Vanguard News Network
VNN Media
VNN Digital Library
VNN Reader Mail
VNN Broadcasts

Old February 10th, 2011 #1
Mike Parker
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2007
Posts: 3,311
Default Have a (Diet) Coke… and a Stroke

Have a (Diet) Coke… and a Stroke

By Melanie Warner | February 9, 2011

The unfortunate timing of Diet Coke’s Heart Truth campaign — which seeks to motivate women to “take action against risk factors” for heart disease — offers the clearest example to date of the perils of food companies getting involved in disease-related promotions, especially when those diseases are heavily diet-related.

On February 1st, Coca-Cola (KO) launched its heart disease “awareness campaign” and today researchers from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine presented results of a study showing that people who drank diet soda every day had a 61% greater risk of what scientists call “vascular events,” which includes strokes and heart attacks, compared to people who consume no diet drinks.

In other words, to “take action against risk factors,” as Coke recommends, women should kick their Diet Coke habit, not to mention put down that Diet Sprite and all of Coke’s other zero calorie brands.

Here’s Dr. Tudor Jovin, an associate professor of neurology and medicine and director of the Stroke Institute at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, quoted in an MSNBC story about the study:

People with a lot of risk factors for vascular disease, might want to reduce the amount of diet soda they consume. Those risk factors would include high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, smoking, a family history of cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome and a history of cardiovascular events.

In Coke’s defense, this is the first major study to show such a link, and it has yet to be published. Researchers presented it at the International Stroke Conference in LA. And it’s not clear yet what the association is — whether there’s actually something in diet soda that harms blood vessels. The researchers, who surveyed 2,500 New Yorkers, speculated people who drink diet soda often have poor diets in general and may be replacing those “saved calories” with other unhealthy choices.

But here’s the fundamental problem with disease prevention campaigns and food companies. All the biggest health conditions plaguing Americans — Type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer and hypertension — have huge dietary components, which is to say they are caused, in part, by a steady intake of crappy food. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether Diet Coke and many of the other products large food companies sell qualify as crap, but diet soda is clearly not a health-promoting beverage.

By aligning its brand with a disease caused by poor diets, Coke leaves itself exposed to the ever-increasing possibility that scientists will finger one of its products as part of the problem.

KFC waded into these choppy waters with its pink bucket breast cancer campaign, and critics assailed them for it. But most people probably didn’t bother to notice the association between high fat foods and cancer because no one has explicitly singled out fried chicken in that equation.

Diet Coke wasn’t so lucky.

http://www.bnet.com/blog/food-indust...-a-stroke/2490
 
Reply

Tags
coca-cola, diet soda, heart attack, stroke

Share


Thread
Display Modes


All times are GMT -5. The time now is 12:34 PM.
Page generated in 0.60222 seconds.