Do Sugar-Sweetened Beverages Cause Obesity and Diabetes?

IN RESPONSE:

Dr. Slavin claims that our team erred by misidentifying her as being affiliated with the SSB industry when she published the 2012 article that we included in our review and by miscategorizing that article as a negative study. Dr. Slavin has, indeed, been affiliated with food and beverage industries since at least 2010. In her article that we reviewed for our observation (1), she did not disclose any conflicts of interest. However, in related work published in 2015 (2), she disclosed that she had given 150 scientific presentations in 13 countries in the previous 5 years (that is, since at least 2010). Many of these meetings received sponsorship from companies and associations with an interest in carbohydrates and nutritive sweeteners. She also disclosed that her research funding for the past 5 years included grants from Tate & Lyle (a company that manufactures sugar-based food and beverage ingredients), Nestlé Health Sciences, and the International Life Sciences Institute (an industry trade group that funds nutritional science, whose members include Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group). As to whether her article should be considered a study that supports a relationship between SSBs and obesity- or diabetes-related outcomes or contends that no association exists (a negative study), our coding schema determined that it did conclude that there is more than ample doubt about whether there is such an association. As such, we correctly coded it as a negative study. For example, in the conclusion of the article's abstract, Dr. Slavin writes: