research that favored funders like Hershey, Kraft, and Kellogg. In 2016, it backed a paper that criticized the growing body of evidence on sugar’s health risks. That move proved controversial even among its corporate supporters. Matthias Berninger, then a spokesperson for Mars, said the paper would not help consumers make better choices. Mars withdrew from ILSI in 2018, with Berninger saying, “We do not want to be involved in advocacy-led studies that so often, and mostly for the right reasons, have been criticized.” Two years later, Coca-Cola quietly exited as well.
The company has also waded deeply into politics. In 2018, Coca-Cola joined an effort to fight soda taxes in California. Along with other soda makers, it supported a campaign with the benign-sounding name “Californians for Accountability and Transparency in Government Spending, Sponsored by California Businesses.” This coalition gathered signatures for a statewide ballot initiative that would require a two-thirds voter majority for local tax changes. The proposal was so alarming to cities and unions that lawmakers were desperate to block it. With enough signatures collected, the soda industry had leverage. They offered to withdraw the initiative in exchange for a statewide law banning new local taxes on groceries, including soda, until 2030. Legislators agreed, and the tax ban was passed as a rider to a budget bill. This kind of maneuver, called preemption, has also been used effectively by gun-rights organizations.
Taken together, these efforts form an alternate reality in which sugary drinks seem relatively harmless, soda companies appear civic-minded, and real policy solutions — like soda taxes — are slowed or blocked. The anodyne-sounding groups funded by Coca-Cola fit into a coordinated strategy that has kept public opinion from turning sharply against the company, unlike what has happened to Philip Morris, Purdue Pharma, or Exxon. In the 2024 Axios Harris Poll 100, which ranks corporate reputations, Coca-Cola landed at No. 27 with a “very good” score. Exxon, by contrast, ranked 86th with a “fair” rating. Coca-Cola’s PR machine helps preserve its glow of goodness while profits and shareholder returns continue to flow.
As for that Washington, DC, lawsuit, it never became the landmark case some hoped for. After years of legal wrangling during which Coca-Cola’s elite attorneys chipped away at the claims, the plaintiffs ultimately withdrew the case in 2019. Once again, Coke walked away the winner.
Murray Carpenter is a health and science journalist and the author of Sweet and Deadly: How Coca-Cola Spreads Disinformation and Makes Us Sick and Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts and Hooks Us.
