A New Front in the Corporate Corruption of Science

The best Ph.D.'d/M.D.'d whores that Coca-Cola can buy!

Coca-Cola, the world’s largest producer of sugary beverages, is backing a new “science-based” solution to the obesity crisis: To maintain a healthy weight, get more exercise and worry less about cutting calories.

The beverage giant has teamed up with influential scientists who are advancing this message in medical journals, at conferences and through social media. To help the scientists get the word out, Coke has provided financial and logistical support to a new nonprofit organization called the Global Energy Balance Network, which promotes the argument that weight-conscious Americans are overly fixated on how much they eat and drink while not paying enough attention to exercise.

This is where it gets laughable:

>Records show that the network’s website, gebn.org, is registered to Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, and the company is also listed as the site’s administrator. The group’s president, James O. Hill, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, said Coke had registered the website because the network’s members did not know how.

Riight. Any thirteen year-old kid with access to a credit card can register a website in ten minutes or less. The University of Colorado doesn't have an IT department?

Sometimes, it's depressing to see how many scientists are eager to sell their honor to some company with bags of cash. For nobody who has the GEBN on their CV will ever be taken seriously after this story gets out.

It's an old game, first pioneered by the tobacco industry and then taken up by the fossil-fuel extraction industry: Claim that the science is "unsettled" or that if 98% of the researchers in the field disagree with you, that "there's no consensus". And then you just drag it out, and, if you're really lucky, you can get the wingnuts on your side. Which will be helped if some moronic ham-fisted politician tries to do something really dumb.

Anyway, if you want to know who are the whores scientists lending their "good names" to Coca-Cola's false-flag operation, here they are. And, of course, there's a statement by the Head Pimp saying that taking Coke's money doesn't make them Coke's stooges. (In a pig's eye.)