Excerpt
Why black pastors are suing Coca-Cola: More brothers killed by “sweets” than “the streets”
(Natural News) Tired of watching members of their religious community fall victim to the health perils of sugar-laden soft drinks, a group of African-American pastors is filing a lawsuit against both the Coca-Cola Company and the American Beverage Association (ABA) for engaging in what the group says are deceptive marketing tactics concerning the safety of these companies’ beverage products.
Leading the charge is William Lamar, the senior pastor at Washington, D.C.’s historic Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church. Lamar says he’s had to preside over so many funerals for parishioners who have died of heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, that he finally decided enough was enough. The health toll from soda products is simply too great not to do something, he says, and many others in his religious community agree.
“It’s become really clear to me that we’re losing more people to the sweets than to the streets,” stated Lamar and Delman Coates, pastor at Maryland’s Mount Ennon Baptist Church, to The Post about the epidemic of health problems he, too, is seeing ravage his community.
Big Soda aggressively targets minority communities in particular with junk food beverages, lawsuit claims
What makes this particular lawsuit a landmark is the fact that it represents a minority community breaking ties with a major segment of the junk food industry – one of the first of its kind. Junk food manufacturers and “Big Soda” companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have been known to target both blacks and Latinos with their aggressive marketing campaigns, which evidence suggests disproportionately affects these communities in a markedly harmful way.
As it turns out, rates of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease are all higher in minority communities than they are for whites, suggests The Post. Minority communities also tend to drink more soda than other groups, which some say is due to aggressive advertising in the communities where minority populations tend to be the highest.
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