Coca-Cola Just Paid $1,000,000 To Keep This Hidden From You
Coca-Cola has been having a rough time. The company owns Honest Tea, Odwalla, Powerade, Vitamin Water, Simply Orange, and other products marketed to health-conscious consumers. But it is best known for making Coke, a product that is utterly devoid of nutritional value and is often blamed for contributing to the obesity epidemic — an epidemic that is costing hundreds of billions of dollars and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths each year.
With demand for the company’s carbonated and artificially flavored sugar water declining, hope for Coca-Cola’s profitability has been increasingly resting on the brands it markets as healthier alternatives. Bloomberg.com reports that sales of Coca-Cola-owned brands like Honest Tea, Powerade, and Simply Orange are the company’s new profit center.
But there’s a problem.
In October, campaign finance reports revealed that Coca-Cola had secretly contributed more than a million dollars to the fight against GMO labeling in Washington. It took the state’s Attorney General suing the Grocery Manufacturers’ Association (GMA) for what turned out to be an $11 million violation of the state’s campaign finance laws to reveal these secret contributions. But now that the truth has been exposed, some healthy food activists are fighting back.
Andrew Kimbrell, founder of the Center for Food Safety, comments:
Consumers of healthy beverages want to know what’s in their food. By using money from sales of natural brands to secretly fund an anti-choice agenda that deprives consumers of the right to know what they’re eating, Coca-Cola has been betraying the public interest and standing on the wrong side of history.
And what makes matters worse, Honest Tea proudly proclaims throughout their website that they are GMO free — while their parent company is actively working to prevent GMO labeling.
I wrote Coca-Cola asking if they intended to continue funding anti GMO labeling campaigns. The company’s response was to repeat the anti-labeling lobby’s talking points. They told me that Washington’s labeling initiative, I-522, would: “Require tens of thousands of common food and beverage products to be relabeled exclusively for Washington State unless they are remade with higher-priced, specially developed ingredients. The measure will increase grocery costs for a typical Washington family by hundreds of dollars per year.”
These are charges that the nine-time Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper The Seattle Times called “mostly false” and that Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, flatly rejected. In short, Coca-Cola not only tried to hide their contributions to the anti-labeling efforts in Washington, but they continue to try to deceive people about the actual realities of GMO labeling.
And they’re using sales of Honest Tea, Odwalla, Powerade, Vitamin Water, Simply Orange, and all their other brands, to finance their agenda.
The post Coca-Cola Just Paid $1,000,000 To Keep This Hidden From You appeared first on Now The End Begins.
Source: http://www.nowtheendbegins.com/blog/?p=25425
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bob goyette
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Good for them. Who in the hell wants GMO labeling aside from tin-foil hatters who have somehow been lead to believe that there’s something “wrong” with GMO’s? Do you want to pay for this meaningless labeling? I don’t.
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Stephen J. Crothers
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Every consumer has the natural right to know what is in the food they buy and where it comes from. So if GMO, that is a consumer data point for notification. If you want to eat GMO, fine, but those who don’t should not be denied information to allow them to make an informed choice. If GMO is faultless, then the GMO’s should have no problem with labeling their GMO as GMO.
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Joseph A Olson
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GMO is random splicing of genes from one species and randomly injecting into another species. DNA is like Fortran for life, where it is not just content, but ORDER that determines outcome, often taking generations to express DEFECTS.
GMO is food monopolists playing Russian genetic roulette with ALL life.
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