
The strategy remains essentially unchanged. It’s been working since the 1950s, when the Coca-Cola Company gave $5,000 to the chairman of nutrition at Harvard Medical School, who would go on to write an article for McCall’s magazine promoting “soda, ice cream or a Coke” as an appropriate snack for teenagers. If that line of thinking sounds reasonable to you, Big Soda’s playbook is working. All it takes, in fact, is 23 minutes of cycling to burn off the 140 calories from all that “scary” sugar - the very same sugar, it’s worth pointing out, that’s found in healthy foods, such as apples, pears and strawberries. Twelve ounces of carbonated, sugar-sweetened liquid won’t send you spiraling into metabolic syndrome. A single can of soda, I think we can all agree, will do you no harm.
