OPINION:
Sugar is the villain in a dietary game that any number can play, and now the lawyers have figured out how to combine sugar and race in an assault on soda pop.
Two black pastors are suing Coca-Cola and the American Beverage Association for contributing to obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes among their parishioners. “We’re losing more people to the sweets than we are to the streets,” says the Rev. Delman Coates of Mount Ennon Baptist Church in Clinton, Md., one of the two plaintiffs. The other is the Rev. William H. Lamar IV of the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church in Washington.
Mr. Lamar says he’s tired of conducting funerals for his congregants who die of those maladies, which, statistically, afflict blacks at higher rates than among whites. He and the Rev. Mr. Lamar claim that soda-pop makers engage in marketing campaigns that deliberately deceive black consumers about the health risks of sugar-sweetened beverages.
Too much sugar is no doubt not a good idea. Indeed eating too much of anything is not a good idea. But resorting to the courts to make everyone eat right is more of the Nanny State so beloved of Nanny and her disciples. The lawsuit particularly infantilizes blacks, suggesting they’re incapable of deciding for themselves what (and how much) to eat and drink, and that they are deprived by the state of information about diets that is available to white folks and others. It’s more of what George W. Bush rightly called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a greater percentage of black adults (20.9 percent) drink more than one regular soda a day than whites (15.7 percent). The adult obesity rate is higher among blacks than among whites (47.8 percent vs. 32.6 percent), according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
But correlation and causation aren’t the same thing, as is demonstrated — inconveniently for the plaintiffs and their lawyers — by the fact that Hispanics drink more than one sugary soda daily in greater numbers than blacks (22.6 percent vs. 20.9 percent), yet have a lower obesity rate (42.5 percent vs. 47.8 percent).
If, as Mr. Coates says, blacks suffer the ravages of sugar consumption, why not also sue the confectioners who make sugary chocolate candy bars?
“The allegations here are legally and factually meritless, and we will vigorously defend against them,” Coca-Cola says of the lawsuit, which, curiously, didn’t name chief rival Pepsi as a co-defendant. But one fat target at a time, we suppose.
The beverage trade association disputes the claim of a link between soda consumption and obesity. “Beverages are not driving obesity rates,” the association says. “Obesity has been going up steadily for years, while soda consumption has been going down steadily. Shouldn’t obesity rates have gone down with the reduction in soda consumption if the two are connected?”
The soda-pop association might be tempted to settle the lawsuit out of court, if only to save on lawyers’ fees. A cash settlement might be what the Center for Science in the Public Interest, believed to be behind this lawsuit, wants. The suit asks the court to declare the marketing practices to be “deceptive” and in violation of the District’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act, and to require the defendants to pay for “a corrective public education campaign” against soda pop. And it wants generous lawyers’ fees and whatever else the court might think of to reward the lawyers.
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