Simon Singh takes money from Coca-Cola, and says that sugary drinks aren’t unhealthy

Simon Singh’s charity Sense About Science has been making unscientific claims that processed sugars aren’t deadly or feed cancer—but hasn’t revealed that it has been receiving funding from Coca-Cola, according to information published by the London Times.

The drinks giant has been spending millions of dollars on a dis-information campaign that has attempted to shift the focus away from its unhealthy products.

Simon Singh takes money from Coca-Cola, and says that sugary drinks aren’t unhealthy

Simon Singh’s charity Sense About Science has been making unscientific claims that processed sugars aren’t deadly or feed cancer—but hasn’t revealed that it has been receiving funding from Coca-Cola, according to information published by the London Times.

The drinks giant has been spending millions of dollars on a dis-information campaign that has attempted to shift the focus away from its unhealthy products.

Coca-Cola has made contributions of £20,681 to SAS between 2012 and 2013, and has also retweeted Sense About Science’s claims about the safety of processed sugars.

This year, the charity produced a ‘position paper’, Making Sense of Allergies, in which it said that health concerns about processed sugars in fast foods and drinks were a “red herring”.

The charity’s social media team also sent a Twitter message to restaurant owner John Vincent after he had written in a newspaper column that an academic had linked sugar to cancer. In its Tweet, Sense About Science said that sugar “does not create or fuel cancer.”

The tweet and the comment in its position paper were retweeted by Coca-Cola’s chief science officer Rhona Applebaum. Ms Applebaum has also attended a Sense About Science meeting in the US.

Mr Vincent said later: “It’s really worrying the extent to which companies like Coca-Cola can fund organisations that the public might otherwise think are independent.”

Coca-Cola is currently running a major dis-information campaign that claims that the obesity epidemic is caused by a lack of exercise, and not sugary drinks.

Singh and Sense about Science, you may remember, are the self-same self-righteous folks who launched a sustained attack on What Doctors Don’t Tell You. SAS members were quoted in the Times and elsewhere as calling our material ‘unscientific’.

We applaud the Times for finally outing SAS as the grubby paid lobbying group it is, masquerading as an independent voice of science. Pity the newspaper didn’t look a little deeper into the funds SAS has received from the pharmaceutical when it was busy trying to trash our magazine.