Coca-Cola: University Archives Show Coke's Considerable Influence on Health Studies

The study examined five research agreements concluded with Louisiana State University, the University of South Carolina, the University of Toronto and the University of Washington, all of which were formulated before Coca-Cola has defined the following rules for funding research (as well as the exhaustive list of funded projects):

For all the funding for health and well-being research described below, the researchers:

· Are expected to conduct evidence-based, transparent and objective research;

· Are expected to generate a properly formulated hypothesis and conduct research that will answer relevant questions rather than favoring a particular outcome;

· Have full control over the design, execution, collection, analysis and interpretation of the data;

· Are encouraged to publish; and

· Are expected to disclose their sources of funding in all publications and public presentations of the data.

The company claims to respect these rules for all research funded since 2010 – even though these agreements were concluded since then.

"We agree that transparency and research integrity are important," said a spokesman for Coca-Cola. reverse. "This is why, since 2016, The Coca-Cola Company has not independently funded research on health and wellness issues, in accordance with the research guiding principles published on our website since . "

However, not everyone interprets the data this way.

"Coca-Cola did not follow his speech," said Gary Ruskin, co-founder and co-director of US Right to Know, a non-profit food watchdog, and one of the newspaper's authors. reverse. "He did not respect his principles in funding research."

Ruskin said that he and his colleagues were motivated to continue this research because of "Coca-Cola's efforts to evade responsibility for its role in the global obesity epidemic."

As Susan Greenhalgh, Ph.D. of Harvard pointed out in two articles in January, Coca-Cola used its influence in China to steer public health towards health at the expense of nutrition and fitness – thus minimizing the role of sugary drinks like Coca-Cola. His conclusion, however, differs slightly from Ruskin's.

"It's very interesting to me that these research contracts have been in place since at least 2010 and that Coca-Cola was not taken until 2015," she says. reverse. In other words, she does not think that these papers paint Coca-Cola in a terrible light, since the contracts were not too aggressive towards the researchers, even before. The New York Times shed light on his practices.

"This gives the impression that the company is trying at least to be responsible in terms of managing science," she said, acknowledging that Coca-Cola's conduct in this study is "at least a very good legal demonstration of doing what is right. "

She also noted that the contracts seemed remarkably "above expectations".

"The most damning term was this termination clause, but beyond that, they do not find much evidence of the kind of influence I think they were looking for," she adds.

Perhaps more importantly, the team made recommendations on how researchers could be more transparent through future funding.

Even when Coca-Cola was disclosed as a source of funding, the nature of the funding agreements with public universities gave it such leeway to approve or cancel the final results in the future. As a result, they point out that researchers should also disclose the full text of funding agreements in order to transparently examine how Coca-Cola funding influences their research. Greenhalgh agrees with this recommendation.

"I'm not saying that all business financing is bad or bad, we just need to know exactly how it influences science," she says.

Companies that sponsor research make sure to get the price that suits them. "

Marion Nestle, Ph.D., professor of nutrition and public health at the University of New York, has conducted extensive research on how the food industry's money distorts food science , including the soda industry, as reported in his 2015 book. Soda Politics. Nestle tells reverse that she thinks the new document is "staggering" and that she could not believe that the researchers were able to obtain this information.