New York’s Soda Size Limit and Public Health

A: Your ques­tion comes up at a time when the New York State Supreme Court is hear­ing argu­ments about whether New York City’s health depart­ment has the right to estab­lish a limit on soda sizes.

As an advo­cate for pub­lic health, I think a soda cap makes sense. Sixteen ounces pro­vides two full serv­ings, about 50 grams of sug­ars, and 200 calories—10 per­cent of daily calo­ries for some­one who con­sumes 2,000 calo­ries a day.

That’s a gen­er­ous amount. In the 1950s, Coca-Cola adver­tised this size as large enough to serve three people.

You may not care whether sodas are bad for health, but plenty of other peo­ple do. These include, among oth­ers, offi­cials who must spend tax­payer dol­lars to care for the health of peo­ple with obesity-related chronic ill­nesses, employ­ers deal­ing with a chron­i­cally ill work­force, the par­ents and teach­ers of over­weight chil­dren, den­tists who treat tooth decay, and a mil­i­tary des­per­ate for recruits who can meet fitness standards.

Poor health is much more than an indi­vid­ual, per­sonal prob­lem. If you are ill, your ill­ness has con­se­quences for others.

That is where pub­lic health mea­sures come in. The clos­est anal­ogy is food for­ti­fi­ca­tion. You have to eat vit­a­mins and iron with your bread and cere­als whether you want to or not. You have to wear seat belts in a car and a hel­met on a motor­cy­cle. You can’t drive much over the speed limit or under the influ­ence. You can’t smoke in public places.

Would you leave it up to indi­vid­u­als to do as they please in these instances regard­less of the effects of their choices on them­selves, other peo­ple and soci­ety? Haven’t these “nanny state” mea­sures, as you call them, made life health­ier and safer for everyone?

All the soda cap is designed to do is to make the default food choice the health­ier choice. This isn’t about denial of choice. If you want more than 16 ounces, no gov­ern­ment offi­cial is stop­ping you from order­ing as many of those sizes as you like.

What trou­bles me about the freedom-to-choose, nanny-state argu­ment is that it deflects atten­tion from the real issue: the fero­cious efforts of the soda indus­try to pro­tect sales of its prod­ucts at any mon­e­tary or social cost.

The law­suit against the soda cap is a per­fect exam­ple. It is funded by the American Beverage Association, the trade asso­ci­a­tion for Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and other soft-drink com­pa­nies, at what must be astronomical expense.

To con­fuse the pub­lic about cor­po­rate prof­its as a motive, the bev­er­age asso­ci­a­tion enlisted two dis­tin­guished civil rights groups—the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation—to file an ami­cus brief on behalf of its lawsuit.

Never mind that the obe­sity rate for the com­mu­ni­ties these groups rep­re­sent is con­sid­er­ably higher than aver­age in New York City, and that these neigh­bor­hoods would ben­e­fit most from the soda cap. The ami­cus brief argues that the soda cap dis­crim­i­nates against them.

The brief, how­ever, neglects to men­tion that both ami­cus groups received large dona­tions from soda com­pa­nies and that the NAACP in par­tic­u­lar has a long his­tory of part­ner­ship with Coca-Cola.

Financial arrange­ments between soda com­pa­nies and osten­si­bly inde­pen­dent groups demand scrutiny. National and local reporters—bless them—have done just that.

They report, among other con­nec­tions, that one of the law firms work­ing for Coca-Cola wrote the ami­cus brief, and that a for­mer pres­i­dent of the Hispanic Federation just took a job with that company.

Last fall, the East Bay Express exposed how the soda indus­try exploited race issues to divide the elec­torate and defeat the Measure N soda tax ini­tia­tive in Richmond. It revealed that the bev­er­age asso­ci­a­tion not only paid for the suc­cess­ful “grass­roots” cam­paign against Measure N but also encour­aged views of the soda tax as racist.

Driven by this expe­ri­ence, the soda indus­try is repeat­ing this tac­tic in New York City.

Is a cap on soda sizes dis­crim­i­na­tory against groups work­ing for civil rights? Not a chance.

Public health mea­sures are about alle­vi­at­ing health dis­par­i­ties and giv­ing every­one equal access to healthy diets and lifestyles. This makes pub­lic health—and ini­tia­tives like the soda cap—broadly inclu­sive and democratic.

If any­thing is unde­mo­c­ra­tic and elit­ist, it is suing New York City over the soda cap.

In fund­ing this law­suit, the soda indus­try has made it clear that it will go to any length to pro­tect its prof­its, even if it means dis­cred­it­ing the groups that would most ben­e­fit from this rather benign pub­lic health initiative.

Marion Nestle

Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health (the depart­ment she chaired from 1988-2003) and Professor of Sociology at New York University.