“Soda Politics” Reaps Accolades in Journal Review

“If any one name evokes unfettered truths about the sociopolitical machinations of ‘Big Food,’ it is that of Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University,” proclaims physician David Katz in a review of Nestle’s new book, Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning). “Dominions of fizz,” Nature, October 1, 2015.

Nestle describes, according to Katz, “softball” strategies employed by industry—“… scientific evidence on health effects, the industry’s impact on the environment and the preferential marketing of soft drinks to children, specific ethnic groups and poor people …”—as well as “the correspondence between the tactics of the soft-drinks and tobacco industries.” Those alleged tactics, Nestle asserts, include “’hardball’ strategies such as litigation, lobbying of Congress, and front groups such as New Yorkers Against Unfair Taxes, established by the beverage industry to oppose a soft-drinks levy.”

Issue 580