Big Sugar plays hardball

You can mess with Big Tobacco, Big Pharma and Big Oil. But don’t dare mess with Big Sugar. Those guys play hardball. Around the globe, nothing sells like soft drinks, which are loaded with sugar and have been linked to rising obesity and diabetes rates. One of the first things doctors order parents to do when their children are diagnosed with hyperactivity disorder is to get them off soft drinks. Don’t get dentists started on what soda can do to teeth.

The political battlefield is littered with the casualties of activist campaigns that dared to take on Big Sugar in the name of health and good education. That’s a sad, though hardly surprising, statement on the industry’s priorities.

This year in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a local proposition asked voters to accept a two cents-per-ounce tax on soft drinks to fund early-childhood education.

Proponents tried to make the election about pre-K education but beverage companies campaigned hard in low-income neighbourhoods to make the vote about cheap access to soda. They won handily. A similar effort went down in defeat in Chicago last month.

Big Sugar knows that billions of people, and billions more dollars, are at stake in the soft-drink fight. And we all know that when corporate profits are at stake, human health priorities come in a distant second.

St. Louis (Missouri) Post-Dispatch