Coca-Cola Has Admitted to Funding Australian Studies on Obesity and Fitness

Corporate social responsibility, or CSR. It's one of those buzzy terms corporations use when they want to pretend they are "helping the community" or "actively promoting healthy behaviours" or "not making kids obese." Mostly, it's smoke and mirrors—PR stunts designed to generate positive media coverage. But that's doesn't mean it doesn't add up.

Take Coca-Cola, which has just admitted that over the past five years it has spent $1.7 million funding academics and fitness groups in Australia. For Coca-Cola, a company that made somewhere around $43 billion last year, this money is nothing. For a researcher in Australia though, scrabbling for funding amidst continual cuts, it's not insignificant.

Maybe it's cynical to question Coke's motives but think of it this way: Would you really trust a study funded by Michael Bay about the value of independent cinema? I just made that up but the parallel is clear. How about a research backed by Hummer on the economic viability of electric cars?

"Many of these studies look like they are just there to make it easier for the company to make health claims for its products," Professor Marion Nestle told the ABC. "I don't think that's good for their independence or their research."

But Coke has always been a big fan of research. Take Coke Life, whose green packaging took a lot of people by surprise when it was released in 2015. However, research released in 2012 showed that the colour red actually reduced people's consumption of soft drinks. Whereas people are more likely to consume greater quantities of food they think is healthy, which includes food and drink in green packaging.

This "healthy coke" would be great, except for the fact that it still contains 19 percent of our daily recommended sugar intake in a single can. Non-faux-healthy Coke is closer to 35 grams of sugar, or seven teaspoons.

Professor Tim Olds, a researcher from the University of South Australia who has received $400,000 from Coca-Cola for an international study on obesity, told 7.30 he saw no problem with the funding.

"I think, frankly, this is old-style superannuated chardonnay socialism. We're not going to have a world where there is no private funding of public sector research," Professor Olds said. "That's just the way that capitalism works for the last 150 years, and to deny that, you just have to get with the program."

Indeed with the CSIRO, Australia's peak research institution, facing massive cuts and university research funding slashed in last year's budget, it looks like the "program" is going to have to be privately funded, at least in part.

Correction: this article originally stated the University of Sydney received $370,000 from Coca-Cola for research. The company actually contracted the university's Boden Institute of Obesity, Nutrition, Exercise & Eating Disorders to design a workplace health program.

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