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Industrial agriculture and processed food corporations are flooding supermarket shelves with seemingly endless choice. But this abundance of packaged products and sugary drinks is deceiving. In reality, we lack real choice: the choice for fresh, local, and far more nutritious foods.

Around the world, roughly 2 billion people are overweight, consuming too many calories from unhealthy sources driving a global public health crisis. One of the biggest culprits? Sugar and sugary drinks pushed by a handful of big corporations, with Coca-Cola and PepsiCo in the lead. These brands, which many have dubbed Big Soda, spend billions every year on a range of marketing and political tactics—including advertising, lobbying, and free trade agreements—to expand their reach in the United States and around the world.

These tactics are reminiscent of the tobacco industry’s decades-long fight against regulation and public education about the dangers of smoking. Like Big Tobacco, Big Soda has a vested interest in increasing sugary drink consumption despite the tragic and costly public health consequences. Like the tobacco industry, Big Soda markets aggressively, especially to young people and communities of color.

The good news? People power everywhere is taking on Big Soda. Strategies like soda tax campaigns, spearheaded by the communities most affected by health disparities, are spreading and making big wins. As part of a range of community-based strategies to reclaim our food systems, soda taxes have been successful in reducing consumption and generating revenues to support public health.

The resources in this toolkit will help you organize a fun and engaging film-based event, shine a light on Big Soda’s tactics, explore people-powered strategies, and offer ideas to counter Big Soda’s influence in our lives.

Photo by Andy Schultz/Flickr

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The soda industry won big in Chicago this week when county commissioners voted to scrap the 1-cent-per-ounce tax on sugary drinks that had been in place for just two months.

This is a stark turn for the effort to tax these drinks, which has been making headway as voters and City Councils in at least a half-dozen other cities, including San Francisco and Philadelphia, in recent years approved measures in favor of soda levies. The sudden about-face in Chicago, after a battle in which both sides spent millions on TV and radio ads, offers an important lesson for advocates of these taxes, ourselves included, as the industry we call Big Soda takes aim at other communities: We can’t forget the grass roots.

While we are longtime healthy-food advocates, we have only recently awakened to the alarm bell of sugary drinks. For years, these drinks were flagged for “empty calories” that lead to weight gain. Today, the public health community understands that consuming sugar — particularly in liquid form — increases risks of serious health conditions, such as heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, not to mention tooth decay. A 2010 study found that consuming just one to two sugary drinks a day increases your risk of developing diabetes by 26 percent.

While sugar is everywhere — in cookies and crackers, breads and pasta sauce — the single largest source in the American diet is sugary drinks. A 20-ounce Coca-Cola contains 65 grams of added sugar, significantly exceeding the American Heart Association’s daily maximum recommendation for adult women, 25 grams, and adult men, 36 grams.

It’s not hyperbolic to claim that sugary drinks pose a major public health threat. Nationally, we spent $245 billion on diabetes medical costs in 2012. By 2030 we could be spending as much as $818 billion on the direct medical costs of heart disease. Both illnesses are associated with the consumption of sugary drinks.

Fortunately, we have effective tools for addressing this crisis. Taxes on sugary drinks are one. As a peer-reviewed study published this spring found, since the tax went into effect in Berkeley, Calif., in March 2015, purchases of healthier drinks have gone up and sales of soda have gone down, all without consumer grocery bills increasing or the local food sector losing money. The tax raised about $1.5 million last year for nutrition and health programs in a city of 113,000 people.

Since Berkeley passed its tax, seven municipalities have followed suit, and many others, even some states, are interested in doing the same. This has Big Soda scared because these taxes — with the awareness they create about the health effects of sugar and the consumption they reduce — threaten the industry’s bottom line.

How scared? Leaked internal Coca-Cola emails last year revealed a “coordinated war” against policies like these, says a public health advocate, Kyle Pfister, who has studied these documents. This war, waged by the American Beverage Association and sugary drink manufacturers like Coca-Cola, includes a slew of duplicitous tactics, like funding research to give a hue of legitimacy to their anti-tax claims, pursuing social media influencers, lobbying at every level of government and targeting key journalists for persuasion. These time-tested tactics have been used by the tobacco industry in its fight against cigarette taxes.

The industry also starts and funds faux grass-roots organizations. In another email, a trade group representative boasted about the impact of Philadelphians Against the Grocery Tax, an industry-funded group, which deployed an aggressive media strategy that achieved a “significant shift in public attitudes away from initial majority support for the discriminatory tax” in Philadelphia. In the end, the industry lost there.

In Cook County, which includes Chicago, the industry’s “Can the Tax” campaign spent millions on local TV ads and pressured commissioners, in particular critiquing the use of the soda tax revenue to help cover budget deficits. (In other cities, the money has been directed to public health concerns or, in the case of Philadelphia, to fund universal pre-K.) When Jesus Garcia, a Cook County commissioner, signaled he would vote to repeal the tax, he acknowledged that the beverage industry used its financial power to shape public opinion before supporters of the tax were able to craft their own message for a public debate.

There is an important lesson here: When efforts for sugary-drinks taxes are driven and supported by community coalitions that build public awareness early on, they’re better able to withstand industry attacks. Strong coalitions are vital both to adopt new taxes and to ensure they remain to curb consumption and generate funds for public health programs.

In Berkeley, the industry waged a $2 million anti-tax campaign. We credit the success of the tax effort there to a broad-based community coalition — a united front of the local NAACP., Latinos Unidos, teachers unions and many more groups. This compact was strong enough to withstand the industry’s onslaught. We won decisively, with 76 percent of the vote. Community engagement is key.

While the Cook County decision is a setback, it’s a clear reminder of what it will take to win. There’s no substitute for good, old-fashioned community building. We know we will be outspent. Let’s not be outnumbered.

Originally published in The New York Times

Photo by Jean Balzan/Pexels

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In August of 2016, the consumer advocacy group EDUCAR Consumidores along with the coalition Alianza por la Salud Alimentaria aired a public service announcement on Colombian television highlighting the public health impacts of consuming sugary beverages. The PSA, titled “Take it Seriously” (Tómala en Serio) shows how easy it is to consume 47 teaspoons of sugar in a single day by drinking just a few servings of juice, sweetened tea, and soda. The PSA—which also points to obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cancer as dangers of excessive sugar consumption—was taken off the air in early September by the Chamber of Industry and Commerce just as public debate was ramping up on including a sugary beverage tax in the country’s tax reform law. Civil society widely denounced the move as censorship and a violation of the freedom of expression. The legal group DeJusticia filed a suit on behalf of EDUCAR, which was upheld by the Supreme Court on April 5, declaring that consumers have the right to “access information about the positive and negative consequences that a product may have on their physical and mental integrity.” The ruling is being touted as a major victory in Colombia and throughout the region in the fight against Big Food and Big Soda.

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Even as the evidence is clear that their products are making us sick, soda giants — Coke, Pepsi, Dr Pepper, Snapple — are spending millions to try to stop us from doing anything about it.

How sick? When UCLA published its findings of diabetes and pre-diabetes rates last year, the figures shocked the state: 55 percent of Californians are pre-diabetic or diabetic, the researchers found. Half of us. Nationally, the figures are not much better: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that a child born today has a 1-in-3 chance of developing diabetes in their lifetime, if these trends remain unchanged. What’s more, the dietary patterns linked to this rise in preventable diabetes — particularly the consumption of sugary drinks — are implicated in other chronic illnesses, too, including heart disease, liver disease and other metabolic conditions. Diabetes alone costs the country $245 billion today. It’s not hyperbole to call this a national crisis.

Communities around the country are alarmed and want solutions. They are increasingly focused on policies to discourage consumption of sugary drinks — the single largest source of sugar in our diets — and raise revenue for health education and diabetes prevention programs. Placing an excise tax on sugar-sweetened drinks of a penny or more per fluid ounce is one such approach. In the wake of the first two U.S. cities passing a sugary drinks tax — Berkeley, then Philadelphia — San Francisco, Oakland, Albany, Calif., and Boulder, Colo., all have versions of this tax on their ballots.

