Well, yeehaw, this is good news.
Companies agree to ban on sale of fizzy drinks in schools
By Lauren Foster in New York Financial Times
Updated: 3:43 p.m. ET May 4, 2006The world’s three largest soft drink companies on Wednesday agreed to ban most soda sales in US public schools and distribute only lower-calorie and nutritious beverages in an effort to tackle soaring rates of childhood obesity.
Nearly 35m students will be affected by the new guidelines, established by the American Heart Association and former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation, and agreed to by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Cadbury Schweppes.
The move comes a month after Republicans and Democrats joined forces to propose the first bipartisan bill aimed at purging vending machines in US schools of fatty snacks and fizzy drinks.
That last is a reference to a bill called the Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act, one of whose cosponsors is one of my senators, Lisa Murkowski. Someone I usually don’t like all that much, but for that bill I even wrote her a thank you letter. I even got a standard form letter back from her office about it. It was just a form letter, but at least it wasn’t full of bullshit as the previous one I’d gotten from her, about the Iraq war.
Anyway, good for Bill Clinton. Not quite good for the soft drink companies — they shouldn’t be manufacturing that nasty piss to begin with. I thought this was a weird comment:
Dawn Hudson, president and chief executive of Pepsi-Cola North America, said there were “no short-cuts to solving the obesity problem” and the company was “delighted” its products “are part of the equation”.
Right.
