Harvard research reveals Coke’s fingerprints on health policy in China
A complex network of research funding, institutional ties, and personal influence allowed Coca-Cola, through connections with a nonprofit group, to exert substantial influence over obesity science and policy solutions in China, nudging government policy into alignment with the company’s corporate interests, a Harvard study has found. Professor Susan Greenhalgh’s study reveals not just efforts by the food industry to influence public policy, but also the impact of those efforts. It is described in a pair of Jan. 9 articles published in The BMJ and the Journal of Public Health Policy. “There have been decades of work on how Big Pharma and Big Tobacco have tried to influence science and dictate policy, but the research on Big Food and Big Soda is just now emerging,” said Greenhalgh, the John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Research Professor of Chinese Society. “I don’t know of any other work that has documented this type of impact, especially on the policy...