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    Study: Coca-Cola Shaped China's Efforts To Fight Obesity

    A new report documents how Coke penetrated the government and influenced efforts to bring down the growing obesity rate — but not by cutting back on calories.
    by Jonathan Lambert Jan 10, 2019 5 minutes
    Students exercise at a weight-loss summer camp in Shandong Province, China. The government promotes physical activity as the solution to a growing obesity problem.

    The Coca-Cola company exerted strong influence over the way the Chinese government addressed the country's growing obesity problem, according to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of Public Health Policy and the BMJ.

    Study author Susan Greenhalgh, a social scientist and China scholar, wanted to uncover the opaque process of science-based policy-making in China. She focused on the government's efforts to address a growing obesity crisis: the percentage of obese Chinese adults more than doubled over two decades, from 20.5 percent in 1991 to 42.3 percent in 2011.

    Greenhalgh's years-long investigation unraveled the complex personal, institutional and financial connections the soda company cultivated to align Chinese science and policy with the interest in building a market for Coke in China.

    "I was surprised here at the extent, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Barcelona who studies how corporations influence science and policy. "The study gives us an interesting and important insight on the extent to which corporations can influence public policy in other countries where there is less scrutiny."

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