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She Took On Colombia's Soda Industry. Then She Was Silenced.
It began with menacing phone calls, strange malfunctions of the office computers, and men in parked cars photographing the entrance to the small consumer advocacy group's offices. Then at dusk one day last December, Dr. Esperanza Cerón, the head of the organization, said she noticed two strange men on motorcycles trailing her Chevy sedan as she headed home from work. She tried to lose them in Bogotá's rush-hour traffic, but they edged up to her car and pounded on the windows. "If you don't keep your mouth shut," one man shouted, she recalled in a recent interview, "you know what the consequences will be."
The episode, which Dr. Cerón reported to federal investigators, was reminiscent of the intimidation often used against those who challenged the drug cartels that once dominated Colombia. But the narcotics trade was not the target of Dr. Cerón and her colleagues. Their work had upset a different multibillion-dollar industry: the makers of soda and other sugar-sweetened beverages.
Their organization, Educar Consumidores, was the most visible proponent of a proposed 20 percent tax on sugary drinks that was heading for a vote that month in Colombia's Legislature. The group had raised money, rallied allies to the cause and produced a provocative television ad that warned consumers how sugar-laden beverages can lead to obesity and diet-related illnesses like diabetes. The backlash was fierce. A Colombian government agency, responding to a complaint by the nation's leading soda company that called the ad misleading, ordered it off the air. Then the agency went further: It prohibited Dr. Cerón and her colleagues from publicly discussing the health risks of sugar, under penalty of a $250,000 fine.
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(Score: 2) by crafoo on Friday November 17 2017, @06:12PM (4 children)
Losing the taste for sugar has amazing effects. Start with the drinks, move on to other foods in your diet.
Start looking at processed food labels. This includes everything that comes in a box or bag. Nearly everything has a refined sugar in it! It's incredible. The sugar industry is poisoning our food supply! OK, that's unfair. People asked for it. Over time, sweeter foods sold better so more foods had processed sugars added to them. Now we are awash in refined sugars. I wish we could put a bottle of ketchup from 1970 next to what we have today. One was a tomato-based condiment. The other is a sugar syrup that looks red.
It's a really big deal. Look at the change in the populace from 1970 to today. Watch old film footage. Look at class pictures. People were thin. Everyone was thin! Being really fat was unusual. Not now. Obese is the norm, which is a very dangerous thing.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday November 17 2017, @06:48PM (3 children)
While I agree that excess sugar is a major problem, and contributes significantly to the obesity epidemic, the proportion of obesity that you are comparing probably has more to do with changes in lifestyle. In the 1970's people were a lot more active. More of them were physically active on the job. And even minor changes can add up over time.
Consider children's games in the 1970's vs. now. That's a particularly visible change, but its hardly the only one.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Friday November 17 2017, @09:19PM (2 children)
My generation, the last of gen x, are the last generation of children to grow up without excessive video games and cable/streaming TV. We rode bikes, played manhunt in parks and the neighborhood, climbed the abandoned LIIR elevated tracks, broke into abandoned factories and warehouses making them our secret urban forts (and almost getting arrested in the process), etc. Now to get kids out of the house, large video game companies have to go out of their way to design outdoor activities into their games such as Pokemon Go.
(Score: 4, Informative) by mhajicek on Saturday November 18 2017, @05:43AM (1 child)
These days if you let your kids play outside the neighbors call the cops, who are required by law to call CPS, who are required by law to do an investigation. I speak from experience.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Interesting) by LoRdTAW on Saturday November 18 2017, @05:24PM
Sad. Really sad.