Hard on Soft Drinks

As Nick noted yesterday, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has issued a new version of Liquid Candy, its indictment of soda for making us fat, rotting our teeth, weakening our bones, giving us heart attacks, and revealing the identity of Valerie Plame. (OK, I made that last charge up.) The report, which accompanied CSPI's call for soda warning labels, has some new data on soft drink consumption, but otherwise it seems pretty much the same as the document I discussed in my 2003 Reason cover story on CSPI. Elizabeth Whelan at the American Council on Science and Health has a quick run-down of the report's major fallacies.

Perhaps most galling is CSPI's insinuation that diet soda, the logical alternative for those concerned about calories, might give you cancer. As Radley Balko shows on his blog debunking Morgan Spurlock's oeuvre (well worth a visit, by the way), CSPI knows better than to buy every Internet rumor about aspartame, which makes its continued scaremongering all the more objectionable.