Instead of acknowledging tax proposals like these as a commonsense approach to a public health crisis, the beverage industry is fighting back. Big Soda has spent millions to try to control the debate on these taxes and fight the communities proposing them. Since 2009, Big Soda’s big players — the industry trade group, American Beverage Association, and Coca-Cola and PepsiCo — have spent a whopping $67 million to try to defeat these taxes in 19 cities and states, according to analysis from the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

As part of these campaigns, the trade group has also been busy promoting its products and deflecting concern about sugary drinks. Every year, beverage giants spend billions marketing sugary drinks, especially targeting black, Hispanic and young consumers. And just as the sugar industry was caught trying to shift blame for heart disease to fat, Coca-Cola has for decades been trying to shift blame for chronic illnesses like diabetes from consuming their products to a lack of exercise. Last year, the company was exposed for funding a new (and now disbanded) front group, the Global Energy Balance Network, promoting just such message.

Big Soda is bullying us with their billions, using their pocketbook and political influence to thwart popular will. When my city of Berkeley took on Big Soda and put a sugary drink tax on the ballot in 2014, we were bombarded with these industry bullying tactics — the same ones now being used everywhere communities are embracing these public health policies. We were told the tax would be too hard to implement; that it wouldn’t make a difference to people’s health. We heard these industry-sponsored messages in ads on bus stops, public transit hubs, mailers on our doorsteps — even before movies in our theaters.

In the end, Big Soda dumped $2.4 million in this city of 117,000, about $400 for everyone who voted against the tax. But despite being heavily outspent, we the people won — with a people-powered 76.2 percent of the vote — and the tax now generates about $1.5 million a year for popular nutrition and education programs and has decreased consumption. According to one survey, the city’s low-income residents report a 21 percent reduction in soda consumption post-tax.

With sugary drinks taxes on the ballot beyond Berkeley, Big Soda is spending big again: The industry has banked $9.5 million on TV ads in San Francisco alone. They’re also spending millions on legal action, hiring white shoe law firms, including some of the same firms that have worked with the worst bullies out there: the tobacco industry.

When Big Soda didn’t like that Berkeley put a soda tax on the ballot, the industry hired someone to move to Berkeley to sue the city, claiming the proposed language for the tax was unfair. (They lost).

When Big Soda didn’t like that enough Boulder residents had signed a petition to put a sugary drink tax on the ballot there, the industry trade group tried to stop the policy with bogus legal complaints about the petition process. (They lost).

When Big Soda didn’t like that Oakland residents would have clear ballot language calling this city’s soda tax a, um, “soda tax,” they fought in court to try muddy the language and confuse voters. (They lost).

As public-health minded nutritionists, doctors, community activists and parents are coming together in ever greater numbers to take on one of the biggest culprits of chronic disease — Big Soda — the industry is responding in force. It’s time to expose this industry for its bullying tactics. Bullies aren’t welcome on the schoolyard and they certainly shouldn’t be welcome in our city halls, influencing promising public health policies, either.

Originally published in the San Francisco Examiner

Photo by  Andy Schultz

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Since that watershed victory, the Berkeley vs. Big Soda campaign lives on as a resource and an example to other cities that hope to take the same positive action. Keep your eyes peeled for upcoming events and fundraisers. You might run into a few familiar faces!

Real Food Media founder Anna Lappé (far right) with Malia Cohen and Alice Waters.

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by Anna Lappé

An estimated 27,500 people in Los Angeles, 20,000 in Seattle, and 18,500 in the Bronx: Bernie Sanders is sparking some of the biggest crowds in primary history. For millions across the country, his message is clearly resonating. It’s refreshing to hear someone running for the country’s highest office finally articulate (without any prodding!) core progressive policies: from taking on Wall Street to reforming campaign finance to making college affordable—the list goes on. So it stunned many progressives to hear Sanders attack Philadelphia’s plan to tax sugary drinks; he called soda taxes regressive and came out swinging.

Like health advocates across the country, I think Sanders got it wrong: These taxes in fact reflect the progressive values he holds dear.

It’s the very communities Sanders says he’s trying to protect that have been at the beating heart of campaigns for soda taxes.

As a resident of Berkeley, California, the first city in the United States that has passed a tax of this kind, and as someone who has been working to sound the alarm on the epidemic of diet-related illnesses for years, I have had a ringside seat at the battle against Big Soda. And I think that if Sanders had firsthand knowledge of the fight, he too might be moved to see these taxes differently.

