Coca-Cola tried to influence CDC on research and policy, new report states
The Coca-Cola Company tried to influence the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on diet and obesity issues by encouraging the agency to shift attention and blame away from sugar-sweetened beverages, according to a new report.
The study, which was based on email correspondence between Coca-Cola and the CDC that were obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, describes a series of efforts by Coca-Cola to gain access to CDC staff members, build relationships and influence policy on nutrition and artificial sweeteners.
“It’s a fascinating form of lobbying,” said Gary Ruskin, one of the researchers at U.S. Right to Know, the nonprofit consumer and research group that conducted the study. The report was published in the Milbank Quarterly, a peer-reviewed health care journal.
Although the CDC is not a regulatory agency, its impact is vast in the public health and scientific communities in the U.S. and abroad.
The group cited several correspondences by Alex Malaspina, a former Coca-Cola senior vice president of external affairs, to Barbara Bowman, then director of the CDC’s Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention.
Bowman and Malaspina arranged a dinner with Coca-Cola vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs, senior vice president of public affairs, and scientific officials. In a follow-up email, Coca-Cola staffers wrote that they would be sharing “work on the low and no calorie beverage research.”
“This is an instance of Coca-Cola using research it funded to influence the CDC staff’s perception of obesity challenges and likely solutions,” the report states.
The group said emails in 2015 between Bowman and Malaspina show that Coca-Cola was using its CDC contacts to lobby the World Health Organization after the body published a report that reinforced limits on full-sugar soft drinks consumption and encouraged a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages.
“Any ideas on how to have a conversation with WHO?” Malaspina wrote to Bowman. “Now, they do not want to work with industry...She is influenced by the Chinese Govt and is against the US. Something must be done.”
Bowman responded with several suggestions.
Corporations and individuals have had the ability to donate both directly and indirectly to a CDC foundation since it was created in 1992. The purpose was to raise private funds to support federal and biomedical health research. The law required that the foundation report “the source and amount of all gifts,” as well as any restrictions on how the donations can be used.
In the last year, however, legislators on a House appropriations subcommittee expressed concern that these guidelines were not being followed. The CDC foundation lists anonymous donors and does not indicate the size of their gifts.
In addition to shortcomings regarding donation information, the CDC has been unreliable in terms of publishing public information. Several of the FOIA requests made by U.S. Right to Know were denied for being too broad. In many cases, the researchers were able to access the same information through FOIAs to other institutions.
Coke first reached out to the CDC in April 2013, when Rhona Applebaum, then Coca-Cola’s chief science and health officer sent a note to CDC’s Jane Collins to congratulate her on being appointed director of the division of nutrition, physical activity and obesity. Several months later, Collins contacted Applebaum to suggest a colleague for a position at Coca-Cola. Applebaum promised to share the résumé internally.
The CDC is testing the boundaries of its ethics guidelines, according to the report from U.S. Right to Know, which itself is funded by donors including the Organic Consumers Association. Some of those files revealed research collaborations between the CDC and Coca-Cola.
One exchange suggested that partnerships between the CDC and companies that sell sugar-sweetened beverages could help avoid taxing such drinks. Malaspina goes as far as to phrase a sugar tax as “a global threat to our business.”
CDC’s ethics guidelines instruct employees to consider potential conflicts of interest before engaging with a potential partner. It also says the CDC should not be in partnerships in which “the potential partner represents any product that exacerbates morbidity or mortality when used as directed.” They also say CDC employees should not accept gifts if doing so could “compromise the integrity of a government program.”
In a statement, the CDC said it had many checks on ethics in place.
“CDC believes that public health and scientific advancement are best served when information is shared among other public health agencies, academic researchers, and private researchers in an open, timely, and appropriate way,” it said. The agency’s professionals “have numerous opportunities and extensive ethical and science-integrity checkpoints internally and externally that work to balance its guidelines and recommendations.“
Coca-Cola reiterated on Tuesday that it had since made efforts to be more transparent and to address the issue of obesity. “These emails go back a number of years and pre-date a commitment we made in 2015 to disclose our funding for well-being scientific research and partnerships publicly on our website,” the company said in a statement.
It added that its recommendations for sugar intake are aligned with those of WHO. “We recognize that too much sugar isn’t good for anyone.”
The nonprofit group behind the study, however, urged lawmakers to delve in deeper on the issue.
“I hope that Congress will investigate whether Coca-Cola is influencing the CDC improperly,” Ruskin said.
“This is an issue of major policy importance. Our nation is in the middle of an obesity epidemic. Congress should be investigating whether the CDC is following its own ethics standards.”