CDC chief saw Coca-Cola as fitness ally
As health commissioner of Georgia, the state with one of the highest rates of child obesity, Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald faced two enormous challenges: How to get children to slim down and how to pay for it.
Her answer to the first was Power Up for 30, a program pushing schools to give children 30 minutes more exercise each day, part of a statewide initiative called Georgia Shape. The answer to the second was Coca-Cola, the soft drink company and philanthropic powerhouse, which has paid for almost the entire Power Up program.
Fitzgerald is now in the spotlight as the Trump administration’s newly appointed director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, making her one of the nation’s top public health officials. And she finds herself facing a backlash from public health advocates for having accepted $1 million to fight child obesity from a company experts say is a major cause of it.
Her new position puts her at the helm of a federal agency that shook off its ties to the soda giant in 2013, after concluding Coke’s mission was at odds with its own. But Fitzgerald suggested in an email response to questions from The New York Times last week that she would consider accepting Coke money for CDC programs and would evaluate any proposal through the agency’s standard review process.
Georgia Shape was established by Gov. Nathan Deal in 2011, after the Legislature called for a statewide school fitness program, and was run by Fitzgerald. In 2013, Fitzgerald started Power Up for 30 with a million-dollar contribution from Coke. The money amounted to most of the program’s $1.2 million budget over the past four years.
Coke — which, like the CDC, is based in Atlanta — has also had two employees on Georgia Shape’s advisory board in various years. One was Rhona S. Applebaum, Coke’s chief science and health officer. She left the company in 2016 after The Times reported she had helped orchestrate a strategy of funding scientists who encouraged the public to focus on exercise and worry less about how calories contribute to obesity.
Ben Sheidler, a Coke spokesman, said someone from the Georgia Department of Public Health had solicited the grant for Power Up for 30 from Coke’s foundation, but he did not know who it was.
The program emphasized Coke’s longtime contention that exercise is the key to weight loss. A search of the program’s website turned up no mention of the role of sugary drinks and sodas in weight gain. The company has spent millions on studies that support exercise over reducing soda consumption, and that, critics say, deflect attention from the role sugar-sweetened beverages have played in the soaring rate of obesity and the spread of Type 2 diabetes among children.
But numerous other studies, including research from the CDC, have come to the conclusion that sugarladen drinks are a major factor contributing to obesity. The CDC’s website notes: “Frequently drinking sugar-sweetened beverages is associated with weight gain/obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, kidney diseases, nonalcoholic liver disease, tooth decay and cavities, and gout, a t ype of arthritis.”