Coca-Cola is an interesting company.
They’re best known, of course, for producing soft drinks — with 1.8 billion units sold each day.
Soda is a product that’s criticized by even the mainstream media for being horrendously unhealthy and contributing to obesity and diabetes. It triggers pleasure centers in the same way as heroin, and it’s more accessible and costs less than water in some parts of the world.
All of this is catching up to Coca-Cola in a decline in the demand for unhealthy soft drinks, but they’ve still managed to find major success thanks to products aimed at health-conscious consumers such as Honest Tea, Powerade and Simply Orange.
Efforts to maintain a good face for the increasingly health-conscious public have recently hit a major snag.
Finance reports recently revealed that Coca-Cola has contributed over a million dollars to fighting GMO labeling in Washington.
This was revealed when the state’s Attorney General sued the Grocery Manufacturers’ Association, the umbrella group behind much of the anti GMO-labeling efforts.
The GMA has been criticized by many health experts, and has even been accused of surpassing Monsanto as “the most evil corporation on the planet.”
They make no effort to hide their anti-GMO agenda, making them the perfect company for large corporations like Coca-Cola.
But now that the truth is out, health experts have yet another reason to discourage consumers from buying anything made by Coca-Cola.
Image: Coca-Cola
Andrew Kimbrell, founder of the Center for Food Safety, commented:
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.
The irony is that Honest Tea’s website proudly claims the product is GMO free while their profits are channelled by their parent company towards efforts that undermine the anti-GMO movement.
What’s Coca-Cola’s response? When asked by the Food Revolution Network for an explanation, they gave the usual anti-labelling talking points, saying Washington’s GMO labeling initiative would require tens of thousands of common food and beverage products to be relabelled exclusively for Washington State.
And now you know. So what can you do about it?
Well, to start, you can stay away from anything produced by Coca-Cola as a means of not only keeping yourself healthy but voting with dollars as well.
You can also take direct action against Coca-Cola’s anti-labeling efforts by signing this petition on Change.org.
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