Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
Weekend reading: a fresh take on the soda industry
Bartow J. Elmore. Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism. Norton, 2015.
Elmore is an historian at the University of Alabama, whose book takes a fresh look at how soda companies managed to make fortunes selling cheap sugar water. Advertising, he says, is only a minor factor in generating soda profits.
The real profits came from a business strategy that offloads the costs and risks onto suppliers, bottlers, and taxpayers. Soda companies depend on taxpayers for the cost of city water supplies, the recycling discarded cans and bottles, the cleanup of containers that are not recycled, the transportation of sodas to the military, and the health care of overweight consumers.
The public, he says, should be setting and collecting the price for use of public resources, rather than “accepting the bill for corporate waste.”
