Give Up Blog

Friday, October 13, 2006

Coke's Scam marketing of Enviga

The Journal reports:

In a conference call this week, [Coca-Cola] the Atlanta beverage giant unveiled plans to launch Enviga, a sparkling green tea-based soft drink infused with a tantalizing claim: Consume three 12-ounce cans of Enviga over a 24-hour period, and a healthy person of normal weight can burn anywhere from 60 to 100 additional calories...

A little later in the article...

Rhona Applebaum, Coke's chief scientist, agrees that the new drink is not a diet pill. "This is not a magic bullet," she says. Enviga should be consumed as part of a healthy diet and regular physical activity, she says. Enviga "gently invigorates your metabolism. It gives your body this extra boost."

[...]

Coke didn't petition the FDA to make a formal "qualified health claim" because the product doesn't assert an effect such as reducing a disease or a health-related condition, Coke's Dr. Applebaum said. "We're not making any weight-reduction claims," she said. The calorie-burning assertion is instead a "structure-function claim," which companies are permitted to make as long as they can back their claim up with science and vouch that the information on the label is truthful, Coke and the FDA say.

Okay, so, this isn't a weight-reduction claim? You hold a media conference call to tell the stenographers that your product burns calories, and it's not a weight-reduction claim?

And that's not the end of it. The data supporting Coca-Cola's claims are based on privately-held industry research that hasn't been peer reviewed. The research was on healthy people, not fat asses who will be fooled by this folly. And is a 100-calorie increase even statistically significant? You can burn 100 calories in 20 minutes by taking a short walk. How do they know that the study participants didn't fidget a little more that day, or take an extra few trips to the bathroom as a result of drinking too much Enviga?

The magical thinking is so intense surrounding weight loss that people will believe anything. So, the science isn't going to matter. The newspapers have already done Coke's scam marketing for them.

And this is the kicker--the Journal is right on with this:

The people most likely to try Enviga will be young people who tend to obsess over the next cool concoction -- most of whom aren't overweight, says Georgia State's Prof. Rosenbloom. "You know who's going to be drinking these," she says. "The thin girls."

1 Comments:

Rev. Dr. said...

So you don't know what the best part of this is.

If coke is lucky, this drink will do nothing, like most altie/BS magical products. This might be the case if they're smart enough not to put too much EGCG in.

But an interesting thing about green tea, it hasn't really been proven to be good for anything, and all the studies so far relating to anti-cancer activites have been on cells. The big JAMA paper showed an inverse correlation between green tea consumption and cardiovascular disease, but this was a correlative finding, not a prospective double-blind clinical trial. It might be good for you, but so far the data are pretty sparse or correlative.

On the other hand, there is pretty good data showing that green tea components affect the cytochrome p450 system, notably inhibiting some important p450 enzymes. It will be interesting to see if people start cranking this stuff if they'll screw up their drug regimens and experience toxicity from inability to clear drugs as well. Then again, the p450 activation that might result from the caffeine levels (3 times higher than regular coke) might offset this effect. We'll see.

To me, this sounds like a bad idea, a potential lawsuit, and really just a foray by coke into the alternative medicine/diet idiocy market. One can only hope they tested this concoction adequately or were smart enough to make it such a low dose its harmless.

2:41 PM, October 15, 2006