Sanders claims soda taxes will “disproportionately affect low-income and middle-class Americans.” But here in Berkeley, as with other places soda taxes are being proposed, it’s the very communities Sanders says he’s trying to protect that have been at the beating heart of the campaigns.

When Berkeley took on the soda tax, the campaign connected people from all walks of life. The NAACP, Latinos Unidos, the entire school board, every single city council member, and dozens of other groups were all united in their support. Across race, class, and age, the community came together against a deluge of Big Soda money to defend a strategy to help take on one of the biggest public health crises of our time.

Supporters of these taxes understand they are “regressive” only in the most simplistic sense. As with any tax that could lead to higher prices to consumers, from cigarettes to carbon, one could allege they make the poor pay disproportionately more. In Philadelphia, the 3 cent per fluid ounce excise tax on sugary drinks levied on distributors could raise a $0.99 12-ounce Coke to $1.35 if the tax were passed on entirely to consumers. For a $7.25 hourly minimum-wage worker, that price hike would therefore be a bigger relative burden than for, say, the CEO of Coca-Cola who made roughly $7,000 an hour last year.

Philly’s soda tax could prevent 2,280 new cases of diabetes and 36,000 new cases of obesity every year.

But it’s wrong to leap from that simplistic calculation to call these taxes an encumbrance on the poor. It’s not like this tax is for something people have to buy—a tax, for instance, on water or fruits and vegetables. No one needs Coca-Cola to survive and, in fact, drinking soda is a key driver of serious illness. Indeed, a study of the effect of a soda tax in Philly found that the potential price increase could reduce soda consumption, preventing 2,280 new cases of diabetes and 36,000 new cases of obesity every year. Over the course of a decade, the levy could save the city $200 million in averted health care costs. That’s yuge! as Sanders would say.

Progressives have long understood that one of the ways to take on predatory industries whose products hurt the most vulnerable among us is through consumption taxes—something Sanders understands when he speaks in favor of taxing cigarettes.

So maybe Sanders just isn’t hip to the evidence about the harm caused by sugary drinks. And I get it: Many still don’t perceive soda as being as troubling as tobacco. But the science is in. Long-term, peer-reviewed studies have clearly demonstrated the links between sugary drinks and a wide range of illnesses, from diabetes to heart and liver disease to weight gain—not to mention the damage to dental health. Drinking just one or two sugary drinks a day can increase the chances of developing Type 2 diabetes by 26 percent. And reducing soda consumption is increasingly seen as the best first step to halting weight gain. (I experienced this myself when I cut out sugar-sweetened beverages as a cash-strapped grad student. No longer able to afford my habit of multiple Snapple drinks a day, I went cold turkey and dropped 15 pounds. Save for my two pregnancies, I have never gained them back.)

We also know the burden of these diet-related diseases is not evenly experienced by race and class—and that’s putting it mildly. I bet the CEO of Coca-Cola doesn’t live in a community where 1 in 2 residents either have diabetes or are on the way to being diagnosed with it, as is the case in many low-income communities nationwide. Consider this shocking fact: According to the American Diabetes Association, African Americans and Latinos are 70 percent more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than their white peers. In other words, the potential benefits of these taxes will be greater for the communities whose health has been most undermined by soda.

The potential benefits of these taxes will be greater for the communities whose health has been most undermined by soda.

The most powerful moments of the Berkeley versus Big Soda campaign were hearing community members describe their direct experience with the costs of diabetes: from forfeited wages because of days spent caring for parents or kids to lifelong health problems including heart disease, comas, infertility, vision loss, insulin replacement, even amputations. (Yes, amputations.) At least 73,000 lower-limb amputations were performed nationwide in 2010 on people with diagnosed diabetes. The economic toll of this rising epidemic cannot be stressed enough.

These taxes are beneficial—and reflect progressive values—in another way: Revenues reaped can disproportionately benefit a community’s most at-risk residents. Here in Berkeley, our tax on distributors (one penny per fluid ounce) is on track to bring in $1.5 million annually, which will be used to support health education and diabetes prevention. In Philly, the mayor would use the revenue to fund universal pre-K.

