Do Sugary Sodas Make You Fat?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler writes:

Politicizing Soda Science

Today’s NYT reports on how New York City’s health commissioner pressured his staff to create a scary anti-obesity ad campaign, featuring this ad, even if it meant stretching the available scientific evidence on the potential health consequences of drinking a can of soda per day. In the end, they produced an ad that was “defensible” because, as one participant in the discussions put it, the ad’s language was “broad enough to get away with.”

Now, there are a bunch of things you might say about this right from the start. Maybe governments shouldn’t be in the business of running nanny state ads about personal nutrition. Maybe this particular ad was disgusting and shouldn’t have been released. Maybe obesity isn’t really that big a deal in the first place. But those weren’t the issues at stake. Rather, it was this single sentence in the ad:

Drinking 1 can of soda a day can make you 10 pounds fatter a year.

What, I thought, could be wrong with that? A can of sugared soda contains about 150 calories, and adding 150 calories a day to your diet would almost certainly produce a ten-pound weight gain over the course of a year or so. There are some caveats, of course:

  • If you cut out 150 calories elsewhere, you won’t gain any weight.
  • If you exercise more, you won’t gain any weight.
  • Your exact weight gain will depend on your age, current weight, etc.
  • If you have a miracle metabolism, you might not gain any weight at all.

This all seems pretty obvious, and while you’d probably mention it in a longer piece, it hardly seems necessary in a 30-second spot. But it turns out the scientists, especially Michael Rosenbaum of Columbia, seemed to think it should all be included. The ad, he said, was “misleading in that there is no reference to energy output changes.”

So I’m curious: what do you all think of this? I’m open to argument here, but it seems crazy to me, less a politicization of science from the health commissioner than a case of geekdom run amok among the scientists. I mean, if you can’t tell people that adding a bunch of calories to your diet will make you gain weight, what can you tell them?

POSTSCRIPT: And while I’m at this, can I complain once again about how journalistic conventions can ruin a story? It’s actually hard to tell exactly what happened here because the reporter insisted on “adding value” by not relating things in a simple chronological fashion. Nor does she tell us what the original sentence they were arguing about was. It’s a real mess.

UPDATE: Via comments, I do see one problem with this ad that I didn’t notice before. The phrase “10 pounds fatter a year” might lead you to believe that you’re going to gain ten pounds years after year. In fact, you’d gain (about) ten pounds and then just stay there.

This interpretation didn’t occur to me when I saw the ad. However, it’s a plausible one. Something like “10 pounds fatter in a year” might be better.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate