Soft Drink Industry Executives Have a New Friend in the CDC, But Who Is It?

The beverage industry in the United States reportedly makes over a billion dollars per annum, with companies involved in Big Soda making a whole lot of money while also putting a whole lot of people at high health risk. This is why some states have imposed taxes on sugary drinks as a way to deter people from consuming them.

Luckily, this taxation has been working for the most part. However, it seems as though soft drink companies have something up their sleeve. According to reports from Huffington Post, some of the big wigs of the soda industry have been talking to Dr. Barbara Bowman, director of CDC's Division for Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention and she has been advising them on how to address the actions by the World Health Organization that were hurting their business immensely.

A report from US Right to Know states that there were emails being sent back and forth between Bowman and Alex Malaspina, a former scientific and regulatory affairs leader for Coca Cola. In their correspondence, it seems as though Bowman was quite happy to be helping the beverage powerhouse change their current public image.

The emails between Bowman and Malaspina also show the latter's concern over the World Health Organization giving his company ILSI and Coca Cola a "cold shoulder." In Coca Cola's case the primary concern was with their brand new product Coca Cola Life, which is sweetened with Stevia instead of regular sugar or high fructose corn syrup. However, multiple reports claim that a bottle of Coca Cola life still contained more sugar than the WHO's daily recommended amount.

The full email string is well documented in the report from the Huffington Post. It may seem controversial that someone from the CDC is helping Coca Cola, but spokeswoman Kathy Harben has said that it is "not unusual" for someone in the CDC to keep in touch with people on both sides of a conflict.