The other charge Sanders makes against these taxes is that they are job killers, leading to “the loss of thousands of good-paying jobs.” There is no evidence this would be the case. Here in Berkeley, where the soda tax was implemented March 1, 2015, there’s been no indication of jobs lost.

It’s perplexing to me that Sanders would embrace an anti-soda-tax stance. His particular volleys—”It’s a jobs’ killer!” “It’s regressive”—are straight from the pages of the beverage industry’s PR playbook. And they echo tobacco industry misinformation that came before them. When cigarette taxes were first proposed, the industry cried foul, too, claiming the poorest people would be most burdened by rising costs, that jobs would be lost. Instead, we’ve seen one of the most positive public health success stories of a generation as smoking rates have plummeted.

Sanders argues that instead of soda taxes we should tax corporations more. Today’s effective corporate tax rate, he notes, is just 22.8 percent, down from 31.7 during the Reagan years and resulting in the loss of an estimated $166 billion every year. What progressive would disagree with Sanders here? But I’m not sure why Sanders presents these positions as either/or. Soda taxes are just one tool in progressive toolbox to take on corporate power and address the devastating epidemic of diet-related illnesses.

The soda industry’s trade group has spent an estimated $64.6 million since 2009 fighting soda taxes.

And what a tool they can be. The soda industry knows this. That’s why its trade group, the American Beverage Association, has spent an estimated $64.6 million since 2009 fighting soda taxes, according to analysis from the Center for Science in the Public Interest. (That doesn’t even include this year’s lobbying spend in California’s capital to fight a proposed statewide tax and more going to undermine fledgling efforts in Oakland, California, Philadelphia, and beyond). In Berkeley, a city of 116,000 people, the trade group spent $2.4 million in an onslaught of negative ads, misinformation, and paid supporters. Big Soda even got in-kind donations from Landmark Theaters to play anti-tax ads before movies in local theaters.

Despite this big spend and thanks to an incredible community effort—the kind of people power I would have thought Sanders would love—we won, and we won big. (Even San Francisco—where the industry outspent the community 31 to 1, shelling out $9.2 million to oppose the tax—55.6 percent of voters supported it, with the vote only failing because it fell short of the two-thirds needed there.)

I wonder whether things would be different if Sanders had been at the Berkeley versus Big Soda headquarters on election night. There, under the bare bulbs of a cavernous room on the main strip of downtown Berkeley, hundreds stood shoulder to shoulder watching as the election results rolled in—and cheering and hugging as the number of precincts crept up.

We stood, a community united, listening to what this campaign had meant to the people at the heart of it: A pediatric dentist recounted how the campaign had transformed her despair at the deterioration of dental health into determined action. A young Latino organizer whose aunt had been hospitalized that very evening from complications from diabetes, shared that the effort had given him a tangible way to use his agony about the illness ravishing his family to make a difference. An African American reverend shared how the grief of losing his 29-year-old son to diabetes propelled him to work tirelessly for the campaign; no other father should lose a son to this disease, he said.

If Sanders had been at the Berkeley soda tax HQ on election night, listening to these voices and more like them, I wonder if he, too, would have been brought to tears—and, whether he, too, would have joined in the thunderous applause as the final results came in. Despite Big Soda’s big spending, the people had triumphed. The final tally: 76.2 percent in favor of the tax.

Just like the city had done in setting policy precedent by being the first to voluntarily desegregate its schools, and to provide curbside recycling, to create curb-cuts for wheelchair accessibility, now Berkeley had passed the first tax on sugary drinks in the United States. There will be more.

Communities across the country are taking up similar taxes, from Philadelphia to Boulder, Colorado, to Oakland. In response, Big Soda will redouble its efforts to confuse the public, distort the science and undermine the credibility of advocates—and they’ll undoubtedly take on the dual mantras Sanders echoed. They have nearly bottomless pockets to do so. (Coca-Cola alone spent $3.5 billion in marketing in 2014.) But Berkeley has shown that strong coalitions can take on even the world’s largest corporate behemoths. It’s a David versus Goliath battle that any progressive should love.

Originally published in Mother Jones

Photo by Miranda Pederson/Daily News via AP

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