The Coca-Cola company exerted strong influence over the way the Chinese government addressed the country’s growing obesity problem, according to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of Public Health Policy and the BMJ.
Study author Susan Greenhalgh, a social scientist and China scholar, wanted to uncover the opaque process of science-based policymaking in China. She focused on the government’s efforts to address a growing obesity crisis: The percentage of overweight or obese Chinese adults more than doubled over two decades, from 20.5 percent in 1991 to 42.3 percent in 2011.
Greenhalgh’s years-long investigation unraveled the complex personal, institutional and financial connections the soda company cultivated to align Chinese science and policy with the interest in building a market for Coke in China.
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