Tuesday, May 17, 2005

The Truth-Twisting Power of Corporate Money

My husband is a diabetic. It's all about sugar in all its forms. That's a long-established medical fact.

Here's an astonishing example of the blinding, truth-twisting power of corporate money. This greed-caused lie is deadly. From Common Dreams:

After the American Diabetes Association received a large gift from major manufacturer of sugar-sweetened beverages, its top medical official is claiming that sugar has nothing to do with diabetes. In an interview published in today’s Corporate Crime Reporter, Richard Kahn, the chief scientific and medical officer with the American Diabetes Association said “What is the evidence that sugar itself has anything to do with diabetes? There is no evidence,”

On April 21, the ADA announced a “three-year, multi-million dollar alliance” with Cadbury Schweppes Americas Beverages, which produces sweetened soft drinks that are implicated in the epidemic of obesity and diabetes in the United States. Its parent company is Cadbury Schweppes, which is the third largest soft-drink manufacturer in the world, after Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.

“Saying that sugar has nothing to do with diabetes is like saying that tobacco has nothing to do with emphysema,” said Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert. “The American Diabetes Association has been so corrupted that they have sunk to the mentality of ‘tobacco scientists’ who denied the link between tobacco and lung cancer.”

Incredibly, when Kahn was asked whether sugary drinks have anything to do with diabetes, he responded “No one has a clue of whether they do or don’t.”

There is ample evidence linking diets high in sugar, and sugary drinks, with obesity. For example, a study in the Lancet, titled "Relation Between Consumption of Sugar-Sweetened Drinks and Childhood Obesity: a Prospective, Observational Analysis" found that the likelihood of obesity in children “increased 1.6 times for each additional can of sugar-sweetened drink that they consumed every day.”

Today’s Corporate Crime Reporter interview is posted at: http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/diabetes051605.htm

More information about the American Diabetes Association-Cadbury Schweppes “alliance” is available at: http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050421/dcth002.html?.v=7

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