This is the last in a series of posts based on a recent f.a.c.t.s. (“food advertising to children and teens score”) report on sugary sodas issued by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. A while ago, the center did a similar report on the advertising of junk food to children, and you can read my excerpts from that here.

This is another in a series of posts based on a recent f.a.c.t.s. (“food advertising to children and teens score”) report on sugary sodas issued by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. A while ago, the center did a similar report on the advertising of junk food to children, and you can read my excerpts from that here.

The fractures of mass media have forced marketers to develop new ways of reaching their targets, and the sugary beverage industry is a particularly relentless hunter. One older example is Coke's purchase of space at the judges' table on American Idol for its logo-ed cups, but the Rudd Center report adds plenty more:

A good long while I ago, I wrote a series of posts a report on the advertising of junk food to children prepared by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale. Last week, Yale came out with another f.a.c.t.s. (a rather labored acronym signifying “food advertising to children and teens score”) report, this one on sugary beverages, and I thought I’d follow the same fashion.

So it turns out that when I wrote yesterday about the Jane Brody squib in the Times yesterday, referred there by my friend Ron-the-voracious-reader, I had actually been referred slightly elsewhere, to the mainbar of what Brody wrote. She was reporting the release of a series of reports in the British medical periodical The Lancet that address the growing obesity epidemic.

The "tobacco playbook" is legend among capitalists, especially those who want to keep selling a product that clearly has adverse health effects for those who buy it. And it should be, considering that for decades after it was clear that ingesting tobacco or its smoke was noxious, the playbook made it possible for companies to continuing with relatively few curbs, and tobacco continues to be sold even today.

Playbook practices include lying, delaying, misdirecting, and obstructing at every turn. Such tactics have nothing to do with claiming right or virtue, two concepts you want to have on your side but are all but meaningless when you're in the trenches. I've always thought this lesson has been much better taken in by conservatives vs. liberals, and capitalists vs. crusaders.

I've discussed the topic before, so why bring up this topic again? Because the forces of sugary soda are deploying them again, according to Reuters. Read on.

I have not read it yet because it's just out, but I feel I can recommend Nancy Appleton's new book, "Killer Colas, The Hard Truth About Soft Drinks," on the strength of her earlier work, including her 1988 book, "Lick the Sugar Habit," and

If anyone out there is proposing a tax on sugary sodas, you can be sure the Center for Consumer Freedom will be nearby, trying to distract from any real discussion.

With this post, it returns to Philadelphia, where the mayor is again proposing a soda tax, even after beverage industry lobbyists pledged to give $10 million to the city's Children's Hospital, in the middle of a debate on a soda tax, so it could expand obesity-prevention efforts. Any reasonable person would consider that civic bribery, but let's skip over that right now.

In this dispatch from foodnavigator-usa.com, the soda industry is reported to complain that New York City's effort to bar food stamps' use for sugary beverages is discriminatory.

To which I say, "Of course it is! But what's your point?"

A comparison between increases in the rates of obesity and of soda consumption:

No, it doesn't mean one caused the other. But you can decide if it's mere coincidence.

Some people oppose any public suasion of any kinds on food choices — and even some of those do so honorably, instead of being motivated merely by their paycheck. I suspect they would object to the above.

But here's the thing, even putting aside the question of whether sugary soda is even food, or, in the coinage of Michael Pollan, a "foodlike substance." If any currently "acceptable" food or drink product warrants this sort of treatment, it is sugary soda.