SPECIAL REPORT: Soda Ban Lacks Scientific Fizz
The California legislature's top lifestyle nanny has finally scored a win. Deborah Ortiz's bill to phase out soft drinks in schools passed the state Senate last week and was sent to the state Assembly.
It's not the California senator's first anti-soda bill. Last year Ortiz tried to pass legislation that would have imposed a two-cent tax on every can of soda, and a nine-cent tax on every two-liter bottle sold in California -- at a cost to consumers of as much as $300 million a year. Ortiz is also sponsoring a bill -- using the Center for Science in the Public Interest's (CSPI) "model" language (word-for-word) -- that would require all chain restaurants to slap nutritional information on every item sold.
The soda-ban legislation uses two highly flawed Harvard studies to claim that soda contributes to poor health. The Ortiz bill claims: "A study of 9th and 10th grade girls found that those who drank colas were five times more likely to develop bone fractures." That's from a study by Grace Wyshak, who failed to measure bone density, and didn't ask how much soda her subjects consumed. Wyshak also admits that "causality cannot be inferred from [her] data."
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